Word: arctic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When "Project Icicle" was first discussed, few Air Force people besides Lieut. Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher had any real enthusiasm for it; the idea of a weather station floating lazily through the Arctic Ocean on a huge island of ice seemed just too fanciful. But Joe Fletcher, then C.O. of the 58th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Fairbanks, Alaska, kept wheedling and nagging at his superiors. Last week Fletcher's party finally fought their way on to the ice island some 100 miles from the North Pole. With a double-thickness tent, a month's rations, primus stoves...
...dogleg "Ptarmigan" track (Alaska to the Pole) reported that he had picked up a strange target-an "island" of some sort where there should have been nothing but spongy, saltwater ice pack (TIME, Nov. 27,1950). Because the 16-hour weather hops over the white wastes of the Arctic get monotonous, the crews took a lively interest in searching for a new landmark...
...first island was named, looked strangely like the great glacial ice-foot that puzzled Peary at the turn of the century. But if it was Peary's giant ice-foot, it was circling slowly across the top of the world in the sea currents that swirl through the Arctic. It might make an ideal, stable platform for scientific observation...
...navy in 1726 and the Bering expedition in 1733, bringing his wife and son along. It took the straggling army of human whatnot (adventurers, scientists, convict laborers, shipwrights, camp followers) almost five slogging years to cross the 4,000 miles of Siberia and join up in Okhotsk. There, in Arctic cold, the expedition built a large base and a small fleet. One squadron sailed south to study Japan; two ships, one of them carrying Bering with Waxell as his second in command, put out into uncharted seas to explore America from the west...
...living crouched in sandpits near the beach, and there-without strength to move the men who died beside them, with little food except for sea otters and seals that they were able to kill, open to all weathers, and to winds of gale force-spent the whole of an Arctic winter...