Word: snow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hours, even canceled altogether, sometimes stranding people on the ice cap for days at a time. We were lucky - our plane did depart, and landed safely at NEEM some two-and-a-half hours later. There's no paved runway on the ice cap, just a groomed, flat snow path, and the planes don't use landing gear but giant skis. That can make takeoff tricky, if snow has melted and stuck to the skis. After dropping us off, our plane taxied around the skyway for more than an hour trying to reach escape velocity, and finally had to dump...
...white, blinding and endless. At NEEM we're 77 degrees latitude north of the equator and nearly 2,500 meters above sea level, all of it accumulated snow and ice - some 130,000 years worth, which is what the scientists at NEEM eventually hope to drill through. The polar horizon stretches to all sides without landmarks, save for the black and red flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result is scary, when...
...drill for shallow ice cores. This is a side project, a much smaller drill that can bore down 70 m or so below the surface, which covers the past few hundred years of climatic history. At this depth what they bring back is not solid ice, but a half-snow, half-ice substance called firn. It's solid but porous, so it can trap some of the gas present in the atmosphere when it accumulated as snow. They can tell how much carbon dioxide was in the air during a given time period (roughly seven years with each layer, because...
...will be fully analyzed. The work is done underground to make sure the ice stays stable - though we're far above the Arctic Circle, with the open sun the temperature is only -6 degrees or -7 degrees C, though the wind can make it feel worse on the open snow. The sprawling cold room is also where the main drilling at NEEM will be done. That won't take place until next summer, but the scientists have already dug out a deep trench where the main drill will bore to the bottom of the ice. Here the cores will...
...Picking Up the Phone The first two Treasury chiefs of the Bush years never pulled off much at all. Paul O'Neill, the former CEO of aluminum maker Alcoa, battled with the White House over deficit spending (he wanted less of it) and lost. His successor, John Snow, former CEO of railroad giant CSX, toed the Administration's low-tax, anti-regulation line so faithfully as to be almost invisible...