VAST CONTINENT OF ANTARCTICA

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27576, 5 February 1955, Page 9

VAST CONTINENT OF ANTARCTICA

Challenge To Explorers

“ONE OF MAJOR VENTURES LEFT TO MAN”

Challenge To Men’s Curiosity And Enterprise

When a proposal to send a British Commonwealth expedition to Antarctica in 1956 ; -57, wit|i the object of bisecting that continent and discovering more about the polar region, was announced in London recently, the chairman of the organising committee, Sir John Slessor, said: “This is one of the major explorative ventures left to man.” There was nothing of hyperbole in those words; indeed, if anything they understated the case. Antarctica, though visited many times and gallantly penetrated by a few intrepid men, is still very largely unknown. It remains a tremendous challenge to our curiosity and enterprise. The thorough survey of Antarctica will necessarily be piecemeal, probably extending over the rest of the present century. But the plans of the expedition now mooted are such that its work could well make a contribution of historic importance to our knowledge of the most remote, loneliest part of the earth. '

Because the Antarctic mass is at the base of the world, beyond the fringe of familiar maps, few people appreciate its immensity. Estimates of its area vary between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 square miles—which means it can be thought of as being about twice the size of Australia. There is good reason for uncertainty about the actual area. Almost the whole continent is blanketed with Ice, which extends from the land mass like a vast, oversized cap. There is difficulty in tracing the true outline of the coast under that cap. The edge of the cap is the great Antarctic Ice Barrier and beyond it is a fringe of pack ice and a litter of ice floes and Icebergs. The fringe expands and shrinks according to the season of the year. Expeditions go to the Antarctic in summer, for only then can ships get close enough to the solid land to enable the safe tiansport ashore of men and material.

Two Huge Seas There are two great indentations in the coastline of the continent, which is believed to be up to 20,000 miles long. One is the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand; the other is the Weddell Sea, south of the South Atlantic Ocean. At the edge of the Weddell Sea a huge, bleak rocky peninsula juts out in the direction of South America. These are the regions where exploration has been most intensive, though contact has been made with various other points along the continental perimeter. The two big seas provide the two most convenient approaches to the interior—to the. South Pole—but explorers have concentrated on the Ross Sea approach, which is the deepest indentation. What is the extent, to date, of exploration and therefore of our acquaintance with this white wilderness surrounded by the vast southern oceans? One convenient way to assess this is to think of Antarctica as a bigger Australia with the extra size mostly bulging to the west. There is a very rough similarity between the shapes of the two continents if one imagines the Ross Sea as the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Weddell Sea as the Great Australian Bight, and Graham Land with its furthest outpost, the South Shetlands, as a Tasmania extending from the south-east corner of Victoria. From there the celebrated land expeditions, led respectively by Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, struggled to the centre in the summer of 1911-12. In the same geographical relationship, the activities of the present Australian F.rrpedition based on Mawson would be taking place in the vicinity of, say, Broome, in the far west of Australia. That is virtually alt The whole of the rest of this double-sized Australia is unknown territory, unmapped beyond its outer extremities and hardly glimpsed. The interior of the Antarctic Continent is known to be one of the world’s mightiest and more extensive mountain regions, with vast ranges, valleys and tablelands, great glaciers

