Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • A term current in Siberia for flutings or little ridges of wind-blown snow, running parallel with the direction of the air-currents, and now sometimes quoted in English. See zastruga.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • Incorrect, but common, var. of zastrugi.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of sastruga.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Driving vehicles over the sastrugi is pretty bad for tracks, towbars and tank runners.

    The Crossing of Antarctica 1959

  • This area of the ice cap was covered with a layer of scalloped snow, what was called sastrugi, little curled waves of frozen snow formed by winds and erosion.

    Ice Hunt Rollins, James, 1961- 2003

  • The windblown snow, called sastrugi, is exceptionally hard and jostles and tosses the snow machines with every little bump.

    NYT > Home Page By JEFF VERVOORT 2011

  • They survived altitude sickness, enormous blisters, countless frozen snowdrifts, known as sastrugi, and blinding whiteouts. "

    Renegade Futurist 2009

  • They survived altitude sickness, enormous blisters, countless frozen snowdrifts, known as sastrugi, and blinding whiteouts. "

    Renegade Futurist 2009

  • The surface was now fine enough, smooth as a floor and without a sign of sastrugi.

    The South Pole~ Through the Mountains 2009

  • And then we were off: It was a hard pull to begin with, both for men and beasts, as the high sastrugi continued towards the south, and made it extremely difficult to advance.

    The South Pole~ Through the Mountains 2009

  • That it had been blowing here at some time, and violently too, was shown by the under-surface, which was composed of sastrugi as hard as iron.

    The South Pole~ Through the Mountains 2009

  • Meanwhile the sastrugi grew smaller and smaller, and finally they disappeared altogether, and the surface became quite flat.

    The South Pole~ Through the Mountains 2009

  • The going changed at once up here; the loose snow disappeared, and a few wind-waves (sastrugi) began to show themselves.

    The South Pole~ Through the Mountains 2009

Comments

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  • "In places they struggled for mile after mile across sastrugi, an ice-surface scoured by the wind into pitted corrugations which resembled nothing so much as sharp-edged frozen waves."

    —Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The Ghost Disease, and Twelve Other Stories of Detective Work in the Medical Field (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 309

    September 11, 2008

  • "The plains were rippled with sastrugi, great breaking waves, flash-frozen."

    --The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding

    April 3, 2012

  • "At an early age, Eskimo children could already identify every headland and inlet of the sound and could orient themselves quickly by reaching down from the sled and feeling blindly for the tiny ice waves called sastrugi, which formed in the same configuration at every freeze and mirrored the topography on shore."

    --Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic (NY and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 197-198

    January 24, 2017