Word: subterranean
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...February, 'Dante?s Peak' sent small-town folk scurrying from their local Vesuvius; now Mick Jackson?s 'Volcano' has man tamper in God?s domain, by daring to build a subway in L.A. "The script," Corliss notes, "thus exploits two major fears of Angelenos: getting demolished by a horrid subterranean force, and having to take public transportation. The gookum-like lava is less smothering than the plot clich?s: our hero (Tommy Lee Jones) and his perpetually hysterical child (Gaby Hoffman), ever blundering into catastrophe; the spiky geologist (Anne Heche) who has to exclaim, ?Oh, God!? 46 times; silliest...
...shame that I have come to feel this tenderly about the space, because, after all, Loker is doomed. Whatever becomes of Loker in the next five to ten years, the subterranean commons is marred by virtue of its place in campus geography. As a student center, it is a little too close to Annenberg to be an appealing outing for first years who come to the building three times a day already. At the same time, it is far enough from the river and the quad houses that there are plenty of other options for food or social activity that...
Curiously, though, prices seem to have gone up while the rewards of giving have gone down. Witness Ms. Loker's millions for a subterranean "hang-out" and compare it to John Harvard's relatively meager donation for the big prize. It's time we renewed our commitment to giving our donors their money's worth. There is no point in getting overly-sanctimonious. If a name-change didn't seem to bother the school fathers in 1638, who are we to judge in 1997? In our own time, there is even precedent for such a change. In 1992, Mr. Henry...
...Pacific Northwest--including Microsoft's hometown, Redmond--Orting was built in the shadow of Mount Rainier, and Mount Rainier has a nasty little secret. Beneath the 14,410-ft. mountain's sugary caps and forested flanks lies a mammoth, smoldering pot of magma. Summoned up from the earth's subterranean ovens perhaps 40 miles below, the molten rock simmers under the mountain at up to 3600[degrees]F. As the magma cooks the rocky innards of Mount Rainier, it slowly helps turn them into unstable clay. At the same time this internal furnace corrodes the mountain from the inside, rain...
...higher, the pressure on it is dramatically reduced, allowing gases trapped within to bubble out like carbonation in an opened bottle of soda. As this happens, the magma takes on a foamier consistency, increasing its speed and mobility. When this scalding froth rises high enough to make contact with subterranean water, the water flashes into steam, turning the whole hellish mix into a natural pressure cooker. Finally, the explosively pressurized magma blasts out of the earth in an eruption that can send rocks, ash and gases flying out at near supersonic speeds. "The driving force of an eruption...