Word: permafrost
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...strike is no accident, but the almost inevitable climax to one of the greatest oil rushes in history. Besides Western Minerals, companies like California Standard, Amerada, Shell, Texaco and Midland have grabbed up 130 million acres in the area to stake millions on electronically corroborated hunches that underneath the permafrost lies one of the world's greatest oil pools. The rush has even pushed into the remote Arctic Archipelago, where at least ten companies have asked for exploration permits. Companies with household names such as Richfield are planning to explore places with exotic names such as Graham Island...
...electric-power resources beyond calculation. But its winters are the coldest on earth. In the past, both Czarist and Soviet regimes have had to force people to live and work there. Tens of millions of hapless human slaves, cutting timber, tilling the bleak steppe, or digging through the permafrost (in some places 75 ft. deep) to get at the gold, iron, coal, copper, nickel, uranium, titanium, magnesium and bauxite have laid the foundations of a series of vast industrial enterprises. To develop this industry, the Soviet Union now needs the skills and crafts of mil lions of willing, i.e., voluntary...
...tent camp. For another five days, rising water in the spring thaw completely cut them off from land. As their provisions dwindled, they lived on canned macaroni alone, because the fish they hooked were too big to land on their lines. When an airplane finally picked them off the permafrost, LIFE printed their memorable full-color photographs of the Canadian tundra...
...range of American cities. And U.S. planes, heading north, would welcome arctic bases. But the little that the armed services have already learned from their arctic operations has made one thing clear: conventional construction won't work. Buildings settle unevenly as they melt their way into permafrost (subsoil, some of which has been frozen solid since the ice age). Roads buckle and heave. Runways are soon pockmarked with dangerous chuckholes...
...very mechanics of existence are too tough to leave time or energy for experiment. So the Army took over the empty laundry in Wilmette. Directed by Swiss-born Henri Bader, snow-and-avalanche specialist, the Army Corps of Engineers turned the three-story building into SIPRE (Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment...