Word: topsoil
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...power to harness the sun's energy and combine it with elements from air, water and rocks into living tissue?the vegetation that sustains animals, which in turn add their wastes and corpses to natural decay. It is nature's efficient reuse of the decay that builds productive topsoil. Yet such is the delicacy of the process that it takes 500 years to create one inch of good topsoil...
Most Americans still think of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the Okies who left it, in the bleak terms of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The long drought of the 1930s seared the land, while recurring winds swirled away the topsoil and black blizzards choked crops and cattle. During that decade, more than 350,000 farmers fled the state, leaving a legacy of deserted homes, barren lands and bitter people. In recent years the Dust Bowl has changed dramatically. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who revisited the region, tells how and why in this report...
...bridges, were hurled downstream. An irrigation project that took two years and $7,000,000 to construct was washed away in six hours. As late as last week the Mediterranean was still an oozing ochre sore from the Gulf of Tunis to the Gulf of Bou Grara because of topsoil washed into the sea by the boiling rivers...
...deaths or serious injuries among the villagers, but a U S. airman mumbled in schoolboy Spanish after parachuting to safety: "Ustedes todos muertos [You're all dead]." Because two bombs' casings had cracked, several thousand airmen and sailors spent 44 days carrying away almost six acres of topsoil and plowing under 600 acres more to dispel any traces of lingering radioactivity...
Strip mining is a simple, productive and inexpensive method of mining coal, both hard and soft; it accounts for one-third of the nation's total 500 million ton annual output. Big power shovels rip off the topsoil, then bite into the underlying seams to depths of more than 100 feet and load the coal onto trucks. But far too often, irresponsible strip miners, operating under ancient mineral-rights leases, have mined the land and simply moved on, leaving behind a fearful legacy of tormented earth. In West Virginia alone, strip miners are tearing up land at the rate...