STUDY OF SNOW

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIX, Issue 87, 1 November 1938, Page 2

STUDY OF SNOW

BRITISH EXPEDITION TO SWITZERLAND

LABORATORY CUT IN ICE

(From The Guardian's London

Correspondent)

LONDON, October 8

The first British expedition devoted exclusively to the study of snow and ice has just returned to London from Switzerland where its members worked for five months in a laboratory hewn out of solid ice. The leader was Mr Gerald Seligman, who described himself as an amateur glaciologist. His companions were a crystallographer, a geographer and two physicists. The scene of their labours was Europe's biggest glacier —the Great Aletsch, at Jungfrau Joch. They lived at an altitude of 11,300 feet and a temperature several degrees below freezing, but, "except for a few days of lassitude at the beginning and exhaustion at the end of their stay, they kept remarkably fit.

"The ice laboratory was a new

idea," Mr Seligman said this week, "and its construction a splendid achievement. A tunnel was cut into the ice wall and a large cave hollowed out.. Solid ice blocks were left for work tables. It was a nagging rather than an intense cold and a feat of endurance rather than of courage," Mr Seligman commented.

But real courage was required for the collection of specimens. More than 50 descents were made into crevasses, some of them 100 ft. below the surface of the glacier. This part of the work was extremely dangerous. The dread of every climber is to be lost in a crevasse. Due to the ice laboratory, remarkable scientific results were achieved, but it will take at least a year to classify them. An incidental practical result may be the designing of a faster ski.

Gwynne Johns, the young Welsh parachutist, has made a delayed drop by night over Salisbury Plain from a height of 18,000 feet, falling for 85 seconds before opening his parachute 4000 feet from the ground.

Building with dominoes is the latest craze in Sunderland. Expert players are all out to break the records of two members of the Westgate Men's Institute, Westgate, Co. Durham, who stacked 90 dominoes on one domino.