Last Antarctic Traverse?

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31576, 13 January 1968, Page 1

Last Antarctic Traverse?

Gruelling, dangerous Antarctic journeys of the kind begun by Scott and Amundsen —and still being done today by a ponderous crawler-tractor caravan in the remote wastes of Queen Maud Land—may soon be a thing of the past. The American Nations Science Foundation is to de cide this year whether test have proved that the sam job can be done just as wel bv remote sensing devices car ri’ed on long-range aircraft. While it thinks about this the last leg of the Queei Maud Land traverse, a S(XK mile journey through the las unexplored region of Antarc tica. will be postponed. Ten scientists are now tra versing the third of the fou legs. The trip began at th’

I South Pole in the 1964-65 sea- ’ son, and as each leg was com- • pleted the men were flown out I and the vehicles left on the Polar Plateau ready to start • again in the following sum I mer. . This year’s traverse party , left Plateau Station (in the : sector of Antarctica below i Africa) on December 1 and I will be in the field for two months, travelling about 1200 miles and making regular al measurements of the thickness of the ice-cap, the characteristics of the rock beneath, and ts the earth’s magnetic field. le Before they started ill struggling across the crevasseir- crazed surface, experimental flights were made with airis, craft equipped to measure the in same sort of things. Sensors 10-1 in the airborne laboratories st i took infra-red profiles of heat, ■c-1 waves coming from the sur ■ face and made radar sounds' ; ings to gauge the depth of the ir i ice. lel “We will compare these

measurements with the traverse party’s sonar soundings,” said Dr T. O. Jones, the foundation’s director of environmental sciences, in Christchurch yesterday. “If they turn out to have equal or greater reliability there is no point in continuing the traverse.”

The experimental flights this year were done in conjunction with the Scott Polar Institute and the British Antarctic Survey. “Now we have to go home and sweat out what we should do,” said Dr Jones. “We’ve got to find out if there are any traps in such measurements. A lot depends on precise navigation, and if we can improve our equipment we’ll be able to fly at a higher altitude where the aircraft functions better.” He said that Plateau Station would be closed next January, but it would be left intact in case it was needed again. Airborne laboratories could

mean the end of long traverses, he said. An aircraft could make “hop, skip and jump” journeys to enable scientists to land and sample snow for ice-movement studies.