Glacier Begins To Break Way Into McMurdo Sound

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28159, 24 December 1956, Page 12

Glacier Begins To Break Way Into McMurdo Sound

(From BRIAN O’NEILL “The Press' cot Task Force 43 ii ABOARD U.S.S. GLACIER, McMURDO SOUND, Dec. 21.

The world’s most powerful icebreaker, the United States Navy’s Glacier, today began the task of battering out a 15.000-acre slab of bay ice in McMurdo The Glacier worked in total “white-out’’ conditions, and had to depend on radar to hack out its mammoth four-mile track up the sound. Seals flopping about on five-foot thick ice. too slow or too insensitive to danger to get out of the way. were butted ”by the ship as it hurled itself into the frozen bay. Tremendous floes, as big as city blocks, split off with marrow-chilling cracks as the Glacier bored in at top speed, rode high up over the shelf edge on its raked stem, and crunched slowly down on the protesting iccbeneath. The ship is opening up a seaway leading to the eventual cargo vessel berthage 12 miles south of the ice edge, and four miles north of the American base at Hut Point. The ice breaker Atka, the tanker Nespelen. and three freighters are still hemmed in by the bay ice 17 miles north of the point. As soon as the present northerly wind changes to the south, or drops sufficiently to allow the north flow ing current to take control, the loose sea ice and broken bay ice in the channel will be cleared out to sea. and the ships will be able to follow the Glacier in Living m an icebreaker hammering itself on the bay ice is like imprisonment in a crazy house of noise. It is like being held inside an empty water tank, which is flailed with chains at the sides and has truckloads of rocks poured over it. To those effects are added the complaining scream of electric generators turning full bore at 21,000 horsepower, and being pushed for even more power, and the thunder of the racing propeller shafts driving the screws which suck huge blocks of ice alongside and underneath the

rrespondent with the United States Navy n the Antarctic) ship’s two-inch tensile steel hull, and smash them together as they are thrown astern. There is also the headaching crackle of the ice parting under the titanic pressure in openings hundreds of yards long, and the concussion as the ship belts into a new piece of ice, and shudders and shakes throughout her entire length. Some seals cavorting on the bay as the Glacier went about its business rolled on their backs and wiggled their tails playfully as the bow of this juggernaut of 8600 tons dead weight loomed out of the white-out above them. Others caterpillared with their natural but curious see-saw movement a foot to one side of the vessel’s path, apparently clear of trouble, but only to scrabble frantically for secure tooting as the ice came to pieces under them. A few tumbled between the churning iceblocks and died, spattering the Glacier’s hull with blood. It was sickening to watch, but it could not be helped if the job was to be done. Only the Antarctic hyena, the pen-guin-killing, raucous voiced skua guii. appreciated the slaughter as it descended on the red patches in the rocking ice of the ship’s wake for a gory feasting.