Selecting Site Of Plateau Station

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30880, 13 October 1965, Page 20

Selecting Site Of Plateau Station

One of the four men who will be responsible for selecting the site of the Plateau Station, to be established this season in the heart of Queen Maud Land, arrived in Christchurch yesterday.

He is Mr C. L. Roberts, a meteorologist with the United States Weather Bureau. Mr Roberts’s job entails supervision of the bureau’s weather research

programme on the continent. It will be his fifth stay in the Antarctic. Mr Roberts said he and three other specialists would be flown to the general area chosen for the new station in a ski-equipped Hercules on December 13. “The four of us will be left there for about two weeks while we collect data necessary for the establishment of the Plateau Station. The next flight will bring the men who will prepare a ski-way and early in the New Year the men who will construct the station—to take two weeks—will arrive,” he said. The new station will be as far from the Amundsen-Scott Pole Station as Byrd Station is, but in the opposite direction.

Mr Roberts has spent two winters and two summers in the Antarctic. » He said that as a result of the Weather Bureau’s research on the continent over the last 10 years a clearer picture had been obtained of the role Antarctica played in the weather patterns of the southern hemisphere.

Research on the continent had been aided by the scientific research vessel, Eltanin, which showed what was happening to the weather systems as they moved around Antarctica. He added that as a result of studies made, scientists had been able to determine more accurately the role played by Antarctica in balancing the “heat budget” of the earth.