Word: tundras
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...deal. Several aviation experts suggest that the U.S. may have been motivated more by politics than by considerations of safety; the YAK-40 has proved a reliable performer in the East. "The YAK-40 now flies everywhere in Russia, everywhere-little fields, big fields, concrete or grass, dirt or tundra," Designer Yakovlev told TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin...
...eight companies accused of contaminating navigable waters with mercury. Despite a parochial interest in seeing a trans-Alaska pipeline laid to the North Slope, Hickel delayed the project for nearly a year, demanding that oil companies devise a pipeline system that would do minimum damage to the fragile Alaskan tundra...
...impact is worst in the frozen Arctic Circle, where nature's recuperative powers, in effect, go into hibernation. In Barrow, the state's northernmost town, the streets are littered with crippled Volkswagens, discarded tires, bits of lumber and old 50-gallon oil drums. Even on the vast tundra, the tracks of World War II bulldozers are still plainly visible. Scars from 30-year-old seismic tests are unhealed. Debris remains and remains, its decay slowed by the cold. A piece of wood was recently retrieved from a depth of 1,400 feet, where it had been lodged between two coal...
...tantamount to vulnerability. Any species can be wiped out and no other species will take its place. The result is expressed in a word that many Alaskans have come to hate: fragility. Says Walter Hickel: "It used to be the hostile, frozen north; now it's the goddamn fragile tundra...
Into this delicate if hostile world, man has burst as a stranger. "There is a new urgency for knowledge of the tundra," says Zoologist Frank Pitelka of Berkeley. "We now have a Texas-size threat to a land doubtfully able to take it." In the past two years, however, the major oil companies have compiled an excellent record. They have hired Arctic ecologists to help minimize the effects of their presence, even going so far as to develop hardy strains of grass to protect the tundra. Helicopters move whole drilling rigs to avoid ripping up the topsoil. Three companies have...