Flight into China
Pull out your globe, and pull a piece of string tightly between New York and Beijing. The line runs almost exactly over the North Pole and back down through Yakutia and Irkutsk in Siberia, threading between Lake Baikal and the Amur River, over the Mongolian plateau and Inner Mongolia, and finally across the ring of mountains surrounding the marshy plain that is Beijing.
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Date: 12/09/08
Size: 48 items
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Waiting to board the plane at JFK
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Being October, everywhere North of 80° North latitude is dusk-like or pitch black, and the travel over Quebec, Hudson Bay and Nunavut was both dark and clouded over. I peered out hoping for a glimpse of the Aurorae in the inky black, but to no avail.
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Advice: bring lots of water with you on a flight this long. Eeking out these piddly cups worth was pretty painful.
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The stars in the sky appeared not to move at all over the next couple of hours... crossing the top of the world, of course, they were simply turning horizontally with the Earth, never to dip below the horizon.
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Soon, having topped out on the world, we sped ever southward on the second half of the trip. Finally, a break in the clouds! The feint wisps parted and yielded a view of the menacing icy reality of what we were traversing.
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The sunlight first returned low on the horizon, like a pale dusk. The Arctic Sea was tightly covered with low clouds, and had so far foiled my attempts at glimpsing what lay below.
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Thankfully, a short break between one awful movie and another occurred just around the time that we were almost directly over the North Pole. I snapped a picture of the "flight progress" screen.
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Huge chunks of ice, in reality far larger than they appeared from 35,000 feet, were pushing up onto one another. I had expected the Arctic Sea to be a solid white sheet, but it's anything but.
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