Word: tundras
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...armchair and a globe, the Aleutians might look like neat steppingstones from Asia up to the North American continent's front door, islands to be defended one by one. But the steppingstones had to be seen. The globe, for instance, did not show the masses of empty tundra stretching inland from the western coast like sloshy, moldy pudding. No map could hint the subzero temperatures that could cripple an army, taunt it with frostbite, hold it to a mile-a-day advance through roadless mountains and plains...
...that breathe and speak and act, but have no soul.* The United Nations tried to peer through the mists that enshroud this regime. Nothing could be seen. The only voice that was heard was an echo of a greater voice that had come rolling and rumbling across steppe and tundra and mountain from a faraway place...
...northwestern tip of Quebec, just south of Baffin Island, is flat, sodden tundra sprinkled thickly with little lakes. Most of them are irregularly shaped. But Prospector Fred W. Chubb noticed, while poring over an aerial photograph, that one lake was almost round and surrounded by a wall of rock. Chubb showed the photo to Dr. V. Ben Meen, director of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum of Geology and Mineralogy...
...miles across, compared with Arizona's famed meteorite crater, which is four-fifths of a mile across. Its level is about 80 feet above that of other small lakes in the vicinity, and around it is a ring of shattered granite that rises 550 feet above the tundra. The rim is lowest on the northwest side, which suggests that the meteorite came from that direction and hit the ground obliquely...
When a woolly mammoth died on the Siberian tundra, it sometimes fell into a quagmire. There the permafrost, operating like a modern freezer, preserved the carcass intact for thousands of years. In temperate New Zealand there was no permafrost but in South Island's Pyramid Valley paleontologists have found a good substitute. From about 18,000 B.C. until 2,-000 years ago, the valley contained a swamp whose lush vegetation attracted moas-great, flightless birds which weighed up to a quarter...