Word: poled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fields of the Arctic Ocean, Japanese Explorer Naomi Uemura last week took a sextant sighting, then another and another. At last he was sure. With the 17 huskies who had pulled his sledge, he was at the top of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole alone by way of the frozen Arctic...
Standing on a dazzling white plain of ice that stretched southward in every direction, the diminutive (5 ft. 3 in., 130 Ibs.) explorer planted the Japanese flag on the pole. The next morning, jubilant members of his support team, who had made five airdrops of supplies along the way, landed beside him in a small plane. Uemura, 37, was full of apologies for taking two weeks longer than he had anticipated to make the grueling journey. Said he: "I'm awfully sorry I was delayed, but I finally got here...
...born. Most of his spectacular feats, past and present, have been undertaken alone. These include having climbed four of the highest mountains in the world: Mont Blanc in France, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Aconcagua in Argentina and Mount McKinley in the U.S. To train for his conquest of the North Pole, he made a 7,500-mile trek from Greenland to Alaska by dos sledge...
Though Uemura's one-man conquest of the North Pole is unique, his expedition was the fifth to succeed since the U.S. Navy's Robert E. Peary and his six-man team first attained the North Pole in 1909. Like Peary, Uemura had set off from Ellesmere Island, now part of Canada's Northwest Territories. Early in the trip, 30-ft.-high formations of compressed ice known as pressure ridges blocked his route across the frozen Arctic Ocean obliging him to hack passageways through the ice to make way for his 882-lb. sledge. Temperatures dropping...
...were airdropped. Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were able to pinpoint Uemura's positions by monitoring signals from a 3½-lb. transmitter mounted on his sledge. The transmissions were picked up by a Nimbus 6 meteorological satellite as it passed over the Pole every 108 minutes and relayed by a NASA tracking station in Fairbanks, Alaska, to Greenbelt...