Antarctic Party Seeks. River Of Ice

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30302, 30 November 1963, Page 15

Antarctic Party Seeks. River Of Ice

Six young scientsts left Byrd Station on November 22 on a planned 1900-mile. tihree-month traverse across the Antarctic continent. They expect to return in midFebruary. They will investigate the possible existence of a buried mountain range and a rapid current of ice in the slowmoving icecap, and gather scientific data and specimens The basic objective of the traverse, as with previous ones, is to determine the outline and composition of the land below the ice, and to find out exactly how far below the land is. Ice thickness is known to range from about one mile to more than two miles in the area of the traverse. Information is gained primarily by seismic, gravitational, and magnetic measurements. This is the latest in a series of traverses conducted by the University of Wisconsin as part of the United States Antarctic research. The traverse leader will be Dr. Manfred Hochstein, a geophysicist with the University of Wisconsin Geophysical and Polar Research Centre. He was in Antarctica as a member of the Roosevelt Island field oarties in the summers of 1961-62 and 1962-63, and participated in a four months and a half traverse over the Greenland icecan in 1959. A West German. Dr. Hochstein joined the Wisconsin staff in 1961. He will be assisted by two geophysicists, two student electrical engineers, and a mechanic. The party will travel in three Sno-cats, large, fourtracked vehicles that provide transport and living quarters. and one motor toboggan. a smaller, ooen vehicle with greater mobility. It will be resupplied in the field periodically by ski-equipped planes of a United States Naval Air Development Squadron. VX6, based at McMurdo Station. The traverse party will go east from Byrd Station about 500 miles to the Filchner Ice Shelf, at the head of the Weddell Sea. An ice shelf is a very thick cover formed mainly of ice that flows from the ccntinetnal icecap to the sea. where it floats while remaining permanently attached to the land ice. The boundary between shelf ice and land ice is visually indistinguishable.

The researchers will try to determine the southern boundary of the Filchner Ice

Shelf, which they suspect extends further south than present maps indicate. They will then try to detect a suspected "ice stream,” a rapid current of ice within the continental icecap. It is thought to flow to the Filchner Ice Shelf through the mountainous region between the ice shelf and the south polar plateau. According to Dr. Hochstein, the stream may flow with a speed of perhaps 600 ft a year, which contrasts with the estimated speed of the icecap as a whole of less than 50ft a year. The phenomenon of an ice stream would be new to science. It has been sug-

gested to account for the otherwise unexplained rapid flow of the Filchner Ice Shelf itself. According t o Dr. Hochstein, known sources can account for only one-tihird of the outflow. The hypothesis has been strengthened by air observation of a 30-mile wide channel in the icecap. Traverse scientists speculate that this channel is the path of the ice stream, and possibly reflects the existence of a trough in the rock below' the ice. The party will next investigate the possibility that a mountain range buried under the icecap connects the Transantarctic mountain chain with the Sentinal range, about 400 miles distant. Small: widely spaced mountains have been seen in this region from the air. It is thought that they may actually be the highest peaks of an otherwise totally concealed range

The Hong Kong Urban Services Department has suspended its anti-spitting patrols during the cholera outbreak.—Reuter.