Word: polars
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...polar dawn comes in March, sunset in September, noon in June. Last week it was mid-afternoon in the Arctic as all over the world meteorologists, astronomers and geophysicists traveled to work for the Second International Polar Year. Their most exciting assignment was to watch for the effects of the Sun's eclipse on Aug. 31. Then will follow a dull, methodical twelve months of measurements, computations and recordings...
...First International Polar Year became an event when the northern nations set up a dozen meteorological and geophysical stations in the Arctic regions. One of the two U. S. parties under Lieut. Adolphus Washington Greely reached the then farthest North (83° 24'), lost themselves. A relief party found seven survivors, 18 starved corpses. Lieut. Greely survived to become Major General Greely, builder of telegraph and cable lines, a trustee of the National Geographic Society. The parties of the other nations added to Man's knowledge of weather-forecasting, navigation and Earth's electromagnetic behavior. After adding...
Once the picture of men ringing the Pole like wolves around a campfire excited romantic scientists. But as the Second Polar Year loomed, economy's pinch made many a nation withdraw its cooperation. Niggling legislatures reduced expense accounts. When at last the Polar Year got under way it had become a Terrestrial Year. Instead of ringing only the North Pole with observatories, the massed nations have sent some men to the Antarctic Zone, some to tropic regions. Africa and South America have six stations each. Some 250 men, and a few women, were last week scattered between South Orkney...
...laid north of Point Barrow, Alaska. Chee-Ak comes courting Kyatuk as winter seems to break. The sanguine tribesmen have a food orgy. They are stupefied with blubber when winter suddenly closes in again. As the polar storm screams monotonously Chee-Ak suggests that they starve afoot. According to tribal routine they seal the aged into their igloos to die. Kyatuk's father is so left but Kyatuk protests. Chee-Ak backs her up. The tribe's offended gods dog the march with bad luck, nearly crushing them all in the polar icepack, until Kyatuk's father...
Despite occasional dramatic refinements that tend to discredit the entire picture, Igloo is well done. Good shots: the company of walruses inching off the ice floe; Eskimos kicking a snowball back & forth with their insteps; a whale whamming its tail out of water; a polar bear shuffling over...