Word: dome
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...maybe --9°C (16°F) on the ice--balmy, as far as summertime goes on the Greenland ice sheet. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the motherly Danish field leader of the NEEM project, greets us at the camp's main kitchen, dining room and work space: a toasty geodesic dome straight from the winter dreams of Buckminster Fuller. I quickly learn that a great deal of time in an arctic research camp is spent preparing and sharing food. In part, that's because the body churns through calories in the cold. But those shared meals--featuring steaks half the size...
...despite the Jimi Hendrix playing on the dome's stereo and the empty mini-kegs of Heineken, this isn't polar summer camp. The scientific work being done at NEEM is as hard as it is necessary. About a mile (1.6 km) outside the main camp, Danish scientists Steffen Bo Hansen and Sigfus Johann Johnsen drill holes 70 meters down. The ice beneath NEEM is more than a mile and a half (2.5 km) thick, the result of over 130,000 years of accumulated snow. Tiny air bubbles from the year the snow fell are trapped in layers of frost...
...leading the SMERSH men through the circular upper concourse of the Byelorussian-Radial subway station on the Moscow circle line, with its white-ceilinged dome and brilliant electric lights, and opposite us two parallel escalators, thickly packed with Muscovites, rising from below. It seemed as though they were all looking at me! They kept coming in an endless ribbon from down there, from the depths of ignorance--on and on beneath the gleaming dome, reaching toward me for at least one word of truth--so why did I keep silent...
February 22, 2006 was when it all went to hell. At least, that's how many Iraqis- Sunnis and Shi'ites alike - remember it. That was the day a powerful bomb set by Sunni extremists ripped through the golden dome of the ancient al-Askari Shrine, one of the holiest sites of Shi'ism, located in the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra, 65 miles north of Baghdad. The blast triggered a round of sectarian bombings, massacres and kidnappings so horrifying that for the next year and a half, many Iraqis would wonder if life would ever return to normal...
...meantime, there's dinner - massive steaks, potatoes and salad - and beer, which comes in 5 liter Heineken mini-kegs. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Dre are playing on the stereo in the main dome. NEEM has no shortage of grad students like Trevor Popp, who describes himself as "34 going on 12," and they know how to have fun. Don't get me wrong. Ice-core science is all hard work - especially the painstaking analysis of the ice cores back in the lab - but only a certain kind of scientist chooses to spend weeks on an isolated...