Word: volcano
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hardware, ranging from satellites to acoustical sensors to highly sensitive gas sniffers. Whether the technology is up to the task of monitoring not just one peak but hundreds worldwide, though, is impossible to say, but the question is becoming pressing. "Someday," says Robert Tilling, chief scientist of the USGS Volcano Hazards Program, "one of these mountains will erupt on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than mankind has ever seen...
Washington State is not the only place where volcanoes loom. There are explosive mountains in every corner of the world. Late last week, Alaska's Okmok volcano coughed a cloud of ash nearly a mile into the sky, perhaps presaging a period of increased volcanic activity. Near Mexico City, Popocatepetl, a 17,887-ft. volcanic peak, has begun to smoke and churn, threatening 500,000 people who live beneath it. In Italy five active volcanoes are being watched, the most menacing of which is the temperamental Vesuvius. In Japan 86 active volcanoes are packed onto an archipelago smaller than California...
...threat volcanoes pose is nothing new, but popular appreciation of it is. The warning bell this time is being sounded not by scientists but by the entertainment industry. Two weeks ago, Universal Pictures released its heavily promoted volcano film, Dante's Peak, and in April, 20th Century Fox will release its more prosaically named Volcano. abc television will air a documentary on the world's most dangerous volcanoes next week, followed by a drama about an eruption at a West Coast ski resort...
...volcanologically untutored, there are worse ways to learn what a volcano looks like than to see Dante's Peak. Though the story line is standard disaster-film fare, the science is generally sound. As the movie reveals, the first debris disgorged by a volcano is often a great gray mass of ash. The opaque cloud, made of pulverized rock and glass, falls like concrete snow on land and buildings miles away and may blot out the sun for days...
After the ash, some volcanoes produce what is known as a pyroclastic flow, a ground-hugging cloud of superheated gas and rock that forces a cushion of air down the mountainside at up to 100 m.p.h., incinerating anything in its path. Other mountains spew that signature substance of the volcano: lava. (On this point Dante's Peak was wide of the scientific mark, concocting a fictitious mountain that produces both substances.) Lava moves at speeds ranging from less than 1 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h...