Word: permafrost
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...protect fragile permafrost from being rutted by tire tracks, much of the Dempster is built on an elevated roadbed that rises as high as 6 ft. above the terrain. Thus it becomes difficult, as well as illegal, to pull off the highway and pitch a tent for the night, except at the sanctioned sites...
...speed up or slow down the water and disturb the salmon battling upstream each spring to spawn. Indeed, biologists say that there has already been a drop-off in the number of fish in streams intersecting the Haul Road. Gravel and dust can be another problem. Tossed onto the permafrost by car wheels, they cause the snow to melt early in the spring. Waterfowl then nest prematurely in these moist spots and lose their young to frost...
...imagination like a 19th century novel. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov echo in the dramatic testimony of Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Sakharov, Medvedev and Mandelshtam. Vladimir Bukovsky's To Build a Castle adds the spirit of Lewis Carroll. His Soviet Union seems like a vertiginous rabbit hole lined in permafrost, or the other side of the looking glass, where the Red kings and queens of the Kremlin can sometimes be made to play by the rules...
...route covers mountainous regions where there have been earthquakes, and broad areas of permafrost and innumerable bogs where the ground heaves during the short summer thaw; pressure tests of the Siberian soil are conducted at an underground Permafrost Institute at Yakutsk. Some 3,700 bridges and culverts must be built across rivers and streams. Subway experts from Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev have helped drill tunnels (one of them 9.5 miles long) through seven mountain ranges...
There were other considerations. The climate of the site had to be reasonably benevolent, and the annual snowfall modest. The soil had to be firm (which automatically excluded the four-fifths of Alaska that is shifting, meltable permafrost), and it had to be less prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions than are many other parts of the seismically active state. Finally, as a symbol of the rugged grandeur of America's last frontier, the site had to be scenically impressive without intruding on salmon-spawning streams, bear dens or other wildlife sanctuaries...