Word: greenland
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From somewhere southeast of Greenland came the crackle of an urgent radio message: "Being fired on by Orange surface raider. Inchcliffe Castle." With that alert from a famed but fictitious merchant vessel,* simulated hell broke loose in the North Atlantic. Out to punish the "aggressors," a six-nation Blue fleet totaling nearly 160 fighting ships began steaming toward Norway. In the Iceland-Faeroes gap, 36 Orange submarines, including the atom-powered 'Nautilus, lay in wait. The U.S. destroyer Charles R. Ware was "sunk"; a "torpedo" slowed down the carrier U.S.S. Intrepid, and H.M.S. Ark Royal had a hot time...
Icecaps can be cozy. Last week Arctic Expert Robert Philippe, recuperating in Alexandria, Va. from an airplane crackup, told how the Army engineers make themselves comfortable in Greenland's icy interior. Instead of fighting polar blizzards on the surface of the icecap, they dodge them by burrowing into the ice, just as many Arctic animals find shelter under the snow...
...principle of the Army's Greenland Research Program, with which Philippe has been working since 1953, is to use what it finds on the icecap. What it finds is snow, which gradually turns into solid ice about 15 ft. below the surface. Treated properly, both snow and ice are useful structural materials, easy to excavate and excellent insulators. They melt when exposed to heat, and deform slowly from their own weight, but the engineers have learned to minimize these failings...
...goal of all this research is active military use of the Greenland icecap, whose strategic position dominates most of the U.S., Europe and the U.S.S.R. Major air bases on the ice are not likely, and in any case, the Army is not much concerned with air bases. More likely it is interested in icecap missile bases, which could be ideal places to station giant rockets in ready-to-go position. Temperature and humidity would be low and constant, deep under the ice, and this is good for delicate mechanism. Under-ice supply routes would lead invisibly in from the coast...
...first-rate popularized anthropology; of a heart attack; at Elmendorf Air Base, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Irascible, impetuous, cantankerous, big (6 ft. 4 in.) Peter Freuchen, descendant of a Danish-Jewish seafaring family, quit medical school for a job at sea, sailed as a stoker, got his first glimpse of Greenland at 20. He returned thereafter with various expeditions, soon learned to talk, live, love like an Eskimo. In 1912 Freuchen and his friend Knud Rasmussen crossed the north Greenland icecap. Childlike in his daring, steel-girded in his endurance, he once (1923) hammered off the frozen toes of his left...