Science: Mysteries of Antarctica

In the present state of the world’s evolution, Antarctica is the only continent that is overwhelmingly in the grip of an ice age. In its vast expanse (5,300,000 sq. mi.) lies the key to much of the world’s weather. It holds 90% of all the ice on the earth’s surface (far more than formerly thought), affects the surrounding oceans for hundreds or thousands of miles in all directions. For such reasons, Antarctica is a land of mystery and paradox—and a priceless laboratory for the world’s scientists. Last week, as the southern summer moderated Antarctica’s frigid climate, some 160 U.S. scientists and 100 scientists from other nations stepped up their activity in a friendly race to unlock the secrets of the white continent.

Once, the briefest visit to unfriendly Antarctica was something to write a book about. Today, freed from the struggle for survival by modern techniques and equipment, teams of hardy men can study Antarctica almost as routinely as if it were Ohio. Bases are now maintained on the continent by the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Argentina, Chile and France—and Poland is about to join the club by taking over a Russian base. All of them get along famously and—by an unwritten rule of Antarctica—lend advice, equipment and assistance to each other whenever it is needed. The U.S. and Russia even trade scientists to work at each other’s bases.

Banishing Night. Because the U.S. has worked longer and harder on Antarctica, it is far ahead of all comers in taming and probing the continent. With good supply lines from its base at Christchurch, New Zealand, the U.S. in season flies some 7,500 men back and forth to the continent, plus thousands of tons of cargo. It has flown in prefabricated huts to protect its Antarctic team from the bitter weather, is planning to install nuclear reactors at its outposts. The first reactor is being erected now at the air facility at McMurdo Sound, and others will eventually go to the South Pole and Byrd stations. The reactors will not only pay for themselves through savings on fuel (which costs 50 times as much as in the U.S. when flown into Antarctica), but will make possible research requiring big amounts of electric power and eventually open up the continent for flying through the long and black Antarctic winter.

Waiting for that winter to fall once again and restrict their activities, scientists are losing no time in making the most of Antarctica’s pleasant—for Antarctica—weather. Among their current projects:

> In land where no other men have ever set foot, four rugged geologists from the University of Minnesota are collecting rock specimens and mapping the land in the Sentinal Range of the Ellsworth Mountains, one of the biggest unexplored mountain ranges on earth.

> A team from Rutgers University is working on a study to find out if soil is being formed in Antarctica, or whether the continent is simply too cold for soil making.

> The National Science Foundation is setting up an elaborate camp in Marie Byrd Land to study the strange magnetic ducts that arch through space and carry radio waves between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. > The U.S., Britain and Russia are leading a smooth-running Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, which is already working out plans for securing valuable weather data in the international “quiet sun” year in 1964-65. Expected to be of great help: the U.S. Tiros satellites.

Promised Land. No matter how hard the Antarctic scientists work, they know that they have barely scratched the surface of the continent’s mysteries. Meteorologists are trying to explain why the Antarctic does not start to warm up, as the Arctic does, before the sun rises in spring, would like to know whether the Antarctic ice will increase or shrink if the earth’s climate gets warmer. Other areas to be explored are multitude—the ice sheet, weather, temperatures, winds, communications, geology.

For ambitious young scientists, Antarctica is thus a promised land, stuffed with ready material for thousands of reputation-building papers. But it is a land where it is easier to discover new mysteries than to find the answers to them. Recently, three U.S. scientists were pulling a fish trap through a hole in the ice when a seal rose through the hole with a big fish in its jaws. The scientists struggled with the seal for the fish, won after a desperate tug of war. The fish, 52 in. long and weighing 58 Ibs., turned out to be an unknown species of a family that was not supposed to be swimming in those cold waters. With it are surely swimming hundreds of other interesting creatures also unknown to science.