Word: permafrost
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...peels do not decay for months. Twenty-five-year-old bulldozer tracks are still plainly visible on the tundra today, testimony to the slowness of the land's ability to heal itself. But the basic problem is that most of the Arctic lies on a hard foundation of permafrost-ever-frozen ground that prevents drainage. In the brief summer months, a thin cover of tundra soil thaws a foot deep. But if the ground is gouged by heavy equipment, the permafrost is exposed. When it thaws, it turns into a small rivulet that continues to erode its banks, growing...
Like many fires in Alaska, however, this 20,000-acre blaze proved to be unspectacular. It smoldered in the foot-deep carpet of moss above the permafrost, slowly charring the sparse timber as it advanced. To contain this fire, helicopters would ferry the men to points along the perimeter, where the crew would hack trenches out of the moss and fell the trees for 20 feet on either side to prevent burning limbs from dropping across the fire line...
...Alaska and some other states, such damage is not very extensive. Many Alaskan fires burn so slowly that even spiders can outrun them; very little wildlife is destroyed. With permafrost so close to the surface, it often takes trees 70 years to reach a diameter of four inches. They are "useful" only for pulp, but the nearest roads for a hypothetical pulp mill are often hundreds of miles from any particular forest. The fires' contribution to air pollution is only temporary, and the grass and moss burn so in- completely that humans' fire trenches may cause as much erosion...
Today, facing furies unimagined and unimaginable in Wilder's heyday, most people cannot share Wilder's optimism. In the 1960s the U.S. has admittedly been spared depressions, cataclysm, poxes, civil war and nuclear devastation-not to mention prevalent permafrost. Alas, few other prophets can speak with the certitude of geologists promising an unfrozen future-as this or any week's news suggests. The Administration claims that Moscow may soon have the capability to devastate the U.S. with a formidable new battery of nuclear missiles. Yet any attempt to counter the Soviet threat (if it is real) would...
Although the results do not prove the existence of water on the Martian surface, Astronomer Harlan Smith, director of the McDonald Observatory, speculates that if water is found in the atmosphere, it must be stored in greater quantities in the form of permafrost at the poles and in the ground...