Science: Glacier Priest

The Alaska Peninsula is a long, slender, jagged tongue of land protruding south-west toward Asia, dribbling the Aleutian Islands from its end. It is a Dantesque region of ice and fire. Out of cracks in its glaciers spurts steam from the muttering cauldrons below. Rivers run blood-red with oxide of iron. Mighty volcanoes darken the sky with smoke and ash and litter the land with grotesque shapes of lava. It is the land of Aniakchak. world’s largest active crater, within whose bliz-zard-beaten rim, 21 mi. around, a lesser volcano raises its snout and a placid lake nestles. It is the unofficial domain, the scientific laboratory and the conditioning gymnasium of sturdy young Father Ber-nard Rosecrans Hubbard, S. J., “the Glacier Priest,” head of the geology department of the Jesuit University of Santa Clara, Calif.

Every year for seven years Father Hub-bard has gone to explore this lurid peninsula, accompanied by three or four husky footballers. He has burned off his shoes scrambling up the sides of volcanoes which other scientists had thought extinct, has gone down inside them to find he could melt copper twelve inches below the lava surface. Marooned by storms, he has used his sled dogs for food. In 1930 he took the first pictures of Aniakchak; the next year, with a pilot, he made the first airplane flight over it (narrowly escaping death when air currents rushing into the volcano’s vents almost sucked the plane down); the next year, his seaplane landed on the lake inside the crater. Sometimes he has traveled alone, visiting missions, mushing 1,600 mi. with only frozen beans for food. He was the first man to reach the top of Shishaldin Volcano on Unimak Island, the first to make a winter ascent of towering Katmai. “Gosh,” he once chuckled to a newshawk, “all the rest of these exploring babies are glad enough if they make one ‘first,’ and here I am with three.”

Between times, because he has no angel to finance his expeditions, Father Hubbard goes after lecture money. Then Easterners may see his pleasant face, his tousled mop of black hair, his excellent motion pictures, and hear him tell in his abrupt, boyish voice what he has seen and done. But he dislikes cities, is always curious to be off to Alaska. Last spring he was off to investigate the geological and archeological history of the Aleutian Islands, and last week he was back in Seattle with news.

Convulsions beneath the Pacific, said Father Hubbard, are building sand bars which seem destined to join the islands to the mainland, perhaps to restore the lost land bridge across which the Mongolian forbears of Amerindians are presumed to have wandered from Asia. “Unimak Is-land,” he said, “a 90-mile long land mass, is the latest bit to desert the islands and, both geologically and biologically, become a portion of Alaska. In the lifetime of the present generation sailing vessels glided between the islands and the mainland through what is known as False Pass. At low water today a school of salmon would scrape off their belly fins trying to negotiate it.”