Unlocking the Icebox
Only a few years ago, Antarctica seemed as remote and forbidding as the moon. Since 1957, however, lights have burned year round across the silent white desert that surrounds the South Pole. As new equipment and technology have helped to subdue the hazards of the hostile land, the U.S. and nine other nations*have set up some 35 permanent research stations, where scientists and servicemen who "winter over" en joy most of the comforts of home as they seek to unlock the secrets of the earth's ice-age continent.
Last week, when New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman made his second trip to conduct Christmas services at McMurdo Station, he found U.S. Opera tion Deep Freeze headquarters heated and lighted by an experimental $7,000-000 atomic reactor. There was turkey in the mess hall, a new movie nightly in the wardroom. Navy Seabees were bus ily installing a saltwater conversion plant which would ease the perennial water shortage, thus doing away with the "honeypot" latrines that have created a gleaming yellow man-made gla cier in the middle of the base. Navymen naturally echo the Rodgers-and<
McMurdo supports three other main year-round bases, one of which, in the storm-lashed Ellsworth Mountains, is 1,525 air miles distant, as well as two dozen smaller, seasonal outposts such as Beardmore Station, near one of the world's biggest glaciers, where 70,702 tons of equipment had to be airlifted recently to supply a three-man Navy meteorological team for a 30-day stay.
Explorer-scientists still use dog sleds frequently in terrain too rough for tractors or motor toboggans. New Zealand dog handlers have not only evolved a special breed of husky to withstand the world's crudest climate, but have even developed a new "language" that the dogs understand better than the "Mush!" used by old Yukon hands: to start the team, the handler cries "Wheet!"
Studying Sea & Sun. Braving 100-m.p.h. winds and temperatures that have been known to drop to 127.3DEG F. below zero, 43 U.S. scientists will winter over in Antarctica this year. Though it costs the U.S. up to $200,000 to put a single researcher on the continent, the 50 independent projects they are working on (total budget: $27 million) may ultimately prove a more fruitful investment than far costlier space research. Staging area for U.S. forces in Antarctica is Christchurch, N.Z. There, ten times weekly during summer months, Navy transports with special ski-type landing gear take off for the seven-hour flight to McMurdo.
Antarctica's vast (5,300,000 sq. mi.) expanse, comprising 93% of the world's ice, offers an unsurpassed observatory for study of the oceans, which would rise 200 ft. if, as some predict, the icecap should melt in some far distant age. Scientists have already learned a great deal about its climate and its far-reaching effect on the world's weather. Oceanographers are studying Antarctica's seas, which are among the world's most fertile areas.
During the International Quiet Sun Year (1964-65), U.S. physicists will concentrate 40% of Antarctica's $7,000,000 scientific budget on studies of the upper atmosphere to learn more about cosmic rays and magnetic phenomena that interrupt radio communications. In the past year, other experts have slogged thousands of miles to map the uncharted wasteland, dived deep below the ice to study the metabolism of seals. They have located the world's southernmost volcano, analyzed bacteria left by explorers 50 years ago (the tinned food and biscuits left by Captain Robert Scott's men in 1902 are still there today, perfectly edible), mined coal--proving that Antarctica once had a tropical climate.
Over at Mirny. The region was transformed into a high-pressure laboratory by the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, when researchers found out more about the world's largest unexplored land mass than had been learned since scientists first became interested in the area in the early 19th century. Most participating nations plan to maintain their scientific programs in Antarctica. In an effort to catch up with the U.S., which since World War II has worked longer and harder in Antarctica than any other nation, Russia has mounted the second most in tensive effort on the continent, with headquarters on the other side of the Pole at Mirny, named for a Russian sloop that, under Mikhail Lazarev's command, first charted Antarctic lands in 1821.
Under terms of a twelve-nation, 30-year treaty dedicating the Antarctic as a "continent of peace" in 1959, the U.S. last week dispatched a nine-man inspection team to ensure that the Soviet bases are not being used for nuclear tests. In practice, Russia and the U.S. are generally friendly competitors in Antarctica, freely lend each other equipment and food, pool weather information, even regularly exchange scientists. If Antarctica's scientists no longer undergo the fearful ordeals of earlier generations of explorers, they still pursue the same high ideal that impelled such heroes as Amundsen, Byrd and Scott. That quest, in the lines from Tennyson's Ulysses, was defined on the cross that stands in memory of Scott and his men, who died returning from the South Pole in 1912:
To strive, to seek,
To find, And not to
yield.
*Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa.
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