Word: volcano
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...exhilarating and impossible to forget. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. ?The way,? the poet is told once the trip has begun, ?is to go up the mountain and make it all complete.? In Helping, a man sober for 18 months starts drinking again. He tells his distraught wife that ?this drink I?m having is the only worthwhile thing...
...exhilarating and impossible to forget. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. ?The way,? the poet is told once the trip has begun, ?is to go up the mountain and make it all complete.? In Helping, a man sober for 18 months starts drinking again. He tells his distraught wife that ?this drink I?m having is the only worthwhile thing...
...reduce the risk, Williams is testing a remote gas sensor that can read a volcano's emissions from a plane flying nearby or even a car driving past at a distance of as much as 20 miles. The instrument works by detecting changes in the infrared energy caused by different gases in the volcanic plume. Says Williams: "Volcanoes give gaseous signals of approaching eruptions. This gives us the lead time we need to get people educated and not terrorized...
This dilemma is typical of volcanology as a whole: more and more, researchers are realizing that the degree of protection their science can offer will be directly linked to the amount of money it receives. The USGS volcano program has been getting by on what in Big Science is a starvation ration: $17 million annually. Next year even that will be slashed by $2 million. The USGS's volcano swat team carries out its volcanic smoke jumping on a budget of just $750,000 a year...
Nobody pretends this is enough to sustain global volcano work, and while a few countries have monitoring programs of their own, many of the Third World nations that are in the greatest danger are the least economically equipped to address it. The U.S. thus finds itself in a familiar leadership role at a time when its own federal budget is under growing pressure. At the USGS researchers can only hope that the funds for their work don't disappear before they have a chance to warn the world of the next volcanic disaster...