Word: spitsbergen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only Fit for a Saga. Like Pytheas, the Vikings, who roamed from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland and Newfoundland, were too far ahead of their time. By the15th Century, when their own exploratory impetus was spent, their Arctic trade-routes and their flourishing Greenland colonies had become mere fantastic stuff for sagas...
...brings a calamity graver than most major battles. Millions pass into slavery between one week and the next. The fate of whole continents swings with a day's news. A fifth of the world's people are involved in actual war. No place, from the Congo to Spitsbergen, is safe. Nobody is secure...
Isolated groups of men in Spitsbergen and Greenland, Burnet points out, generally withstand the arctic winter without illness but summer's first ship brings a violent epidemic of colds. Doctors think that vulnerable victims catch it from carriers who are immune through constant exposure. Even great flu epidemics like the 1918 pandemic, says Burnet, attack only a vulnerable minority of the population. And most flu epidemics quickly run their course, leaving the population immune, at least temporarily, to another epidemic...
Norwegian and Russian scientists believe that the Gulf Stream, Europe's warm-water heating system, is flowing faster and farther into the north, tempering the climate, driving back the pack ice. In 1909, the Spitsbergen coalfields had an annual shipping period of only 95 mid-season days. In 1946, the last ship got safely away...
Soviet Russia insistently asked for air bases on Norway's Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen. The democratic world, remembering reports that Communist influence had gripped postliberation Norway, waited for Norway's answer. On Feb. 15, in a secret session, the Norwegian Parliament took up neighbor Russia's request. This week Oslo let out the news: Parliament, by 101 votes to 11, had voted "No." The 11, of course, were Communists...