Word: arctics
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...question buzzed insistently through the mind of the young Jewish chemist as he hung on the adventures of Russian Explorer Ivan Papanin: Where did he find drinking water in the arctic? After the lecture, Alexander Zarchin shouldered his way to the front of the classroom at the Leningrad Technical Institute and got a deceptively simple answer. "We melted icebergs," explained Papanin...
...reason for the recurring Pleistocene ice ages, say Ewing and Donn, is that the earth's poles are where they are. The South Pole is in the middle of a continent, and the North Pole is in the middle of the small Arctic Ocean, which is almost entirely surrounded by land. This setup is like a slow-responding thermostat that keeps the earth alternating between glacial and interglacial periods...
...present time (an interglacial period), the Arctic Ocean is mostly covered with ice. Very little water evaporates from it, and so the lands around it get little precipitation, and the glaciers in Greenland and northern Canada do not grow. But if the Arctic Ocean were ice-free because of more warm water flowing into it from the south, a great deal of snow would fall on the cold northern interiors of Eurasia and North America, and not all of it would melt in summer. Glaciers would grow and march southward toward New York and Paris...
...glaciers would not grow indefinitely. After a few ten thousands of years, they would lock up so much of the ocean's water that sea level all over the world would fall. Communication between the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans would be reduced, so that less warm water could flow northward over the "sill" between Norway and Greenland. Deprived of warmth, the Arctic Ocean would freeze over. The great continental glaciers, deprived of snowfall, would waste slowly away, restoring their water to the oceans. Then the level of the sea would rise. Warm Atlantic water would flow freely into...
...believe that such cycles have already happened several times. They support their theory by citing cores of ocean-bottom mud that indicate warming of the Atlantic surface water about 11,000 years ago. This, they think, was when the last ice age lowered sea level so much that the Arctic Ocean, cut off from the Atlantic, froze over. The glaciers, then at maximum, began to retreat...