Word: icecap
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...restore the Caspian Sea and to slake the "colossal thirst" of users along the way, is to turn rivers now flowing north to the Arctic Ocean southward. Some international scientists fear that without the usual supply of easily frozen fresh water reaching the northern seas, the polar icecap will recede-and the consequent melting will flood the world's seacoasts...
...years, because of the slow precession of Mars (a wobbling of the planet as it rotates through space), the north pole will be tilted so that it receives more solar radiation during the planet's close approach to the sun. The increased radiation would heat up the northern icecap, release large amounts of trapped water into the atmosphere and make enough water available to stir up any lazy creatures that might have hibernated through the long Martian winter. Impossible? Perhaps, says Sagan, but he adds that those who criticize such speculations do so only because of their "chauvinistic" earthbound outlook...
...century. He notes that barnacles hitchhike to new climes by attaching themselves to whales, sailfish and ships' bottoms. Like some commuters who are forced to transfer from train to bus or taxi, Adélie penguins migrate using an integrated transport system. They toddle across the bleak Antarctic icecap on foot, swim in the icy sea and cruise lazily on drifting ice floes...
...evidence comes from U.S. and Danish scientists working above the Arctic Circle at a remote encampment 120 miles east of Thule. For several years, they drilled through the 4,500-ft.-thick Greenland icecap, gathering cores, or cylindrical samples, that provide a remarkably accurate record of Greenland's weather. The cores consist of layers of ice, each representing a year's precipitation. They have remained virtually unchanged for centuries. By analyzing these layers, scientists have been able to reconstruct a climatic history that reaches back for 100,000 years...
...container analogous to a Gemini capsule, any major change in the weather at one place is bound to affect the whole worldwide weather system. To destroy a typhoon threatening Kyushu might deprive a drought-ridden corner of India of needed rain or even parch Eastern Europe. To melt the icecap would almost certainly inundate much of the U.S. seaboard. Thus the masters of controlled weather would have to make sticky international and intranational decisions about which areas would get the good effects and which...