Word: soils
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...twelve-story building, with all its lights burning, seemed to tilt slowly before it plunged down the hillside like an ocean liner sinking at sea. Government officials worried about a potential threat to other buildings that have been densely packed together on the hillside. Hong Kong's clay soil becomes unstable when saturated with water, and so many buildings constructed so close to each other could result, in times of record rain, in mutual instability...
...screwworm -which ravages cattle on both sides of the border-had to be delayed because U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was out of town. More important, Washington seemed disinclined to honor its promise to halt the dumping of salt into the Colorado River, which leaves much of the soil of Mexico's Mexicali Valley cracked and covered with white cakes of salt...
...future ERTS satellites could quickly detect any large-and possibly dangerous -change in the chlorophyll content of ocean plankton, a principal source of the world's oxygen supply. By similar "fingerprinting," ERTS and its successors could warn of changes in the health of woodlands, detect harmful acidity in soil, find clues to new oil and mineral deposits, and perhaps even sniff out illegal fields of opium poppies...
...conferees fretted continually about the consequences of industrialization. Microbiologist Rene Dubos, generally the most optimistic of the U.S.'s major ecologists, said that modern farmers are putting more energy into the soil (in the form of mechanization, fertilizers and pesticides) than they are taking out in the form of bumper crops. By 1987, Dubos predicted, such practices will cause enough pollution and depletion of resources to limit further growth. He offered the odd analogy of the medieval church builders in France, who decided to end their rivalry after the highest cathedral, in Beauvais, twice collapsed. "Every technology...
...third highrise will loom on Boylston Street, midway between the Kennedy Center and the center of the Square. Soil engineers, contracted by Cambridge landlord Max Wasserman, are testing the peat and clay subsoil to determine what size structure the ground can economically support. The land is zoned for both office space and housing; given the relative surplus of office space in the Boston area, the choice will probably be housing...