Word: spitsbergen
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...Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter (Button; $3), is the story of another intrepid woman and her adventures in a colder climate than Arizona. Frau Ritter lived for a year on the north coast of Spitsbergen in a hut ten feet square, with her husband and a young Norwegian hunter, in temperatures that sank to 40° below zero. To the north lay Anxiety Bay, to the south Distress Hook, to the east Misery Bay and to the west the Bay of Grief. Not a tree or shrub rose from the sea of stones that covered the desolate...
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...