Word: topsoil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story of how, six months of the year, they lift empty oilcans on their backs and trek a kilometer to a stream to fetch water. "Still, there isn't enough," says widow Dorjon Nongrun. Once called the "Scotland of the East" by the British, Cherrapunji lost its trees and topsoil after decades of slash-and-burn agriculture. Today, fruit and vegetables are trucked in from hours away. It's a scene repeated across many arid parts of India and would be unremarkable but for one fact: with an average 12 m of rain a year, Cherrapunji is the wettest inhabited...
...deposits can be as little as 25 ft. below the surface. After topsoil is removed, the shovels scoop the oily mix into the trucks, which transport it to hoppers for crushing. Hot water is injected to create a slurry that separates the raw oil from sand, clay and other particles. Then 2,500-h.p. pumps, the world's largest, push the viscous oil sands through pipes to a plant on-site that converts it to crude oil. From there, it goes by pipeline to refineries in the U.S. The output of the Alberta operations is expected soon to reach...
...historical perspective can help us, because ours is not the first society to face environmental challenges. Many past societies collapsed partly from their failure to solve problems similar to those we face today--especially problems of deforestation, water management, topsoil loss and climate change. The long list of victims includes the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, the Maya, Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse, Mycenaean Greeks and inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat. The outcomes ranged from "just" a collapse of society, to the deaths of most people, to (in some cases) everyone...
...evidence. We even took birds' nests from scenes hoping we would find a hair from the suspect or a piece of jewelry," says Bruce Kalin, a detective brought in on the case in early 1984. At each dump site, the cops cut away the undergrowth and sifted through the topsoil for several hundred yards in every direction. It took three to four days to process each set of remains. The forest helped turn up evidence for those who knew how to look. The decomposing bodies made the soil more acidic, turning overhanging foliage yellow. The number of layers of leaves...
...largest producer and consumer. Chairman Mao linked his country's future success to the cheap fuel, and from the hearth of the tiniest hut to the boiler rooms of big state-owned factories, coal is king. But decades of overuse have left sooty skies, polluted streams and eroded topsoil levels. Despite a pledge to cut down its contribution to global warming, China is the second-largest producer of greenhouse gases behind the U.S., with a far smaller economy. In winter, neat circles of coal briquettes are piled high outside city apartment blocks, while peasants shovel unprocessed chunks into their furnaces...