Word: slopes
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...studies, Avalanchologist Andre Roche and other institute scientists now classify avalanches in two basic groups. One is the dreaded Staublawine (German for dust avalanche), which may occur, for example, when heavy new snowfalls fail to cling to the older foundation and begin to slide in billowing masses down the slope. It can be set off by a sudden shift of wind. Literally riding on a cushion of air at speeds of up to 150 m.p.h., dust avalanches create such enormous pressure differentials that they have been known to pull people out of their homes or knock down scores of trees...
...there are no living organisms on the North Slope-I have been there, and I know what is there...
...doubt about whether oil was coming to an undeveloped part of Maine's coastline (there is already an oil facility in Portland). By successfully battling its way through ice floes, the Manhattan opened the Northwest Passage as a feasible route from Alaska's North Slope oilfields to the domestic market. Maine's deepwater harbors, several studies proved, were the only ones along the Eastern Seaboard that could handle the 300,000-ton supertankers. "Instead of playing penny-ante stuff with the shoe industry, Maine was playing for high stakes with the oil companies," says John N. Cole...
...tours are a first step toward Alaska Airlines' long-sought goal of regularly scheduled flights to the Soviet Union. The airline now flies only within Alaska and between Seattle and Anchorage. On the strength of tourism and a brisk air-freight business to the North Slope oil wells, Alaska Airlines earned $554,000 on operating revenues of $36.6 million in the first eleven months of last year, compared with a loss of $4.3 million in the equivalent period of 1968. Now that it is due to become an international carrier in a small way, its hopes for future growth...
Stevens missed the whole point: the arctic ecosystem is full of life (including Eskimos) but is so vulnerable to pollution that the North Slope threatens to become a classic example of man's mindless destruction. The intense cold impedes nature's ability to heal itself; tire marks made in the tundra 25 years ago are still plainly visible. What most worries ecologists, in fact, is man's blindness to his own utter dependency on all ecosystems, such as oceans, coastal estuaries, forests and grasslands. Those ecosystems constitute the biosphere, a vast web of interacting organisms and processes that form...