Word: icing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...leader, he saw to it that each of the items among the 450 tons of supplies parachuted from Air Force and Navy transports was retrieved, catalogued and stored. If the parachutes failed, the gear had to be dug out from beneath as much as 15 ft. of snow and ice. The camp's huts were put on stilts: on the surface they would become uncomfortably humid as their radiated heat melted the snow beneath them. Oil stoves had to be checked; properly installed, they are the antarctic's greatest comfort, but explosion can bring fiery death, and carbon...
...land. The snow crystals that drift down over its great central plateau seem dry as sand. Yet, because there is little ablation-return of moisture to the atmosphere-this light precipitation has become a glacier of up to a mile or more in depth. Under its own weight the ice moves glacially, spilling down off the plateau, flowing imperceptibly but inexorably toward the sea, squeezing through valleys, crawling over hills, plunging down the sides of mountains in great frozen cataracts. What it does not bury or crush, it encircles. And finally, at the continent's rim, it meets...
...hour sometimes come howling like banshees down off the highlands, often to be followed by unearthly silences. The antarctic has other tricks: when a man breathes its winter air, he not only can see but hear his breath, for as the frozen moisture drifts back across his face, its ice crystals break against his ears with the tinkling of hundreds of tiny bells. When the uncertain light of an overcast day is trapped beneath the clouds above and the snow below, everything between fills with a thick and milky film, devoid of feature or contrast. This is a whiteout...
Outside the little shack the snow was packed in deep drifts. Beyond its white expanse lay the forbidding waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, already thick with pack ice drifting down from Siberia. Inside, protected from the cold by walls papered with pages from popular Japanese magazines, barefoot Minoru Goto shuffled toward the iron stove with another piece of kindling and awaited the return of her children from school. "The first thing they'll say is, 'I'm hungry,' " she sighed, "but even if they ask, we don't have anything for them these days...
...that catches not only the image but also the spirit of the original. Fresh from the drawing board came The Twelve Days of Christmas, an imaginatively designed illustration of the old song; Alouette, a gentle fable about a bird that blossoms only uncaged, and Freezeyum, the story of an ice-cream salesman with a weakness for changing the tune played by the bells on his truck...