ARMY & NAVY: Last Continent

ARMY & NAVY

Summer is coming to the world’s last great uninhabited land mass:the Antarctic continent. Even with the tepid sun hovering for months above the horizon, it will still be a bleak region. Its peaks, soaring to a frigid 15,000 feet, have little need for “keep off” signs. Man cannot support himself in the Antarctic, but with elaborate precautions he can maintain himself there long enough to thaw out some of its deep-frozen secrets.

A British expedition of three or more ships has been operating quietly down below for two years, probably from U.S.-built bases in the Antarctic archipelago south of Argentina. Soon the British will have heavy U.S. competition.

The Navy is bringing out of obscurity the best-known living arctician: Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. Now 58, looking more greyly senatorial than his senatorial brother, Dick Byrd will have technical control of the Navy’s trident expedition. Direct commander of Task Force 68 will be lean, bouncy Captain Richard H. Cruzen (No. 2 to Byrd and skipper of the Bear in the 1939-41 foray). He will have under him twelve ships in three groups, to cover the widest possible area in the short season of light. When a base is set up on the Ross Shelf Ice, planes will be flown in from a carrier.

The Navy’s aims are partly scientific but mainly—and frankly—military: 1) to train personnel and test equipment in frigid zones (away from the North Polar region where the Russian bear crouches); 2) to develop techniques for operating bases under arctic conditions.

All this can be done with little likelihood of stirring up the dormant claims of half a dozen nations to pie-slices of the frozen waste. But a more innocent-looking, one-ship expedition for the American Geographical Society under Commander Finn Ronne, may touch off international fireworks. Its concerns are meteorology and mineralogy. There is probably gold under the ice cap; there might also be uranium.