Word: underground
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more a metaphor than a reality. But I think that there is no question that commercial hip-hop - that is dead. But there is an incredibly rich world of hip-hop that has been literally buried. I tell my friends and students, That's why they call it the underground - because it's in fact buried. But it's not dead; it's an underworld. It's like the Matrix, an alternative world that has its flaws but is part of a living force...
...habit. At the turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs to release pressurized steam that then runs turbines - moved...
...Mission Over the years, Icelandic engineers have learned which temperature enables underground liquids to power a turbine, how to manage a boiling cavern's chemistry, and how to keep power plants sustainable by "resting" boreholes to give the source time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling...
...company is focusing its early investments on East Africa, an area with vast amounts of underground heat and little means to tap it. The company plans to start exploratory drilling next year to build a geothermal plant in Djibouti. In July, the government of the Philippines awarded a Filipino-Icelandic consortium exploration rights to half of Biliran Island in the country's south. Twenty years ago, three boreholes were drilled on Biliran and then abandoned when the underground liquid at the other end of the drill was found to be too acidic. Since then, the industry has learned...
...probable increase in yearly monsoons related to global warming should provide at least some new water, though out-of-control flooding will pose its own dangers. But the only other alternative comes from underground--and here India may be digging its own grave. There are now 23 million wells across India, up from 2 million 30 years ago, and those wells are draining the country's deep groundwater, or aquifer. Wells that once hit water at 20 ft. now need to go 80 ft. or deeper. New Delhi groundwater levels have declined 15% to 20% over the past several years...