Word: icing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...color of the snowflakes is due to two strips of polarizing material on either side of the tank. The colors are of all shades, depending on the thickness of the ice, the inclination of the light source to the crystal and the positions of the polarizing screens...
...been permitted to interfere with the expedition's rigid program of scientific observations. Teams of scientists leapfrog each other, spurting ahead of the column to set up their instruments, and spurting to catch up when they are left behind. Every ten miles they take cores of snow and ice, sometimes 200 ft. deep. Such cores are like petrified weather: they have layers and particles in them that tell the history of Antarctic centuries...
Every 15 miles another team measures the strength of gravitation, which gives clues about the earth's crust deep under the ice. Every 30 miles seismologists bore a hole in the ice and explode a charge of dynamite. Waves from the explosion travel to the bottom of the ice and into the rock beneath it. At each boundary between ice and rock or between layers of different rock, some of the waves are reflected up to the surface, and when they are recorded by the proper instruments they tell the scientists what they have found under the mile-thick...
When all the 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...
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...