Word: volcanoe
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When Mexico's El Chichón volcano came abruptly to life in late March and early April after more than a century, it killed 187 people, forced thousands from their homes and created havoc over a wide area of Mexico. Since then, 3,721-ft. El Chichón (The Lump) has simmered down, giving off only occasional blasts of steamy vapor. But the mountain continues to be an object of intense scientific concern. Though the initial blowup was relatively small. El Chichón pumped so much dust and debris into the upper atmosphere-perhaps more than...
...possibility is not idle speculation. As far back as 1783, when the eruption of Iceland's Laki volcano was followed by an extremely cold winter, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that volcanic dust could partly block sunlight. After the explosion of Indonesia's Tambora volcano in 1815, there were so many frosty nights the following June in Canada and the U.S. that people called it the "year without a summer." Some scientists believe a very large amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere could send the earth tumbling into another...
...responsible researcher foresees such catastrophic consequences from El Chichón. But there are troubling signs. A huge smoglike cloud from the volcano has been spotted at scattered locations around the globe. At the Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, astronomers say the brightness of stars has been reduced by 40%, and volcanic dust has created garish sunsets over wide areas of the Northern Hemisphere. Says Atmospheric Physicist James Pollack, of NASA's Ames Research Center, which has used U-2 aircraft to collect samples of El Chichón's dust: "This is the biggest volcanic cloud...
When you screen out that much sunlight, that's an important event." El Chichón's importance caught scientists by surprise. Located in an impoverished area of southeastern Mexico, where the Zoque Indians scratch out a living by farming the volcano's slopes, it erupted with much less fury than Mount St. Helens and gave off only a fourth to a sixth as much debris as its Yankee rival. But as Volcanologist Wendell Duffield of the U.S. Geological Survey notes, "At Mount St. Helens the barrel of the cannon was pointed laterally. At El Chich...
...shooting began, eight members of the Ramón Portillo family had been squatting as refugees in the shuttered mansion once occupied by the village's wealthiest man, who owned all the cactus fields and a coffee finca (plantation) that stretched as far, it is said, as the volcano four miles away. On New Year's Day, guerrillas swept up the back road, firing into the village as they came. Ramón Portillo was killed instantly as the bullets pierced the thin green door of the house. They were only stray shots, maintains his widow Graciela, nothing...