Science: Deepfreeze ’61

October is springtime below the Line, and last week Harewood Airport at Christchurch, New Zealand was jammed with U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft ready to take off for Antarctica. Some 600 officers and men, headed by Rear Admiral David Tyree, were waiting to make the 2,200-mile hop to the null main Antarctic base at McMurdo Sound. This is Operation Deepfreeze ’61—the fanciest assault ever mounted against-the forbidding, frozen land on the earth’s underside. Including ship and aircraft crews, its staff will total 3,000 men.

The U.S. specialty in Antarctic exploration has long been airlift. But this year the U.S. plans to do more creeping on the hostile ice, and to make more intimate contact with the treacherous terrain.

A ten-man tractor train will head for the South Pole from Byrd Station in the Ellsworth Highland, exploring unknown mountains and marking the 800-mile route with bamboo poles thrust into the ice each 1/5 mile.

Without the Yachts. Another surface expedition will push toward the Pole from Skelton Glacier, about 60 miles from McMurdo Sound. The latest U.S. surface vehicles, says Admiral Tyree, do not rival the luxurious ice-yachts that the Russians drove to the Pole last season, but they can be carried in airplanes and therefore can start explorations from any smooth stretch of ice. Another major U.S. effort will be an attempt by the icebreakers Glacier and Staten Island to smash their way to the coast of the Amundsen Sea. Because of dense pack ice, no ship has ever crossed this sea, and the land behind its defenses is as mysterious as any place in the world.

The U.S. plans to spend $1,800,000 on a duplicate instrument-landing system at McMurdo Sound. The present system works well enough, but if electronic gremlins were to put it out of action in foul weather, airplanes heading in from New Zealand would be in a bad way with no place to land and no possibility of getting back to their starting point. “It’s expensive,” says Admiral Tyree of the duplication, “but what’s money against lives?”

Under the Ice. A long-range project to be started this season is to turn permanent icecap bases into under-ice towns. As snow accumulates, the U.S.’s present buildings sink deeper and deeper beneath the frosty surface. New buildings will be put in deep ice trenches. Observation towers and other structures that to be useful must remain above the surface will be mounted so they can be raised as the snow piles high.

The most expensive material used by the bases is fuel oil for power and heating, which in most cases must be delivered by air. The final answer to this problem is the small nuclear reactor to generate electricity and keep the buildings warm. Preparations will be made this season for the installation of the first of these reactors at McMurdo Sound. Eventually both Byrd Station and the South Pole base will also go nuclear.