WEATHER: Breakthrough

The sun had gone south, taking summer with it. Over the stiff and windless arctic, the constellations glittered like rhinestone gowns and the sheeted aurora flared in unbroken night.

From the polar empyrean, the cold crushed down with a brutality from which even the snow shrank. Day by day, the polar-air front bulged southward. Slowly, the low, languid mass of temperate air, the friend of man, fell back—back to the Great Bear and the Great Slave. There the invader paused, hunting a point of breakthrough. There the storm was cradled; while far south, in Buffalo...

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