Word: arctic
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Adrift in his native city of Leningrad in 1969, the young poet had good reason to feel depressed. He had spent 18 months laboring on a state farm in the Arctic, convicted by a Soviet court of being a "social parasite." Released but still convinced that his mission on earth was to write rather than surrender his skills to the dictates of the state, he faced bleak prospects: the official campaign to discredit him had taken on undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed...
...barely clearing the hills above the Pacific port of Vladivostok, less than 40 miles from China. At the same moment, on the Bering Strait across from Alaska, the easternmost edge of the Soviet world is well on the way to an Arctic noon. And in Moscow, ten time zones to the west over an endless expanse of tundra, forests and inland seas, it is half past midnight, and yesterday has just ended. Not for eight hours will the commuters to the left head for their jobs in the capital from suburban Zagorsk. In the Soviet Union, more than anywhere else...
What sort of day was May 15? In Moscow it began with an overcast sky that brightened briefly before being darkened by thunderclouds. In the Arctic Ocean, the nuclear-powered icebreaker Sibir was cruising toward the scientific station North Pole 27. In Central Asia scientists secretly tested the 170 million-h.p. Energia booster rocket, the world's most powerful. Through the day, photographers scoured areas once strictly off limits. Some places remained out-of-bounds: military academies were accessible; most military installations were...
...somehow at a frozen two in the morning, I didn't relish the idea of crawling across the icy floor to the frigid phone in our arctic common room. I guess deep inside I knew that the next day would bring sunny warm temperatures and with them, of course, that much-needed heat in Lowell House...
...Great Basin stretches across northern Nevada, touching California, Oregon, Utah and Idaho. Once an inland sea, it was formed 20 million years ago by geologic plates thrusting sediment layers upward into mountain ranges. The relatively small national park contains nearly all the Great Basin's ecosystems, from desert to arctic-alpine tundra, encompassing 3,000-year-old bristlecone pines, glacial lakes and one of the continent's southernmost permanent ice fields. As recently as 10,000 years ago, bowl-like cirques in the park's mountains were sculpted by glaciers, which left in their wake gray carpets of rock known...