Word: waterous
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...area. The eruptions, nine in all, went on for nearly a decade, sending engineers scrambling to keep up with the shifting earth. Fanndal, the plant's manager, stops his truck in front of a crater where, without warning, one early drill hole imploded into a cauldron of boiling water that took half a year to settle down. "There were a lot of people who said we should leave this place," Fanndal recalls...
...turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs to release pressurized steam that then runs turbines - moved into high gear...
...concrete translates into significant gains for the environment because it can be used more thinly, consuming considerably fewer raw materials than regular concrete. Moreover, concrete has some properties that make it intrinsically energy-efficient when used in buildings. It insulates well because it doesn't let in wind and water. Its density also means it stores heat during the day and releases it at night, enabling savings on air conditioning and heating; architects including Ferrier are playing with such possibilities as they design their new buildings. And the ultra-high-performance concretes can be put to surprising uses...
...thousand years, venice's fate has been inextricably tied to water: the city famous for its canals is even shaped like a fish, with an imposing tail bifurcating at the Isola di San Pietro. Over the centuries, the Venetians' empire-building navies gave them grandiose reason to stage an annual Marriage with the Sea--the doge on board a gilded galley flinging a ring into the lagoon in mythic matrimony. Last week, however, the sea wanted more than a ring: the Adriatic appeared to be reeling in all of Venice itself, grabbing at it with the worst floods La Serenissima...
...several days, wintry rains, pushy winds and high tides combined to inundate much of Venice's scarce solid ground. At one point, the sea level was more than five feet higher than normal; water sloshed into every part of the city. The Piazza San Marco was submerged, as were all embankments. Venice barely had time to haul out the wooden planks it sets up to help pedestrians navigate flooding. Sometimes only yellow do not cross tape separated pavement from canal...