Word: volcanoes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...volcanoes clustered along the Ring of Fire are more dangerous. The ring traces a geologically active zone where sections of the earth's crust, known as plates, are colliding. Generally the weaker oceanic plates are forced beneath the thicker continental slabs. The friction of grinding rock, combined with heat welling up from the earth's interior, transmutes the lower edge of the oceanic plate into magma. Thick with silica, this type of magma tends to solidify near the surface, forming domes and plugs that seal off the channels through which the magma rises. Such blockages turn a volcano into...
...Survey sent to the Philippines a team of scientists equipped with seismometers, tiltmeters (to measure tiny shifts in the slope of the mountain) and laptop computers to collect and analyze data. Several of the instruments, however, were obliterated by last week's eruptions, hampering efforts to figure out the volcano's next gambit...
...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...