Word: stratas
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...been climbing mountains to make a study of undersea rocks. Last week Dr. Norman D. Newell, of New York City's American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, was studying fossil seashells he had just brought back from the Peruvian Andes. They told him about the strata (possibly oil-bearing) deep under the Amazon Basin hundreds or thousands of miles away. They also suggested that an ancient ice age once chilled the sea water right across the equator...
...almost unknown geologically. But both the Amazon and the towering Andes were covered some 200 million years ago by the same shallow sea. An unexplained disturbance wrinkled the earth's crust. The western part of the sea bottom was lifted high in the air, where its sedimentary strata lie exposed today. The rest (toward the east) is still deeply buried under the tangled jungle...
...remarkable platinum-grey coat with as many as 80 marvelously fine hairs springing from every follicle. So soft is chinchilla fur that a blindfolded person sometimes cannot tell when his hand is brushing it. The close-set hairs foil fleas, which cannot maneuver through them to blood-bearing strata below...
...ZoBell has busied himself for years with the microflora of oil strata, including sea-bottom muds where oil is thought to be formed. His original idea was to study how bacteria modify crude oil (TIME, Dec. 17, 1945). But in 1943, he found in sea mud a comma-shaped bacterium which he named (he was only 38 at the time, and feeling in the pink) desulphovibrio halo-hydrocarbonoclasticus. He put it in a test tube filled with material to simulate a limestone oilsand. Four days later, oil bubbled out of the test tube's mouth. A little later...
...years, the Pennsylvania Grade Crude Oil Association has been experimenting (more or less in secret) with the practical application of Dr. ZoBell's discovery. At present many Pennsylvania oilmen glean their underground fields by forcing water through worked-out strata. They plan to introduce Dr. ZoBell's bacteria along with the water. The bacteria should hunt out and bring to the surface the last drops...