Word: volcanoed
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...were warnings from an angry deity. Today, scientists prefer another explanation, an all-encompassing view of the earth known as the theory of plate tectonics. It holds that the planet's surface consists of a dozen or so restless plates, each about 70 miles thick. Their movements explain volcanoes, the rise of mountains and the drift of continents. They account for quakes as well, most of which seem to occur where the great plates meet-at the so-called Ring of Fire, for instance, the tremor-and volcano-prone region that rims the Pacific Ocean and outlines the Pacific...
...that kind." In rebuttal, Environmental Protection Agency officials said automobiles are not even regulated for sulfur dioxide, because they emit very little of it; utilities, which are regulated, have spewed out 200 million tons of the gas over the past decade, compared with 400,000 tons from the volcano...
...such popularization and simplification. After all, science has a long tradition, often violated to be sure, of modesty and understatement, even of calculated obfuscation, so that only an elite priesthood will be privy to its secrets. Other than the irrepressible Sagan, how many scientists would buzz a simulated Martian volcano, as he does in one Cosmos sequence; or rummage through a re-creation of the famed library of Alexandria, pretending to read long-lost papyrus scrolls; or attempt to explain the paradoxes of special relativity while bicycling through the hills of Tuscany, where the young Einstein once wandered? Sagan also...
Never in history has a volcano exploded with such force before such an array of sophisticated monitoring instruments. The gear even includes a space satellite to measure particulate matter blown into the stratosphere. Yet in spite of all the detection capability, scientists have come away from the mountain basically with confirmations of what they already knew- primarily from observing volcanoes in Hawaii-rather than with any new and startling insights. Says Donald Peterson, the U.S.G.S scientist in charge on the scene: "Everything the mountain has done has been within the realm of our expectations...
Well, not quite. The force of the blast and its timing surprised scientists. They are still not much closer to predicting when a volcano of the St. Helens type will blow; scientists have had much better luck with volcanoes in Hawaii. But the effort has hardly been a waste of time. Says U.S.G.S. Geologist Robert Christiansen: "It has taught us that volcanic hazards are real in the U.S." More probing will be done in November at a NASA conference about the atmospheric and climatic effects of Mount St. Helens, with a view to decoding whatever messages the volcano sent...