Word: icecaps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Khrushchev had wound up four days of secret conferences with Red China's Mao. In Washington U.S. officials were again on tenterhooks about a parley at the summit. In the quivering Middle East more U.S. ground troops were pouring ashore. But there beneath the peaceful, sunlit icecap, the 116 U.S. Navymen were making more pages for the history books than anybody else. They were setting a new sea tradition for their countrymen, to rate alongside Jones, Farragut, Peary, Byrd. The submarine was blunt-bowed Nautilus, world's first nuclear-powered ship. Nautilus' position: under...
...directs the policies of the twelve "sister academies" of the various republics, it runs at least 126 research institutes, and to a large extent governs the work of more than 200,000 scientists and technicians. Its institutes probe into everything from weather control and ionospheric explorations above the Antarctic icecap to elaborate schemes for landing electronic-guided tanks on the moon. It sponsors as many as 100 field expeditions at a time, one of which last year discovered in Siberia what may be the largest diamond field in the world. It is the goad, guide and guardian of Russia...
...planet is still in the grip of an Ice Age, with icecaps at both polar regions, and the IGY wants to know whether it is coming or going. In Greenland, scientists have bored 1,438 ft. into the ice. In Antarctica they are doing the same, and measuring the great icecap by seismic waves. Other scientists are observing the advance or retreat of smaller glaciers in Temperate Zone mountains. Their reports may tell what changes of climate lie in the earth's future...
...painfully gathered data are digested and assembled, they will give a cross section of the Antarctic Continent, which is believed to be a great saucer of rock with a center near the Pole pressed down by the weight of ice that it carries. The thickness of the icecap will tell how much water is locked up in it, and how high the oceans stood during geological ages when the earth's Poles were ice-free. Perhaps the precious data brought back by the Fuchs expedition will explain the seams of coal in Antarctic mountains. Coal is the remains...
Sastrugi. Doggedly sticking to its scientific schedule, but far behind its timetable, the Fuchs expedition crawled up the domed icecap from South Ice. It painfully threaded through a line of nunataks (mountain peaks almost submerged in ice), and reached ice with fewer crevasses on the high plateau behind. Here were great fields of sastrugi-wind-formed ridges of hard-packed snow sometimes 4 ft. high. The Sno-Cats crossed them all right, but with dangerous pitching and crashing. Progress slowed to a crawl; the weather grew worse; but the scientists kept to their schedule as if they were making their...