Word: topsoil
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...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...
...river is the color of cafe au lait, with a generous helping of 30-weight and detergent thrown in. Down toward the mouth of the Mississippi, the land was formed of sedimentary deposits from farther upriver, rich topsoil blown from the hills of Wyoming into the Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once...
Until just a few decades ago, land was winning. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the Gulf had retreated some 60 miles (100 km) south of New Orleans. The Mississippi's immense burden of flaked-off topsoil (originating mainly from its big western tributary, the Missouri) overmatched the rising Gulf. The unrestrained river episodically changed course, laying new land from Biloxi to Houston. Over 7,000 years, the Mississippi River created a new piece of continent the size of New Jersey...
...Amazing, really, what a brief scrutiny of the grass replacement ritual reveals lurking just below the topsoil. The superficial concerns about our Yard are, of course, both abundant and well founded. Everyone can see that it's ugly. Some people have found that it smells bad. At 10 minutes past the hour, the impossibility of running in a straight line over it to Sever Hall is cursed by all and sundry. But now the inner as well as the outer blemishes on our lawns can be shown. Now the grass can be understood. We may still sigh in resignation when...