Word: whiteout
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FLYING back from the South Pole to McMurdo Sound one day this month, Correspondent Edwin Rees of TIME'S Washington Bureau learned firsthand about the dread Antarctic whiteout, the dazzle of reflected light that erases all landmarks and horizons. It was, said an airman, "like flying inside a pingpong ball." The big Air Force troop carrier groped for the icy runway, plowed into a snowbank and slithered over the ice with nose down and tail high. "The feel and sound of 150,000 pounds of airplane sliding out of control is an experience I would like only once," said...
...crystals break against his ears with the tinkling of hundreds of tiny bells. When the uncertain light of an overcast day is trapped beneath the clouds above and the snow below, everything between fills with a thick and milky film, devoid of feature or contrast. This is a whiteout, and in it, pilots may become dizzy and nauseated as they grope blindly for a surface which can vanish even as they come in for their landing. On the ground, in a whiteout, a man cannot tell whether a dark spot ahead is a distant mountain-or a matchbook cover...