Ice Age

MILLERSVILLE -- Cheeks flushed from the cold, hips bruised from her falls, skater Samantha Huntt confronts her next double axel. Her 14-year-old face a scrunch of concentration, she skates ... jumps ... falls ... and tries it again. Over and over and over.Coach Denise Cahill stands on the ice at Benfield Pines Ice Rink, analyzing every angle of every movement that can produce the two successful revolutions in the air.There are glory moments when the teen-ager nails it, like a soprano harnessing a tricky passage of high notes.

WASHINGTON -- Wielding two hypotheses, one about global warming and another about frozen racial attitudes, Bill Clinton and Al Gore are postulating crises to justify fresh bursts of therapeutic government.When The New Yorker's Joe Klein recently asked Mr. Gore why he is so interested in scientific abstractions, Mr. Gore replied, ''People in Grand Forks, N.D., who had to move out of their homes because of the flooding don't think global climate change is such an abstraction anymore.'' Clearly he means that the flooding was caused by global warming.

The Chesapeake Skating School has attracted several top coaches to its ensemble skating program, which emphasizes skating in unison to create large, visually appealing patterns on the ice.Students will perform an exhibition of ensemble skating from 5-6 p.m. today at Benfield Pines Ice Rink in Millersville."

The rain started coming down at 7 a.m. while we boarded the Spirit of Adventure, a 250-passenger excursion boat docked outside the Glacier Bay Lodge in Gustavus, Alaska.Most people see Glacier Bay National Park from seagoing vessels. As the name of the park indicates, it surrounds a bay rife with glaciers -- 16 in all and the main attraction -- a water world scooped out between Canada's Yukon Territory and Alaska's St. Elias/Fairweather Range.We joked about that while we waited in line on a slippery boat-side catwalk.

WASHINGTON -- On the whole, the Next Ice Age is greater than the sum of its parts.Some of the parts of Baltimore's unique ice-dancing company are very fine indeed. And it's quite a coup for the 9-year-old company to have a week's engagement at the Kennedy Center Opera House, accompanied by the house orchestra, and to showcase Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill as its guest artist.Now all it needs is a choreographer. (A lighting designer would help, too.) The two epic-length works on this program show that co-founder Nathan Birch, who created them, has a reach that far overshoots his grasp.

As the music of Mendelssohn fills the rink, seven world-class skaters glide toward the center of the ice, braiding themselves, then separating, and braiding again as if they were genetic strands of the sound. As they move, they seem to breathe the same breath, pursue the same thought, spring from the same curve.They arch in effortless arabesques. They jump and spin in a way that is both fearless and hopeful. They are all the things you once thought you could be.Suddenly Nathan Birch calls a halt to the magic.

ICE SKATING is enjoying unprecedented popularity throughout America. Developers in the Baltimore region are responding by erecting an precedented number of new indoor rinks. In an area where ice time was so scare not long ago that hockey leagues routinely scheduled games and practices after midnight and figure skaters were perfecting double toe loops before the sun rose, this building spree is putting smiles on the faces of serious and casual skaters.Baltimore County's approval this month of a $5.3 million project in the Fullerton area, planned to include two National Hockey League-sized rinks, is the most recent manifestation of this boom.

SALTVILLE, Va. - It seems a natural green valley, except for how the grass grows brown in some places and not at all in others, and the 6-foot chain-link fence that stretches endlessly around the property.The barrier keeps people out of what locals call the muck pond, a 76-acre cauldron of chemical waste near Perryville Road - the festering legacy of the company that dominated this speck of a town in far southwestern Virginia.For decades, Olin Chemical Corp. nurtured Saltville, named for its vast salt reserves.

TALK ABOUT NOVEL public-private partnerships: A group of local investors says it is willing to plunk down $7 million to build a complex containing a National Hockey League-size rink as well as an Olympic-size rink on 17 acres at the Lake Shore Athletic Complex, which is owned by Anne Arundel County. All it seems '' to want from the government is the land.This intriguing proposal merits serious consideration. The investors' willingness to finance the construction springs from the fact that many existing sports and recreational facilities are doing booming business in the suburbs.

BYRD CAMP, Antarctica -- On the incandescent ice between the South Pole and the sea, Paul Mayewski is digging a hole the depth and dimensions of an open grave.First with a saw, then with a shovel, he frees blocks of snow hardened by eons of wind and heaves them to three men standing clear of the growing hollow.Nearby, three men cocooned in cold-weather gear assemble a towering steel drill.The seven men are the only living beings across thousands of square miles in this quadrant of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.