Word: weathering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Weathermen are getting the first really worldwide picture of the atmosphere's circulation. U.S. Weather Bureau scientists drifting on the Arctic ice keep track of winds and pressure changes that will affect the weather of Keokuk and Odessa. Their colleagues at the South Pole do the same for the Antarctic. Already their reports have improved weather forecasting for the Southern Hemisphere...
...program of scientific observations. Teams of scientists leapfrog each other, spurting ahead of the column to set up their instruments, and spurting to catch up when they are left behind. Every ten miles they take cores of snow and ice, sometimes 200 ft. deep. Such cores are like petrified weather: they have layers and particles in them that tell the history of Antarctic centuries...
With his train of Weasels and Sno-Cats (special snow vehicles with spiked tracks), Fuchs had heavy going. The weather was warm for Antarctica, and the snow-bridges over the crevasses were weaker than when he pioneered the route to South Ice. Nine times his vehicles broke through the roofs of vast caves in the ice and had to be hauled out. Once a Sno-Cat was brought to the surface by fixing in the ice beneath it long sections of aluminum bridging to form an incline up which it could be drawn. Other troubles were heavy snowfalls and many...
...reached ice with fewer crevasses on the high plateau behind. Here were great fields of sastrugi-wind-formed ridges of hard-packed snow sometimes 4 ft. high. The Sno-Cats crossed them all right, but with dangerous pitching and crashing. Progress slowed to a crawl; the weather grew worse; but the scientists kept to their schedule as if they were making their observations in the south of England in June...
When the expedition reaches the U.S. polar base, Fuchs will have to review his decision to brave the 1,200 miles to the Ross Sea. The nearest supply cache left by Hillary is 500 miles away, and toward the end of the short Antarctic summer the weather will be too bad for reliable air transportation. If his hard-punished Sno-Cats break down or run out of fuel, the howling blizzards that blow in February may make it impossible to rescue...