Science: Ice

If you are one of the thousands of armchair adventurers to whom the spell of the Arctic has been only a dream . . . this summer you can follow trails traveled before only by explorers. . . . Adventure, yet perfect safety!

Thus advertised the Alaska Line this summer, believing that many a tourist would like to see what few tourists have seen—the grinding, gleaming polar ice pack, which squeezes ships to death in winter, retreats north of the Arctic Circle in summer. For its pioneer cruise the company refitted its 3,868-ton icebreaker Victoria, booked passengers at $250 to $390. Last week, laden to the gunwales with 500 “arm-chair adventurers” and well started on its 7,000-mile, 26-day itinerary, the Victoria sailed from Nome for the dash to the ice pack’s fringe. Later the ship will call at a Siberian port by special permission of the Soviet Government.

Far different was the cruise of the Soviet icebreaker Krassin, which steamed out of Leningrad last March, landed last week at Wrangel Island, a bleak scrap of land in the Arctic Ocean,85 miles from the northeast coast of Siberia. There for five long years six Russian meteorologists, their families and assistants, 44 souls all told, have lived in isolation. Last year the freighter Chelyuskin, commanded by hardy, hairy Professor Otto Tulyevich Schmidt, was sent to take the colonists off their icebound island, deposit a new shift of weather observers. The ice pack closed in on the Chelyuskin in September, hugged it all winter, broke it in February. One man was lost but doughty Professor Schmidt transferred the remaining 101 persons in his charge to an ice floe, whence they were removed in a spectacular series of airplane rescues (TIME, April 23 et ante). In the ensuing storm of enthusiasm the forlorn Wrangel colonists were all but forgotten.

Meantime the Krassin ploughed steadily down the Baltic, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific Coast, through Bering Straits. Smaller (4,900 tons) than the luckless Chelyuskin (6,500 tons), it had special ice-breaking equipment which enabled it to crunch indomitably through the pack. When it put in at Wrangel last week the colonists, their belongings packed and their long exile over, shed tears of joy. Fifteen scientists went ashore to replace the departing six. Mme Semenchuk. wife of the new station chief, presented a bouquet to Mme Mineyev, wife of the retiring chief. No one had ever before seen flowers on Wrangel Island.