another WOTY candidate

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed May 28 22:57:09 UTC 2008


A bit more serious than "overshare"...

The concept of the "quake lake" has been in the news a lot over the
last couple of days, referring to the newly formed lakes resulting
from mountains sliding into rivers in the aftermath of the Sichuan
quake in China, and the fear that they will come undammed and burst
into the towns below.  Crews are working with explosives to release
the water from these new lakes to prevent catastrophic flooding.

As it happens, there's a proper name "Quake Lake" for a lake in
southwestern Montana formed in 1959:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Lake.  But I don't think that
disqualifies these new Chinese "quake lakes", which may unfortunately
be even more in the news shortly.

LH

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