Word: arctic
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...planning for seven years after Fiennes' wife Virginia first proposed it to her husband, whose previous ventures had included a Hovercraft expedition on the White Nile. Fiennes met Burton, a former army corporal, at a party, and he agreed to go along on a training mission to the Arctic in 1977. An advertisement for a deck hand turned up Anthony Bowring, a seaman, who tracked down a 27-year-old polar ship. Bowring then persuaded his father's insurance firm, C.T. Bowring, and a New York insurance company to buy the ship and help sponsor the expedition...
Science, or anyway science fiction, marches on. It seems only yesterday (though actually it was 1951) that the Thing was nothing more than James Arness dressed up to look like a rutabaga with legs, galumphing around an Arctic research station, scaring the wits out of its personnel. Now the scientists' camp has moved to Antarctica, and the Thing is no longer a thing. It still comes from outer space, but instead of being a monster, it is a kind of infection worming its way into animal forms, turning them into monsters...
...Star Wars spaceship, and it is fun to see the future zinging and skittering through our own airspace. Eastwood's laconic professionalism plays off amusingly against the high-tech complexity of his flying machine. And its cruelly trim design plays off handsomely against the bleak beauty of the arctic cloudscapes, icescapes and oceanscapes, where a refueling rendezvous with a submarine must be kept if a final, final escape is to be made. In these concluding passages, John Dykstra's special effects help to turn Firefox into a fantastic voyage through a kind of boyish dream world, suspenseful...
...European grand scheme is scheduled to be launched next year. The rerouting would require the building of 25 dams and numerous pumping stations. As the barriers go up, they would raise river levels a section at a time, until the water no longer reached the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The builders would also erect colossal dikes across the mouths of the rivers, creating great fresh-water bays. The first northern water should begin flowing southward into the Volga through a network of canals and reservoirs by the late 1980s...
More disturbing, some scientists have cautioned that if the Arctic Ocean is not replenished by fresh water, it will get salt ier, its freezing point will drop, and the icecap will begin to melt, possibly starting a global warming trend. Other scientists fear that just the opposite may occur: as the flow of warmer fresh water is reduced, the polar ice may expand. In any case, British Climatologist Michael Kelly of the University of East Anglia sees an ironic consequence: changes in polar winds and currents might reduce rainfall in the very regions to benefit from the river...