Word: ices
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Through blind physics, the Antarctic can confer on a dead seal the splendor of an Arthurian burial rite. A corpse will become frozen beneath some floating ice, then rise slowly to the top as ice forms below and evaporates above. Once on the surface, the body insulates the underlying ice from the sun, causing it to form a pedestal as the surrounding ice recedes. Eventually, the ice breaks up, and the seal, mummified by the dry, cold climate, drifts out to sea. As layers of warm and cold air bend light and play tricks on the eye, it can appear...
Antarctica also plays tricks with time and space. The vast, treeless continent conveys the awesome inertia of a place where motion is noticeable only on a geological time scale, as though the extreme cold flowing out from the polar plateau has slowed the pulse of life itself. On the ice sheets, ice streams 50 miles wide--glaciers within a glacier, in effect--look like frozen rapids when seen from space. Only if time-lapse photography could collapse many hundreds of years would the continent look alive as the ice flowed and cracked, redistributing its mass according to the laws governing...
Entombed in the Antarctic are memories of ice ages, of volcanic eruptions, of epochal changes in winds and rains. These memories are encrypted in dust particles, rare molecules and the properties of the ice itself. The tales they contain of thousands of years of climate changes provide intimations, and warnings, of our fate. That is why people like glaciologist Kendrick Taylor of Nevada's Desert Research Institute are drawn here. By drilling to the base of the ice sheet and extracting a 3,300-ft.-long series of ice cores, he hopes to answer new and urgent questions about...
...Like Middlebury students, we want ice cream from the masters--Ben and Jerry. This would make Harvard...
Silverman coaches a youth soccer program for Nike and Schneller coaches youth ice skating...