Word: arctics
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Last week the U.S. Navy announced that two U.S. icebreakers, the Navy's Burton Island and the Coast Guard's Northwind, had successfully cut their way through McClure on a joint U.S.Canadian expedition. Neither ship made a complete passage from the Arctic to the Atlantic Ocean; the Burton Island sailed through the Prince of Wales Strait from the west and turned around Banks Island to push westward again through McClure Strait (see map); the Northwind pushed eastward from the Arctic Ocean. Both ships used helicopters to scout the best passage through the ice. Unusually heavy melting of barrier...
Although the new shortcut made the headlines, Canadian and U.S. scientists aboard the expedition had a more important mission: taking soundings and recording data on the Arctic seas. With accurate charts, an atomic submarine, such as the U.S.S. Nautilus (TIME, Jan. 11), could cruise from the Atlantic to the Pacific under the Arctic icepack, virtually invulnerable to search and counterattack...
Despite a high initial cost of some $8,000,000, the portable reactor looks like an eventual money-saver to the Pentagon. Remote U.S. bases, especially those in the Arctic, burn up vast amounts of oil for heat and diesel-generated electricity at a cost that sometimes reaches $42 a barrel. Using the reactor and its enriched uranium fuel, the Pentagon could free ships and planes for other duties; 1 Ib. of easily transported uranium contains as much energy as 6,350 barrels of fuel oil. AEC has another outlook on the project. Said one AEC physicist: "We are buying...
...Arctic seas are warming, too. Eskimos of Greenland have had to abandon sealhunting; the seals have moved farther north. Instead, the Eskimos are fishing for cod, which have moved in from the south. Even north of Siberia the water is growing warmer; the Russians are having less trouble with ice on their far-northern sea route...
...Frederiksen believes that warmth and cold in the Arctic come in cycles of about 1,800 years. Before the last peak of cold, from which the Arctic is just emerging, Greenland was really green, and the sea between Greenland and Iceland was sufficiently free of ice to permit the tiny ships of the Vikings to sail without disaster. Dr. Frederiksen predicts that this condition will return, and that great areas of Siberia, Canada and Alaska, now almost uninhabitable, will be opened to agriculture. Population will move north, and the world's balance of power may be affected...