Antarctic’s Main Export Scientific Knowledge

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30074, 7 March 1963, Page 23

Antarctic’s Main Export Scientific Knowledge

[By GRAHAM BILLING, N.Z. Antarctic Research Programme Information Officer at Scott Base.) It might have been the place where icebergs go to die. At midnight the sea relaxed uneasily in calm. A star shone thinly while a red moon rose on the horizon’s rim.

Five miles off Gape Adare the ice-breaker, Edisto, rolled among bergs which glowed with a curious light like cold, enormous neon elements, and waited for her helicopter.

On windy Ridley beach behind the cape, a New Zealand zoologist and an American physicist hastily broke camp to board the aircraft. A snow squall flurried round the ship while storm clouds edged down from the north. The comfortable thump of rotor blades announced the helicopter near. Its landing floodlight gleamed on, the water while the Edisto got under way to gain stability. No time to hover above the ship—the helicopter clapped aboard, the flight-deck roll precisely met as ground crew rushed with wheel chocks before the next roll sent it overboard. The ship drove forward at full ahead, and in everybody’s minds was the thought “This is no place to linger.” Dusk thickened as we crossed the last pack ice towards Antarctica’s lighter south. To sail in a modem icebreaker among the icebergs which surrounded Cape Adare last week was still as awesome an experience as that of the cape’s discoverers 122 years ago. This was the first part of the continent seen by the discoverer of the Ross Sea and Victoria Land, Sir James Clark Ross, with his expedition in Her Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror in 1841. Now Cape Adare is the northern tip of New Zealand’s Antarctic claim, the Ross Dependency. Bent like a lobster claw it embraces Robertson Bay and tiny Ridley Beech where men first set foot on the continent and the first shore party wintered over, sharing the site in spring with 600,000 Adelie penguins.

Long History And new Cape Adare, with a longer history than any other landmark on New Zealand’s side of the continent, has sheltered men again. The two picked up by the Edisto’s helicopter—John Cranfield, New Zealand Antarctic research programme zoologist, of Christchurch, and Elwood Barnes, a physicist from the University of Maryland, both members of this year’s party at the joint United States-New Zealand station at Cape Hallett further south—had spent a week at Ridley Beach trying to extend a biological survey

commenced there by Mr Brian Reid of Rotorua in the 1960-81 summer season. Bad weather aid blizzards prevented them from achieving it

The beach is well known for its gales. The sea ice of Robertson Bay is unstable, making travel dangerous. Only toe penguins which cover the beach in the nesting season and even scale hundreds of feet up the cape’s steep hillside seem to find it hospitable. One man in toe first wintering party died there—a biologist named Hanson in C. E. Borchgrevink’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1899. Hanson's cross stands on the cape crest at 3000 ft and overlooks a grave delicately measured in white quartz and coloured stones.

One of Borchgrevink’s two huts still stands at Ridley Beach, the other is in ruins There is little trace of the hut where the northern geological party of Scott’s last expedition wintered over in 1911 and endured blizzard gales up to 120 miles an hour.

"Enchanting View” My glimpse of Cape Adare in the eerie midnight dusk of autumn was vastly different from that of its discoverers. Roas writes that on “a beautifully clear evening we had * most enchanting view of two magnificent ranges of mountains perfectly covered with eternal snow,” a fine sight for an explorer's eyes end no wonder he had nd hesitation in naming the country Victoria Land after his yrung English Queen. To cruise the Roas Sea in an ice-breaker <m I did for a week with the Scott Base photographer, Guy Matmering, of Christchurch, fills one with admiration far the explorer, his men and their 350ton wooden selling chips.

While the Edisto’s radar screens could position the ship exactly in relation to drifting ice, the Erebus and Terror navigated by sound when among icebergs in thick weather—they altered course when they heard waves roar on the ice cliffs. This sea still holds great danger for the most modern mariner, however. Two years ago in a storm the Edisto lost a propeller while 800 tons of frozen spray collecting on the deck threatened to capsize her.

Similar Cruise The Edisto’s February cruise this year was very similar to that made by Ross whose primary purpose was to study the earth’s magnetism (he had already discovered the North magnetic Pole), and to carry out oceanographic surveys rather than to claim new lands for England by venturing hundreds of miles further south i than any previous sailor. We criss-crossed toe sea i just as his ships did, the i American oceanographers on board taking water samples and temperatures, samples and even photographs of the ■ sea bottom at appointed ocean stations. While Ross’s men performed toe pioneering work no lees meticulously our oceanographers worked in i conditions no lees difficult. • As cables lowered their in- ■ struments 2000 feet to the > sea bottom from the windi ward deck (so that the ship . would not drift down on the ; wire), the oceanographers and assisting seamen worked

in snow. Spray froze to the railings and deck fittings, covering them with ice just as it clogged the blocks and tackle of Ross's little ships. But on sunny days both parties watched the same Antarctic sea birds wheel round and exclaimed in particular at the beauty of the snow petrel, “the elegant white petrel” as Roes called it. A pack of killer whales caused the same excitement and was noted with the same precision in toe ship’s togs. Our ship was warm, its round-bottomed, ice-break-ing hull not the most comfortable in a sea, but the Erebus and Terror had their comforts too. An ingenious central heating system kept them warm and even dried the condensation of humid days from streaming bulkheads.

Compare this with Scott’s Terra Nova 70 years later, another small Antarctic ship with steam as well as sail, but aboard which the crew had little heating. The seamen, whose hammocks were slung beneath the deck on which ponies were stalled, slept at times with ordure leaking through deck cracks on to their bedding. Brilliant Mariner A week on the Roes Sea in 1963 shows Roas to have been a brilliant mariner, expedition leader and organiser in 1839-43. After four years away from England he returned with not a man loot, injured or in bad health. Much is due to the Admiralty which provided and equipped his ships with astonishing open-handedness which, Ross pleaded, should have been

extended to every British sailor of his day. It was the triumph of Ross’s discoveries in the opposite comer of the world, his furtherest-south approach to the Pole, which led the British, and Scott, to tackle the Boss Sea sector of Antarctica 80 years later. And again, 10 yean after that, in Scott’s tragic failure to complete his polar journey. Now New Zealand has the torch in the Roes Dependency and works for science just as Ross did. The British confine themselves to the Weddell Sea and Grahamland Peninsula, south of South'America on their own side of the world. Claims “Frosen” From McMurdo Sound, named by Ross after the Terror’s first lieutenant, the United States also supports its huge Antarctic effort The nations work together in Antarctica and Ross's annexation of Victoria Land for his Queen has been set aside by an international treaty which “freezes” all national claims to the continent Roes thought that deposits of penguin guano on the Victoria Land coastal islands might be of value “to the agriculturalists of our Austratasum colonies” but failed to find further economic use for the continent except to note the number of whales in Antarctic seas. Now, as he predicted, they support a vast international industry. While there to still a chance that the continent will yield mineral wealth, Antarctica's rich export is scientific knowledge, a growing trade plied steadily by New Zealanders in the Roas Dependency and in the grand tradition of its discoverer.