Science: Four Men & a Dog

The most highly publicized hunk of ice in the world last week was a floe about the size of three tennis courts. It was drifting in the frigid, ice-choked sea some 100 miles east of Greenland. On that floe were four Soviet scientists and a dog named Jolly. They were in great danger, for the ice cake, once big enough to hold a sizable town, was getting rapidly smaller. Once ten feet thick, it was getting thinner.

At the North Pole there is no land, so anv expedition there must camp on ice. Last May the Russians, self-elected mon-nrchs of the Arctic, landed planes at the Xorth Pole, established a camp to conduct scientific investigation and communicate hv radio with airplanes making transpolar flights to the U. S. The scientists discovered that the air around the Pole was not constantly at high barometric pressure, but, on the contrary, at constantly low pressure. Another surprise was a swarm of crabs, jellyfish and red crayfish, brought up in a net from a depth of 3,000 feet.

Meanwhile, the huge floe on which the camp stood had broken off from the polar ice pack, was drifting on a zigzag southward course which veered somewhat to the west (see map), in currents which had been charted previously but whose speed had been underestimated. Some days the drift was six or seven miles. As it entered warmer water, the floe began to break up. Last fortnight a hurricane reduced it to 200 yards by 300. Last week it was down to 50 yards by 70. When the part of the floe on which their tent stood was submerged, the scientists stolidly moved the tent to higher & dryer ice. calmly radioed to Moscow: “We. . . . have saved all our instruments and records and we have food for three months. The floe goes on cracking. There is no room for a radio antenna, so we have erected a second mast on a nearby floe.”

Besides the dog Jolly, the four on the floe were Leader Ivan Papanin, Radio Operator Ernest Krenkel, two other scientists. In the Arctic, where every Russian is a king, the king of kings is hardy, hairy Professor Otto Yulevich Schmidt, chairman of the Great Northern Sea Route Administration. Four years ago, when his ship, the Chelyuskin, had been squeezed, broken and sunk by the knitting ice pack, he spectacularly transferred 71 persons from the ship to an ice floe, whence they were spectacularly rescued by airplane. Last week, as Papanin’s floe drifted toward Jan Mayen Island, jungle-bearded Professor Schmidt prepared to lead a rescue party. Whether planes could land in the ice-choked water beside the floe was problematical, so three icebreaker ships were also ordered to accompany the plane.

In Moscow, perpetually astounded Correspondent Walter Duranty experienced spasms of amazement at the diffident manner in which the drama was handled in the Soviet press. Cabled he: “Today each Moscow newspaper gives their plight 66 lines of print in a brief double column with a bald single headline. ‘On Drifting Station of Comrade Ivan Papanin.’ Can you beat it?”