Word: permafrost
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COASTAL AREAS As protective sea ice disappears and permafrost underlying the land's surface softens, coastal erosion will speed up dramatcially. Floods will inundate marshes and estuaries, damaging both human and animal habitats...
...than 250 scientists, a prestigious multinational body called the Arctic Council reported that the region has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the globe over the past 50 years. Arctic Ocean ice has shrunk by as much as 20%, snow cover has diminished on land, and the permafrost underlying the tundra has become less stable...
Shishmaref is melting into the ocean. Over the past 30 years, the Inupiaq Eskimo village, perched on a slender barrier island 625 miles north of Anchorage, has lost 100 ft. to 300 ft. of coastline--half of it since 1997. As Alaska's climate warms, the permafrost beneath the beaches is thawing and the sea ice is thinning, leaving its 600 residents increasingly vulnerable to violent storms. One house has collapsed, and 18 others had to be moved to higher ground, along with the town's bulk-fuel tanks...
Global warming, caused in part by the burning of oil and gas in factories and cars, is traumatizing polar regions, where the complex meteorological processes associated with snow, permafrost and ice magnify its effects. A study published in Science last week reported that glaciers in West Antarctica are thinning twice as fast as they did in the 1990s. In Alaska the annual mean air temperature has risen 4°F to 5°F in the past three decades--compared with an average of just under 1°F worldwide. As a result, the state's glaciers are melting; insects are destroying vast...
...gulag was everywhere in the Soviet Union, not just on remote islands in the White Sea or the permafrost of the Far North. There were camps in the center of Moscow, too. In the early 1950s, for example, some 12,000 men and women - a mix of political prisoners and criminals - worked in Stroilag in the Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia...