Word: floe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Next day, with the three rescue vessels at the site, the U.S.S. Campbell reported that conditions were worse than anything the Coast Guard cutter had seen on convoy duty during World War II. There was one mammoth ice floe half a mile wide and 40 miles long. The boiling seas were choked with icebergs, growlers or low-riding chunks of glaciers, massive hummocks of pack ice, and brash or bits of broken pack ice. Nowhere in all that snow-swirling polar frenzy was there sight, sound or sign of the Hans Hedtoft and her freight of 95 human beings...
...might be guessed, British Author Pamela Frankau, 50, belongs to the Eliza-crossing-the-ice school of fiction: the narrative floe consists in keeping the characters' daydream life one jump ahead of baying reality. She succeeds; artifice mimics art, animation apes life, but the entertainment, most of the time, is real...
...Skate" was a mile-square ice floe, 10 ft. thick. It drifted on the cap of the globe, beyond the Arctic Circle, whose mysteries are as dark as those faced by Columbus, Magellan, and De Soto. There, 20 Air Forcemen and scientists participating in the International Geophysical Year took over a simple camp: 20 Quonset huts, mess hall, science laboratory, 5,000-ft. runway and an electric homing beacon for supply planes. And there they resolutely logged their fresh jigsaw pieces of knowledge about water masses, current patterns, ice drift, season changes and marine life...
Obstacles in the Dark. Their troubles came with the warmth of spring and summer. Ice Skate was cracking. The airstrip had already crumbled away from the rest of the floe. Again and again they built new strips as their drifting cake crumbled and chipped apart. Heavy windstorms swept over, first from one direction, then from another, moving the ice mass slowly to and fro with a sheer force that caused new cracks and pressure ridges...
...Forty percent of floe to east and west has separated. Unable to reach runway for inspection. Overcast, dark, light snow. Crack threatens to separate homer [beacon] from camp . . . Two cracks separating northern 40% of runway . . . Recommend imminent abandoning...