Word: tundras
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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White. No horizon. In the distance, sky and tundra fade together into a blue-white wash. The Arctic landscape has a great many shades of white: the crystalline white of blown snow. The gray-green white of ice on the sea. The silver white of a fox's fur. The turquoise white in the northern sky an hour before the sun comes up in the south to illuminate another short winter...
...idea of what drilling for that oil would do to ANWR, it helps to visit Prudhoe Bay, America's largest oil field. Just beyond the western edge of the refuge, Prudhoe lights up the tundra for miles with megawatts of yellow industrial light. Steam belches from plants eight stories high; flames shoot from natural-gas flares; and bulldozers the size of houses grind back and forth along 500 miles of roads that link the 170 drilling sites along the coast. Five thousand men--and a few women--work here, pumping 1.3 million bbl. a day down the trans-Alaska pipeline...
...industry has worked hard to clean up its act. New technologies allow wells to be clustered more closely together, with drilling done laterally below the surface--reducing the number of installations on the tundra. Pipelines are now built 5 ft. above the surface to allow animals to pass beneath. A truck leaking a pint of transmission fluid is treated as an oil spill, reported as such and laboriously cleaned up. Even so, there are limits. "Drilling for oil is an industrial process," concedes Ronnie Chappell, the main spokesman for BP Amoco on the North Slope. "Some things...
Thirty-five miles out on the tundra and 30[degrees] below zero, a seismic crew is at work, stringing out lines of microphones in front of a 56,000-lb. "thumper truck" that sends vibrations through the earth in search of oil pockets. These are the toughest jobs in the industry. The 94-man crew works and lives out of a mobile camp: 30 bright-orange mobile homes on steel skis, linked together in six trains. In a season they will cover 400 square miles. The men travel the North Slope in Sno-Cats with rubber tracks to minimize damage...
...travel to Alaska's far north, the experience stretches the imagination. To visit a new drilling station in Prudhoe, one that extends only a few acres on the surface but can access 75 square miles underground, or fly over a convoy of trucks spraying water on the tundra to form ice roads strong enough to bear the weight of mobile drilling rigs is to be in awe of our industrial prowess. But to walk at sunset over the tundra of the refuge--where there is silence, an eternity of chill whiteness, a lone raven high overhead and the tracks...