Word: volcanoed
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...wink. There in the cold, thin air of Hawaii's Mauna Kea, home to the world's greatest concentration of high-powered telescopes, the scientists paced, fretted and nervously tuned their instruments. Night is darker than pitch at the crest of the 4,300-meter (14,000-ft.) dead volcano. In that utter blackness, the ultimate sun worshipers waited for the day that would dawn not once but twice...
...infrared," complained astronomer Robert MacQueen. Even more damaging to the infrared readings was the fine dust accumulating in the earth's atmosphere since the June explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. "It's just heartbreaking that after being dormant for 600 or 700 years, the volcano didn't wait another week or two before erupting," said Donald Hall, director of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii...
...forces to remain at the huge military installations of Subic Bay Naval Station and Clark Air Base. A few weeks ago, both teams announced that a new accord, permitting U.S. forces to stay after the old agreement expires on Sept. 16, was "within reach." But then Mount Pinatubo, a volcano that had been dormant for 600 years, erupted and accomplished what Filipino nationalists had failed to do since independence: force the U.S. military to abandon Clark, which is eight miles east of the cone. Both sides admit the explosions threw negotiations into limbo...
...that makes effective use of dedicated, if often poorly equipped, human observers. The answer is that the better scientists get at predicting eruptions, the less chance of false alarms. In 1976, 72,000 residents of the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe were forced to leave their homes because a nearby volcano seemed about to blow. Several months later, after no eruption occurred, the considerably discomfited evacuees returned home. And ever since 1980, the California resort area of Mammoth Lakes has fretted over recurrent clusters of small earthquakes. The resort abuts a huge depression caused hundreds of thousands of years...
...greatest threats to human lives may come from overlooked, long dormant volcanoes. To monitor a volcano requires identifying it beforehand; as recently as 1981, Pinatubo was not even included in the worldwide registry of volcanoes maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. "When a nice little hill covered with lush vegetation finally wakes up," observes Smithsonian volcanologist Tom Simkin, "it's going to cause a lot of damage." Fortunately, scientists were able to see that some nice little hills in the Philippines and Japan were turning nasty while people still had time to get away...