Word: volcanoes
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Instead of a scenic lake, Oregonians feared that they might have a scenic volcano on their hands. Said Professor Howel Williams, leading volcanologist : "Renewed activity is not out of the question." Crater Lake was formed some 10,000 years ago, when 12,000-ft. Mt. Mazama blew its top. The eruption covered 5,000-odd square miles of Oregon with pumice six inches deep. Incandescent avalanches fried the Klamath Plateau for 25 miles around the vent. Seventeen cubic miles of rock were blasted to smithereens...
Unexpectedly, the atomic age was just like home. True, home had been transported to the side of a volcano. But the old familiar faces were there, the old mottoes hung from the walls, and in the evening on the porch everybody aired the same old prejudices, and called the smoke and lava to witness for his side...
...next morning, three battleships, still newer and still bigger than the Indianas, appeared in the more dangerous waters off Muroran, at the mouth of Hokkaido's Volcano Bay. They were the Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin, and they took the Nihon Steel Works and the Wanishi Iron Works as their target, while screening craft darted closer inshore to shoot at smaller bull's-eyes...
Berliners who had sets in working order heard from somewhere in Germany a thoroughly Teutonic curtain speech addressed just to them: "Vapors and smoke trail upward.... Underneath is a sea of flame, a volcano of millions of fires and twitching shadows. Berlin, help us once more to conjure up all that you have meant!" When Berlin returned to the air, it talked Russian...
While Jap cities blazed, the R.A.F. was dropping on Germany the biggest explosive bomb of all. Called variously "volcano bomb," "townbuster" and "Ten-Ton Tess" (eleven tons, by U.S. measure), it carves an enormous crater (see cut), tossing up divots weighing five tons apiece...