What is "nunataks"

Usage examples of "nunataks".

Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataks - that hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next day - the forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon.

We could have gone round the Nunataks, but that would have wasted an entire day, perhaps two, and with the ten-mile route through the hills clearly marked, it was pointless to make a detour.

At noon - I'd warned Hillcrest that we would be traversing the Vindeby Nunataks then and would have to miss our regular radio schedule - we were more than half-way through and had just entered the narrowest and most forbidding defile in the entire crossing when Corazzini came running up alongside the tractor and waved me down to a stop.

I wanted to get through the Vindeby Nunataks, and get through with as little loss of time as possible, preferably before it became dark.

Two ski-planes and two search bombers had been looking for us, but failed to locate us -we'd probably been traversing the Vindeby Nunataks at the time .

We are approaching the Vindeby Nunataks and expect to be through by this afternoon.

I was as certain as I could be of anything that he would have headed due west as soon as he would have emerged from the Vindeby Nunataks, and he'd had time and to spare to make the coast by this time - not even the blizzard of last night could have stopped the Sno-Cat, the engine was a completely enclosed unit, its great caterpillars would take it over the loosest, the most newly fallen snow.

Or, if he were coming west, would he not perhaps be driving in a search pattern, quartering the ground between the Vindeby Nunataks and the coast in a series of wide advancing zigzags?

For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs - the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses.

At first it seemed as if Smallwood was making some attempt to steer it, but it was obvious almost immediately that any such attempts were utterly useless: five tons of steel ran amok, it was completely out of control, skidding violently first to one side then the other, finally making a complete half-circle and sliding backward down the glacier at terrifying speed, following the slope of the ice which led from the right-hand side where we had been standing to the big nunataks thrusting up through the ice on the far left-hand corner of the dog-leg half-way down.

As the white weather turned to a thick low mist and then cleared off, we saw them plainly before sunset: nunataks, great scored and ravaged pinnacles of rock jutting up out of the ice, no more of them showing than shows of an iceberg above the sea: cold drowned mountains, dead for eons.