Word: arctics
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When "Project Icicle" was first discussed, few Air Force people besides Lieut. Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher had any real enthusiasm for it; the idea of a weather station floating lazily through the Arctic Ocean on a huge island of ice seemed just too fanciful. But Joe Fletcher, then C.O. of the 58th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Fairbanks, Alaska, kept wheedling and nagging at his superiors. Last week Fletcher's party finally fought their way on to the ice island some 100 miles from the North Pole. With a double-thickness tent, a month's rations, primus stoves...
...dogleg "Ptarmigan" track (Alaska to the Pole) reported that he had picked up a strange target-an "island" of some sort where there should have been nothing but spongy, saltwater ice pack (TIME, Nov. 27,1950). Because the 16-hour weather hops over the white wastes of the Arctic get monotonous, the crews took a lively interest in searching for a new landmark...
...dispatched a party which grew to an imposing 3,000 men, again under Bering's command, to explore the Arctic coast and the north rim of the Pacific, to reconnoiter the western verges of the New World-and, just incidentally, to develop the whole of Siberia into a profitable community. Despite its pretentious objectives, Bering's second expedition was one of the most extensive and successful enterprises ever carried out in the name of science for the sake of imperialism; and so the Russians, with a genius for reverse publicity, ignored or suppressed many of its fascinating details...
...navy in 1726 and the Bering expedition in 1733, bringing his wife and son along. It took the straggling army of human whatnot (adventurers, scientists, convict laborers, shipwrights, camp followers) almost five slogging years to cross the 4,000 miles of Siberia and join up in Okhotsk. There, in Arctic cold, the expedition built a large base and a small fleet. One squadron sailed south to study Japan; two ships, one of them carrying Bering with Waxell as his second in command, put out into uncharted seas to explore America from the west...
...living crouched in sandpits near the beach, and there-without strength to move the men who died beside them, with little food except for sea otters and seals that they were able to kill, open to all weathers, and to winds of gale force-spent the whole of an Arctic winter...