U.S. Icebreaker Invades Unknown Bellingshausen

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29139, 26 February 1960, Page 22

U.S. Icebreaker Invades Unknown Bellingshausen

IN.Z. Association—Copynght)

(Rec. 8 p.m.). NEW YORK, February 24. The invasion of the Bellingshausen Sea. is a Jules Verne adventure into a world of spectacular beauty, foreboding danger and tantalising mystery, according to a United Press International correspondent aboard the U.S.S. Glacier, off Antarctica. The Glacier was a mechanical marvel of American ingenuity and 20th Century luxury intruding for the first time into a sterile world of ice never before seen or visited by men, the correspondent said. Aboard the Glacier is a group of hardy explorers who hope to bring back to the outside world charts of this Antarctic wonderland. 'Outside the inch and a half thick armoured skin of the Glacier is 28-degree water and millions upon millions of square miles of ice formed ‘ over countless centuries by blizzards, hurricane winds and marrow-freez-ing temperatures. , Yet. inside the steel shell cf the Glacier live 291 Americans with all the comforts to be found in a New England village, a California community or a mid-West housing development. The armour plate enables the Glacier to bulldoze her way through 15ft pack ice that would crush ordinary ships. Through her portholes men seated on green fabric sofas sip coffee and watch as her 10 giant diesel engines, producing 240,000 horsepower, enable the Glacier to shoulder aside floes at 15 knots speed with hardly a bump. Two storeys higher, from the sanctuary of her bridge, the Glacier seems more like a giant sled gliding across the ice on pneumatic runners than a ship grinding through floes. Inside the bridge, earphoned crewmen relay messages from other “brain centres” throughout the ship, navigators plot courses

and cigar-smoking deck officers intently watch their instruments. Every scientific aid known is used by the Glacier to help her probe the mysteries of the Bellingshausen, for there are no charts of these waters. No-one has ever sailed through then) and existing maps show islands that are actually peninsulas and peninsulas that are islands—few of them situated anywhere near the spots where they are pictured on the maps. From high on the Glacier’s mast, radar equipment continuously sweeps the horizon and the beat of a fathometer records the depth of water beneath her bow and aids the detection of shoals and reefs which threaten her along every unexplored mile she travels. Each hour brings new mysteries and new questions. Why -no birdlife? Why no seals. no whalerf and so few penguins? And far inland are plumed and unnamed peaks whose snows are blown by 100-mile-an-hour gales —are they volcanic or granite? Astern, the Glacier carries two orange-coloured helicopters which sprve as her eyes, finding leads and cracks in the ice to open water. They take off and land on her net-enclosed afterdeck. The men manning her and the world she is penetrating are so incongruous that if the situation had been offered to Verne as a possible tale of fiction, he undoubtedly would have discarded it as too fantastic, the correspondent wrote.