Word: arctically
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...that view is wildly skewed. The Vikings were indeed raiders, but they were also traders whose economic network stretched from today's Iraq all the way to the Canadian Arctic. They were democrats who founded the world's oldest surviving parliament while Britain was still mired in feudalism. They were master metalworkers, fashioning exquisite jewelry from silver, gold and bronze. Above all, they were intrepid explorers whose restless hearts brought them to North America some 500 years before Columbus...
Most important, though, they made the finest ships of the age. Thanks to several Viking boats disinterred from burial mounds in Norway, archaeologists know beyond a doubt that the wooden craft were "unbelievable--the best in Europe by far," according to William Fitzhugh, director of the National Museum's Arctic Studies Center and the exhibition's chief curator. Sleek and streamlined, powered by both sails and oars, quick and highly maneuverable, the boats could operate equally well in shallow waterways and on the open seas...
When Bob Hunter, right, and Paul Watson joined buddies in Vancouver in 1971 to protest U.S. nuclear testing in the Arctic, they didn't realize they were setting off their own explosion. Calling themselves Greenpeace, the Canadians went on to stage demonstrations against sealing and whaling, all with media-savvy stunts, like hovering over a seal pup in front of a huge icebreaker. Even so, Watson quit Greenpeace as too timid and started the more radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose tactics include ramming whaling ships. Eventually Hunter quit as well, but the two left a big legacy: a wavemaking...
...last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, brave Siberians walked across the Bering Sea land bridge, then edged their way south via a newly opened corridor in the ice and fanned out in all directions. Within 500 years, their descendants had settled most of the hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Alas, as archaeologists have learned by digging up and down the Americas, this engaging tale may be wrong...
...monsoon is not the only climate cycle that human activity could alter. Atmospheric scientist John M. Wallace of the University of Washington believes that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are already beginning to have an impact on another important cycle, known as the North Atlantic or Arctic Oscillation. In this case it's not the warming these gases create in the lower atmosphere that is key, but the cooling they cause in the stratosphere, where molecules of carbon dioxide and the like emit heat to space rather than trapping it in the upper atmosphere. This stratospheric cooling, Wallace and others...