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...plane heads west toward the old American air base at Kangerlussuaq, puddles of blue glacial melt begin to appear - vast, unblinking eyes that reflect the sky back up. Then the whiteness is suddenly ruptured and the ice wrinkles and thins, revealing slashes of rock beneath the 2.9 million cubic km of ice. By the time the coast comes into sight, the ice sheet ends abruptly, leaving bare brown dirt and rock. Finally, as we descend to Kangerlussuaq, the green in Greenland is visible...
...Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back tens of thousands of years. Oxygen isotopes trapped in the ice core can tell you what the temperature was in a given year; trapped air bubbles...
...occasional iceberg into Baffin Bay. After getting properly outfitted for our trip to NEEM the next day - our weather forecast is in the teens, but temperatures really can be polar even during the summer - we take a car trip out to the vanishing edge of the glacier, some 30 km outside town. It's the waning hours of the afternoon, though it's hard to tell; time loses its meaning during an Arctic summer. As we drive down Kangerlussuaq's only road, we pass sprawling glacial-melt lakes of the purest blue, framed by rocky hills dusted with brush...
...with that sense of purpose that Beijing has spent the past seven years transforming itself. The city added roughly 85 miles (about 140 km) of subway and rail lines and a huge airport terminal. Forty million pots of flowers and 22 million trees were planted. As many as 1.5 million people were forcibly relocated. Some, like the Yu family, who ran a snack shop north of the Forbidden City, hung on till the very end, wrapping their structure in flags and photos of Chinese leaders in hopes it might stop the wrecking ball. It didn't. Less than 48 hours...
...city where the Rat Pack partied, Elvis honeymooned and Eisenhower swung the only hole in one of his life. Palm Springs, California's fabled desert oasis, has long been a winter playground for the Hollywood set; the city lies just 100 miles (160 km) east of Los Angeles. But it is also home to an extensive array of beautifully preserved Modernist structures that have turned this golf-and-cocktails resort town into a must-see destination for devotees of architecture...