Word: rocked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When silt sinks slowly to the bottom of an ocean or lake, the magnetic particles in it line up with the earth's magnetic field like tiny compass needles. When the silt hardens into rock, the magnetic particles are "frozen" so that they cannot move. The Carnegie scientists found that even when the rock layer is folded by geological forces, the magnetic particles keep their alignment, pointing accurately around the curves of the folds. Even in layers known to be 200 million years old, the rock keeps its magnetism...
Reassured by this stability, Dr. John Graham and a team of Carnegie geologists went to work. A series of rock samples 10 million to 100 million years old which they took from flat-lying strata in the western U.S. proved to have a magnetism pointing in about the same direction as present-day compass needles. The conclusion was that when the rocks were laid down as silt, the earth's magnetic field was about as it is today...
...next "rest camp," Pavuvu, and neither-in some ways-was Peleliu, where the division again caught the full fury of war in the Pacific. Pavuvu is a stinking, rat-infested little island in the Solomons, fit neither for marine nor Gook. Some men went "Asiatic" (regular Marine lingo for rock-happy). A sentry walked his muddy post for four hours, stopped at the last tent as his relief reported, put his rifle to his mouth and blew the top of his head off. This seemed so reasonably symptomatic of the division's island sickness that a marine...
...movies kept almost everybody on Pavuvu from going rock-happy. A well-rounded starlet's appearance on the screen brought cries of "Back it up!" Then the operator would oblige by rewinding it and showing the female again. When any heroine displayed signs of falling in love the audience implored: "Don't run off with that bum! Wait till I get home!" One night, men of Headquarters Battalion got so mad at Charles Boyer they threw coral rocks at the screen...
...process now used at Rifle is simple. The shale is blasted from the surrounding cliffs, run through a rock crusher, burned in retorts; the gases given off in this process are distilled into oil ready for the refinery...