Bacteriologist’s Find In Snow Mine At Pole

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28491, 22 January 1958, Page 14

Bacteriologist’s Find In Snow Mine At Pole

(From DENIS WEDERELL. "The Press" Correspondent with tne U.S. Antarctic expedition.]

McMURDO SOUND, Jan. 18. A bacteriologist’s discovery deep in a snow mine at the South Pole may give a glaciologist at Byrd Station 700 miles away the clue he needs to determine the age of the Antarctic icecap. Because bacteria multiply more rapidly in warmer weather—in this instance the brief Antarctic summer—their presence in the age-old ice will be stratified. At Byrd Station William Smith, ho is in charge of the deep core drilling project, has found that he can identify the summer and winter seasons in cross-sections of the ice cores by noting melt bands. Below 300 ft these become merged because of compression under the great weight of ice above. He is now about 600 ft down. But if, back in his laboratory in the United States, he finds bacteria such as were found at the pole by Captain Charles Meyers he will oe able to establish the seasonal layering of the ice and so estimate its age. Further, if similar bacteria are found at only one level he will be able to establish horizons which will be applicable to any point in the Antarctic. This was one unexpected and almost immediate result of the work by Captain Meyers, of the United States Navy Medical Corps. He is now enthusiastic after coming to the Antarctic with some reluctance. Captain Meyers has already, in

the few weeks he has been 'in the Antarctic, given another push to help to topple the theory that the Antarctic is a sterile continent. At the Pole station he went down into the snow mine at a minus 60 degrees temperature with an alpine ice axe, two sterilised ice picks and a face mask. He first chopped out a foot square chunk from the wall, dug in further with the first sterile pick and then, with the second pick chipped the sample into a germ-free container. When this was placed under a microscope Captain Meyers saw bacteria. “Identification is a problem. Some of them are fairly weird looking,” he said. From a snow sample taken during a short halt alongside Dr Albert Crary’s traverse party on the Ross shelf, Captain Meyers has isolated a possible mould or fungi—this from an area where no man is known to have been before. One theory is that these bacteria spores and viruses have been carried by the wind, possibly at high altitudes, to reach the Antarctic. But if great forests once grew in the Antarctic, a possible deduction from fossils found in the last 50 years, the Antarctic would grow plenty of its own bugs. Captain Meyers does not discount the likelihood of finding germs which sent men to bed with headaches hundreds of years ago, deep in the Antarctic ice—diseases of which today we are quite unaware.