Word: polarizer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Above a glistening ice pack in the Bering Sea, a helicopter stalks a polar bear, following paw prints in the snow. The bear suddenly appears as a hint of movement, white against white, padding its way across the ice. The helicopter descends, hovering over the frightened creature, and a shotgun slides out the window, firing a tranquilizer dart into the massive fur-covered rump. Minutes pass. The bear shows no effects. The helicopter drops for a second shot. This time the bear stands its ground, and the pilot, fearing the animal is about to lunge for the aircraft, abruptly noses...
Those tense moments were all in a day's work for Garner, one of a handful of hearty scientists, pilots and technicians taking part in a ground-breaking and hazardous $700,000 annual U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study of arctic polar bear populations. In an effort to follow the fate of more than 600 bears since the program's inception, the researchers have braved wind-chill factors of -59 degrees C (-75 degrees F), spartan living conditions, the constant threat of mechanical failures and the peril of being stranded on an ice pack. Last October two government biologists...
...decades ago, big-game hunters, not researchers, pursued polar bears from the air and on the ground. A thousand carcasses a year littered the Arctic. The number of ice bears dwindled, and there was worldwide concern that the animal might be hunted to extinction. Today the bears' recovery is one of the success stories of conservation. Worldwide, polar bears now number as least 20,000, all of which are protected by a 1976 international agreement. Alaska has 3,000 to 5,000 polar bears, and only the state's Native Americans can hunt them -- and strictly for subsistence purposes...
...guess where these two polar-opposite paragons teach. You got it: Dartmouth, veddy Ivy League but founded as a prep school for New Hampshire Indian lads. Their common link, besides furtive lust, is Christopher Columbus. She has been asked for an article on the quincentennial of his first voyage from her people's perspective. He is laptopping an epic poem on the great explorer. In pursuit of Columbus' lost diary, Roger and Vivian fly to Eleuthera in the Bahamas as guests of a junk-bond financier on the lam. This quasi Milken thinks Vivian knows the secret burial site...
...National Academy of Sciences issued a long-awaited report on global warming -- the theory that a buildup of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing temperatures to climb, threatening crops and coastal areas that could be drowned under rising oceans if the polar ice caps melt. Though both sides could find some support for their positions in the study, its findings and recommendations could prod the go-slow faction in the White House...