Word: volcano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Clementine Churchill got an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree from Oxford. She also got some sympathy for being Winston's wife. "He forgets there is a time for meals," observed Oxford's Public Orator, in Latin, "besides he is a perfect volcano, scattering cigar ashes all over the house (totas aedes Coronarum Coronarum favillis conspergi...
...year-old Navy Commander named Nelson Levings, 55-year-old ex-Supreme Court Clerk Thomas Quitman Ellis and 66-year-old ex-Congressman Ross A. Collins-were campaigning hard. But Bilbo paid no heed. Instead he howled a warning: "The white people of Mississippi are sitting on a volcano. . . . We are faced with a nationwide campaign to integrate the nigger with the social life of this country...
...ticking like a time bomb. Dr. Thomas A. Jaggar, a rugged old master of volcanology at the University of Hawaii, would not venture a guess on the day or month Mauna Loa would erupt, but according to his charts and records, 1946 is a climactic year in the volcano's eleven-year cycle. That cycle has been rolling along as steady as moonrise since 1832-and probably well before that. When the eruption comes, says Dr. Jaggar, there is a good chance that a stream of smoking lava will writhe slowly down the north side of the mountain...
...rifts in the earth's subsurface, cracks running down as much as 100 miles or more. At those depths the temperature is high, the pressure strong and steady, and earth material a homogeneous magma of plastic rock. This pressure and material are the source and force of a volcano...
After an eruption has released the pressure, the top layer of the molten rock cools and hardens, sealing the volcano temporarily. The cap can contain the pressure for a time-depending on the peculiarities of the individual volcano-when it cracks open again with a rush of burning gas. Molten magma boils up, whipped to a froth by the gases. After the pressure has been relieved, the eruption subsides, the cap forms again and the cycle of eruption is complete...