Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) White Sands, uninhabited desert area, S central N.Mex. It is a center for U.S. military-weapons research and testing. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded at Holloman Air Force Base (f...

(Encyclopedia) Goodwin Sands, stretch of shoals and sandbars, c.10 mi (20 km) long, lying off the east coast of Kent, SE England. It forms a breakwater E of The Downs, a roadstead. Shipwrecks were formerly frequent ...

(Encyclopedia) Tularosa Basin, desert basin, c.6,500 sq mi (16,800 sq km), S N.Mex. and W Tex. From Texas east of El Paso the basin, an area of interior drainage, extends c.170 mi (275 km) to the north, and ranges c...

(Encyclopedia) Alamogordo ălˌəməgôrˈdō, –də [key], city, seat of Otero co., S N.Mex., near the Sacramento Mts.; inc. 1912. Holloman Air Force Base, home to U.S. stealth aircraf...

(Encyclopedia) white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of...

(Encyclopedia) white lead, heavy, white substance, poisonous, insoluble in water, extensively used as a white pigment and base in paints. It is one of the oldest paint pigments used by humans. Chemically, it is basi...

(Encyclopedia) white-eye, common name for warblerlike, arboreal birds, including 85 species in the family Zosteropidae, and for certain species of ducks. The members of Zosteropidae, with the exception of a few spec...

(Encyclopedia) White Mountains, part of the Appalachian system, N N.H. and SW Maine, rising to 6,288 ft (1,917 m) at Mt. Washington in the Presidential Range and to 5,249 ft (1,600 m) at Mt. Lafayette in the Francon...

(Encyclopedia) White River. 1 River, c.690 mi (1,110 km) long, rising in the Boston Mts., NW Ark., and flowing first N into SW Missouri, then generally SE through NE Arkansas to the Mississippi River. Its chief trib...

(Encyclopedia) White, Charles (Charles Wilbert White, Jr.), 1918–79, American figurative painter, printmaker, and teacher, b. Chicago, studied School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A left-leaning activist whose ...