fissure, stretch (n), recast undersea terrain, vein of danger and tragedy

China to Focus on Economic Fissures at Policy Meeting

By KEITH BRADSHER

As the Communist Party prepares for a critical policy meeting starting Saturday, it faces a persistent problem: Jobs abound in China, but not the kind young graduates want.

Japan quake-tsunami recast undersea terrain

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Updated 10h 39m ago

SAN FRANCISCO – Undersea views reveal that Japan's colossal earthquake ripped deep fissures in the seafloor and raised undersea cliffs hundreds of feet, while spawning waves that destroyed billion-dollar seawalls, scientists reported here Tuesday.



Twitter Blames 'Bug' for Outage


Twitter's popular microblogging service was intermittently unavailable to users for significant stretches of time on Thursday, as the company blamed a “bug” that disrupted its system.


Japan quake-tsunami recast undersea terrain





By Kyodo News via, AP Monster waves hit homes in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. The quake damage underwater is only now being measured.

Monster waves hit homes in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. The quake damage underwater is only now being measured.





 vein of danger and tragedy

Miners in U.S., China share vein of danger and tragedy

There are stark differences in the lot of miners in the U.S. and China. Yet the families caught up in tragic accidents in recent days share a bond forged in the coal beds that have helped build two nations.

vein

n.

1. 1. Anatomy. Any of the membranous tubes that form a branching system and carry blood to the heart.
   2. A blood vessel.
2. Botany. One of the vascular bundles or ribs that form the branching framework of conducting and supporting tissues in a leaf or other expanded plant organ. Also called nervure.
3. Zoology. One of the horny ribs that stiffen and support the wing of an insect. Also called nervure.
4. Geology. A regularly shaped and lengthy occurrence of an ore; a lode.
5. A long wavy strip of a different shade or color, as in wood or marble, or as mold in cheese.
6. A fissure, crack, or cleft.
7. A pervading character or quality; a streak: "All through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness" (Mark Twain). See synonyms at streak.
8. 1. A transient attitude or mood.
   2. A particular turn of mind: spoke later in a more serious vein.

tr.v., veined, vein·ing, veins.

1. To supply or fill with veins.
2. To mark or decorate with veins.

[Middle English veine, from Old French, from Latin vēna.]

veinal vein'al adj.

[名]

1 静脈（⇔artery）；((広義))血管

the pulmonary vein
肺静脈.

2 （昆虫の）翅脈(しみゃく)；（葉の）葉脈；（大理石などの）石目, （木材の）木目.

3 鉱脈, 鉱層；岩脈；（地層中の）水脈, 水路；（水脈を流れる）地下水

a thick vein of iron ore
鉄鉱石の厚い鉱脈.

4 ((a ［the］ 〜))（一時的な）気分, 気持ち

in a cheerful ［a serious］ vein
陽気な気分［まじめな気持ち］で

be in ［out of］ the vein for ...
…に向かう気分になっている［いない］.

5 [U]((またa 〜))（…の）スタイル, 手法；（…の）気味, 特質, 調子, 性格((of ...))

in the vein of the 19th century novelists
19世紀の小説のスタイルで

in a classical vein
古典的な手法で

a vein of stubbornness
頑固な性格.

job a vein

((米俗))ヘロインを常習的に打つ.

━━[動](他)

1 …に脈をつける；…に脈のような縞(しま)［筋］をつける.

2 …（の上）を脈のように伸びる［走る］

a garden intricately veined with watercourses
水路が複雑に走った庭園.

［古フランス語←ラテン語vēna］

stretch
n.
The act of stretching or the state of being stretched.
The extent or scope to which something can be stretched; elasticity.
A continuous or unbroken length, area, or expanse: an empty stretch of highway.
A straight section of a racecourse or track, especially the section leading to the finish line.

A continuous period of time.
Slang. A term of imprisonment: served a two-year stretch.
Informal. The last stage of an event, period, or process.
Baseball. A movement in which a pitcher, standing with the glove side facing home plate, raises both hands to the height of the head and then lowers them to the chest or waist for a short pause before pitching the ball. It is used as an alternative to a wind-up, especially when runners are on base.



In a series of reports on the March 11 earthquake, among the strongest ever recorded at magnitude 9.0, researchers here at the American Geophysical Union meeting described a shattered world on the Japanese seafloor that birthed a killer tsunami responsible for the deaths of at least 20,000 people.


"They were doomed to start with," says tsunami expert Costas Synolakis of the University of Southern California. A $1.6 billion undersea breakwall outside the town of Kamaishi, for example, "didn't protect the town," he says, taking perhaps 6 feet off of a 40-foot tsunami wave. Funneled by narrow sea canyons, waves as high as 130 feet hit some towns, powered by the seafloor's abrupt piston-like bucking during the quake.


"In some places, we cannot see to the bottom of the fissures," says geophysicist Takeshi Tsuji of Japan's Kyoto University. Before-and-after robot submarine visits to three sites about 70 miles off Japan's coasts confirm that the seafloor shifted more than 70 feet eastward and dropped more than 30 feet in some locales, along the fault between the Pacific Ocean and the Japanese crustal plate.


Fissures stretch the length of football fields and a cliff several hundred feet tall looks freshly exposed at one spot, more than 2 miles deep.


"It was a peaceful seafloor, but after the earthquake everything moved," Tsuji says. The seafloor study, and satellite images reported Monday, help further explain the tsunami's severity.


• Parts of the seafloor on the eastern side of the fault dropped, while the far side popped upward and westward, delivering a double-barreled tsunami.


• The NASA Jason-1 oceanographic satellite revealed waves merging offshore to heights far exceeding expectations, channeled by undersea ridges. "We call them fingers of God," Synolakis says.


• Preventive measures such as planting stands of pine trees on coasts proved useless for stemming waves. Japanese researchers such as Kazuhisa Goto of Japan's Tohoku University reported that they now realize that a tremendous tsunami that struck Japan in 869 A.D. should have served as a warning to the island nation.


The earthquake struck with such force, the fourth-largest one ever measured in the world by seismologists, that it dealt Japan two waves of shaking: one originating at the fault itself and one emanating from a displaced reflection of the quaking, which shook the seafloor closer to the coast, says geologist Keith Koper of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.


"It was like an orchestra, with the tubas playing on one side," he says, and the flutes playing on the other.


The quake lasted for three minutes, "an enormous amount of time for an earthquake," Koper says, precisely because of the undersea orchestration of the quake shaking the seafloor.


"The more we understand the physics of earthquakes and tsunamis, the better we can warn people the next time," says Dapeng Zhao of Japan's Tohoku University. "That is why we study this."

fissure

Pronunciation: /ˈfɪʃə/

noun

• 1a long, narrow opening or line of breakage made by cracking or splitting, especially in rock or earth: the bacteria survive around vents or fissures in the deep ocean floor
• Anatomy a long, narrow opening, e.g. any of the spaces separating convolutions of the brain.

• 2a state of incompatibility or disagreement:a fissure between philosophy and reality

verb

[with object] (usually as adjective fissured)

• split or crack (something) to form a long, narrow opening:low cliffs of fissured Silurian rock

Origin:

late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin fissura, from findere 'to split'

recast
(rē-kăst')

tr.v., -cast, -cast·ing, -casts.
To mold again: recast a bell.
To set down or present (ideas, for example) in a new or different arrangement: recast a sentence.
To change the cast of (a theatrical production).

n. (rē'kăst')
The act or process of recasting.
Something produced by recasting.