Word: thick
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...really thick skin as a Native American in the academy,†Browner, the UCLA ethnomusicologist, added...
With branding time near, the tension grows thick. One waddie fires the propane to heat the branding iron, while another scrapes his knife across a whetstone. Three others climb atop their mounts to lasso the calves from among the dozen skittish critters in the tight pen. One crazy cow, a 1,500-lb. mother with twisting horns sharpened for the gore, tries twice to leap the fence but fails, landing with a thud hard enough to shake your ancestors...
...double eruption produced none of the spectacular lava displays that characterize such perennially active volcanoes as Hawaii's Kilauea. Instead, the superheated magma within Nevado del Ruiz began to melt the thick blanket of snow and ice that caps the top 2,000 ft. of the peak. Filthy water started to flow down the sides of the mountain. The trickle swiftly turned into a torrent of viscous mud, stones, ashes and debris with a crest of 15 ft. to 50 ft. The liquid avalanche, known as a lahar, was soon hurtling down the steep slopes at speeds...
...according to Colombian Historian Rafael Gómez Picón, "subterranean sounds emanated from the upper part of the ... river on the slopes of the snowcapped volcano . . . accompanied by a series of slight quakes. Suddenly, out of the canyon wherein the Lagunilla River flows, an enormous and strange torrent of thick mud became dislodged at tremendous velocity. It dragged with it great blocks of snow, debris, trees and sand." According to Gómez's chronicle, the mudslide destroyed the town of Ambalema some 20 miles southeast of Armero, killing 1,000 people. The 1845 eruption also deposited some 250 million tons...
What was left behind in Armero, in Henao's words, was "one big beach of mud." A viscous gray layer, between 7 ft. and 15 ft. thick, covered most of the town. Thousands of bodies were buried in the sludge, their location sometimes marked by pools of blood on the surface. Other corpses lay half visible in miniature bogs that were as treacherous as quicksand. Some exhausted survivors lay on the surface of the mud in shallows, or staggered along in shock on drier ground. Many of the living were naked or only partly clothed; their garments had been torn...