the Paleocrystic Sea. It was the product of millennia’s smashing churn of the elements acting on freezing and frozen and thawing and refreezing ice. One could stare at it all day and never see coherence. Needle ice gave way to striped puddles, to thick driven snow, to rippled pockets of new ice, to mires of goop, to lagoons of open water, to ruined battlefields of shards and bricks, to spectral blue sculptures of ancient ice, and to the wind-whipped corrugations of snow that the Russians called sastrugi.
