Word: thicker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...typical New England campus in summer session. Small groups of students sprawl on smooth lawns, chat in the green shade of old maple trees, and stroll among rosy brick and crisp white clapboard buildings. But this is no typical summer school. The students are somewhat longer of tooth and thicker of waist than the average undergraduate, and their chatter is about polymers and photoconduction, magnetic resonance and spectroscopy. They are participants in one of the Gordon Research Conferences, possibly the oldest and most eminent floating brain trust in the world...
...fear what the President might have feared three years ago?that a building would fall on his head?because almost all the buildings have fallen in the interim, and are now nicely disguised as two lawns of gray-yellow dust on either side of Charlotte Street. The dust is thicker than the ash from Mount St. Helens. It fills the air. It smells of nothing organic but manure, yet even that smell is not precise; it is tinged with an odor at once dead and sweet. Only fragments in the rubble-wire nettings, a square of bathroom tile ?suggest...
...activity caught scientists by surprise. Though volcanologists have been able to predict almost to the hour when the volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands will erupt, Mount St. Helens presents a more difficult problem for would-be prognosticators. The molten rock, or magma, underneath the Washington volcano is a thicker, silica-rich material (unlike the less viscous molten basalt of the Hawaiian chain); more pressure must build up before the hot gases trapped within it are released. Thus the mountain erupts infrequently and violently...