and plateaux so extensive that they have stretched beyond the horizons of observers in aircraft. As explorers, little by little, probe deeper from the coast, new mountain formations are being sighted. The niost recent discovery was on December 29 last when Robert Dovers, of the Australian Antarctic station at Mawson, reached a point 140 miles from the station from which he could see a hitherto unknown range, high and rocky, and approximately 100 miles in length. Many of these mountains and, indeed, considerable areas of the coastal uplands rise stark and clear of the ice cap. Thus scientists have been able to make geological investigations which have proved the presence of coal and many metals. In this respect, however, the possibilities of Antarctica have barely begun to be assessed. The areas of geological survey are coastal pinpoints. Just as some explorers believe that the continent may contain mountain peaks comparable with the giants of the Himalayas, so some scientists are of opinion that the world’s richest mineral deposits may be awaiting discovery there —though whether man will ever be able to make use of them is another matter. Continued exploratory effort in Antarctica has an important bearing on territorial claims there. For two reasons, these claims are of an unusual, if not unique, character. One reason is that, whereas claims elsewhere have been based on discovery and occupation, Antarctic claims rest on discovery and preliminary exploration, or even discovery alone. Questions of occupation and exploitation are only now beginning to have significance. Cutting a Cake The other unusual feature of the claims is the method by which they have been geographically calculated. They have been mapped in each case along lines of longitude south from the 60th parallel of latitude. These lines enclose certain stretches of coastline and extend into the unknown interior, converging on the polar region. Thus Antarctica may be likened to a gigantic cake—an iced cake with a mystery centre—which has been cut into a number of wedges, in each of which a national flag has been planted. At least 10 nations have shown interest in the continent, and have advanced claims based on early explorations, some of which, however, could better be described as fleeting visits. Japan, Chile, Argentina, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Russia are among these nations. On today’s maps the “recognised” territorial claims—though by no means all of the have-not nations subscribe to this recognition—number five. There is the British Territory, embracing the Falkland Islands Dependency, the Norwegian Territory, the French Territory, the Australian Territory, and the New Zealand Territory. There is a sixth territory, claimed for the United States by Lincoln Ellsworth after his flight from the Weddell Sep to the Ross Sea in 1935-36. when he crossed over a part of it. On its outer edge Admiral Richard Byrd, of

the U.S. Navy, set up his camps in 1939-41 and 1946-47. when he made a number of exploratory flights. U.S.A.’s Interests The United States Government has made no formal claims to this territory, which includes James W. Ellsworth Land and Marie Byrd Land, and contains such features as the Rockefeller Mountains and the Edsel Ford Ranges. But obviously an American claim, if put forward, would carry substantial weight. Byrd, who flew over the South Pole from the Ross Sea on his first visit to the Far South in 1928-30, has been the most*active Antarctic explorer of the mechanised and winged era that followed the era of sledges and dog teams —the brave days of gallant Scott, tenacious Shackleton, and Australia’s sturdy Sir Douglas Mawson. Britain as the major original claimant, by virtue of early voyages of southern discovery and the subsequent efforts of her great polar explorers, now asserts sovereignty over much less than a quarter of the continent. The wide-angled Australian Territory of nearly 2,500,000 square miles was established by an Order-in-Council of the British Government in February, 1932, New Zealand’s Ross Dependency having been similarly set up some 10 years earlier. Norway laid formal claim to her “wedge,’ r under the name of Queen Maud Land, in 1939. The modest French claim to the slim sliver of Adelie Land is made on the ground of its discovery by D’Urville in 1839. Dispute in 1948 Of the countries that are not satisfied to leave matters as they are, Argentina and Chile have been most restive, their arguments—which in 1948 threatened to become an international “incident”—being based mainly on the geographical ground of proximity to the Falkland Islands Dependency. If discovery, xollowed by exploration and scientific activity, establishes ownership—and' from time to time it has been suggested that the United Nations should pronounce upon this—then the present divisions represent something like the proportions of the various undertakings, except that France has been content to rest on D’Urville’i laurels. Australia is now playing a leading part in the investigation of Antarctic conditions, thus helping to extend the principle of ownership by exploration to that of scientific exploration and some semi-permanent settlement. Thus the combined British Commonwealth claims of sovereignty over more than half of the continent are steadily becoming stronger on the only basis which at present exists for their establishment. The proposed British Commonwealth Expedition promises to add still more substance to these claims, besides opening a new chapter of land exploration in the highest traditions of Anglo-Norwegian Antarctic endeavour. —Associated Newspapers Feature Services.