Science: Last Grand Journey

One of the most dramatic episodes of man’s exploration of his planet is shaping up this week in the hostile white heart of Antarctica. The British Commonwealth land expedition, led by 49-year-old Scientist-Explorer Vivian Ernest Fuchs, is battling toward the air-supplied U.S. base at the South Pole, and will probably get there in a few more days. Geologist Fuchs, lean veteran of 30 years of scientific exploration in Greenland, Africa and Antarctica, has announced that he intends to press on, in spite of the threat of worsening weather, and hopes to reach Scott Station on the Ross Sea about March 9. If he crosses Antarctica from sea to sea, he will have accomplished what the great explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton called the “last grand land journey left to man.”

Solemn Warning. If Dr. Fuchs leaves the U.S. base and heads for Scott Station, he will be going against the advice of New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary, who dashed to the Pole last fortnight after setting up a line of supply stations for the Fuchs expedition (TIME, Jan. 13). In a message to London that was made public unintentionally, Sir Edmund told Sir John Slessor, Fuchs’s superior, that Fuchs should leave his equipment at the Pole and abandon further travel until next season; to do otherwise would risk the lives of all the men. When Sir John refused to interfere, Hillary agreed to help Fuchs in every way on his perilous march from the Pole to the Ross Sea.

The twelve-man Fuchs expedition is doing much more than here-to-there exploring. It is a well-equipped group of scientists who are making the first careful, detailed study of the interior of Antarctica. Starting from Shackleton Base on the Weddell Sea, south of South America, on Nov. 24, it headed for South Ice, an advance base 250 miles inland that was established by Fuchs during the Antarctic spring (Oct.-Nov.). This is fearfully difficult country, with two high, parallel mountain ranges, the Theron Range and the Shackleton Range, looming blackly above the snow. The ice between them is torn into great crevasses. Sometimes vertical ice cliffs rise like stone walls, and level plains turn out to be bogs of deep, soft snow.

With his train of Weasels and Sno-Cats (special snow vehicles with spiked tracks), Fuchs had heavy going. The weather was warm for Antarctica, and the snow-bridges over the crevasses were weaker than when he pioneered the route to South Ice. Nine times his vehicles broke through the roofs of vast caves in the ice and had to be hauled out. Once a Sno-Cat was brought to the surface by fixing in the ice beneath it long sections of aluminum bridging to form an incline up which it could be drawn. Other troubles were heavy snowfalls and many “white-outs,” the Antarctic light condition that distorts vision with a curtain of glare.

Rigid Program. But nothing has been permitted to interfere with the expedition’s rigid program of scientific observations. Teams of scientists leapfrog each other, spurting ahead of the column to set up their instruments, and spurting to catch up when they are left behind. Every ten miles they take cores of snow and ice, sometimes 200 ft. deep. Such cores are like petrified weather: they have layers and particles in them that tell the history of Antarctic centuries ago.

Every 15 miles another team measures the strength of gravitation, which gives clues about the earth’s crust deep under the ice. Every 30 miles seismologists bore a hole in the ice and explode a charge of dynamite. Waves from the explosion travel to the bottom of the ice and into the rock beneath it. At each boundary between ice and rock or between layers of different rock, some of the waves are reflected up to the surface, and when they are recorded by the proper instruments they tell the scientists what they have found under the mile-thick ice.

When all the painfully gathered data are digested and assembled, they will give a cross section of the Antarctic Continent, which is believed to be a great saucer of rock with a center near the Pole pressed down by the weight of ice that it carries. The thickness of the icecap will tell how much water is locked up in it, and how high the oceans stood during geological ages when the earth’s Poles were ice-free. Perhaps the precious data brought back by the Fuchs expedition will explain the seams of coal in Antarctic mountains. Coal is the remains of lush vegetation, and nothing except a few hardy lichens and mosses grows in Antarctica now. One theory is that Antarctica had a tropical climate many millions of years ago. Another is that the earth’s thin rocky crust shifted around its plastic core like the loose skin of a puppy, marching a fertile continent with all its plants and animals to frozen death at the Pole.

Sastrugi. Doggedly sticking to its scientific schedule, but far behind its timetable, the Fuchs expedition crawled up the domed icecap from South Ice. It painfully threaded through a line of nunataks (mountain peaks almost submerged in ice), and reached ice with fewer crevasses on the high plateau behind. Here were great fields of sastrugi—wind-formed ridges of hard-packed snow sometimes 4 ft. high. The Sno-Cats crossed them all right, but with dangerous pitching and crashing. Progress slowed to a crawl; the weather grew worse; but the scientists kept to their schedule as if they were making their observations in the south of England in June.

When the expedition reaches the U.S. polar base, Fuchs will have to review his decision to brave the 1,200 miles to the Ross Sea. The nearest supply cache left by Hillary is 500 miles away, and toward the end of the short Antarctic summer the weather will be too bad for reliable air transportation. If his hard-punished Sno-Cats break down or run out of fuel, the howling blizzards that blow in February may make it impossible to rescue his men by air.

As Fuchs nears his final decision, every man at the polar base, both American and British, will be thinking of Fuchs’s countryman, Captain Robert Scott, who got to the Pole in 1912. He started back toward the Ross Sea—the same terrible journey Fuchs will have to make, and at the same terrible season—and was frozen to death with the last of his five-man party, in a nine-day blizzard.