Word: volcano
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...residents of Kenai, Alaska, looked on in awe last week, Redoubt volcano continued its noisy return from a 25-year dormancy. The 10,194-ft. mountain, 115 miles southwest of Anchorage, had begun spewing ash last month, which disrupted mail deliveries and passenger air traffic in the heavily traveled corridor to Asia. But the latest series of eruptions were even more spectacular. A plume of volcanic ash rose 40,000 ft. high, and lightning caused brilliant yellow and red flashes that illuminated the volcano against the night sky and revealed the area's coastline. Pilots reported seeing lava...
...saltwater bay whose surface is frozen solid. Beyond the bay loom glittering glaciers and towering, rocky peaks. On the south and east rises a blinding white shelf of permanent ice, so thick that it grinds against the seabed far below. And to the north is a snow- covered volcano that continuously belches noxious fumes. This is the bottom of the world, where winds can reach 320 kph (200 m.p.h.) and temperatures can plunge below -85 degrees C (-121 degrees F). This is Antarctica, the white continent, the harshest, most forbidding land on earth...
...Antarctica's past, and biologists drew 50-kg (110-lb.) fish from ice holes to study the unique organic antifreeze that keeps these sea dwellers alive. Volcanologists braved the knifelike winds and choking fumes atop Mount Erebus to learn what kinds of gases and particles Antarctica's largest volcano emits. At Williams Field, a runway on the Ross Ice Shelf, a multidisciplinary team prepared to launch a huge helium balloon. Its purpose: to follow circumpolar winds around the entire continent, gathering data on cosmic rays and solar flares and testing the behavior of high-density computer chips in the intense...
...creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved...
...vistas were highly edited pastiches, ecological anthologies. But this enhanced their power for the 19th century viewer, who wanted epitomes of nature, filled with moral messages. These Church supplied in abundance. He never actually saw his volcano erupt -- it did so on Sept. 13, 1853, three days after he left the area -- but when he painted Cotopaxi in 1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly...