CONTINENT IN ENVELOPE

Evening Post, Issue 26, 31 January 1935, Page 12

CONTINENT IN ENVELOPE

Very fascinating is the exploration and development problem that Antarctica offers to, the world and particularly- to what Sir Douglas Mawson calls "the proximate countries." When Central Africa called for exploration, the explorers found many difficulties in . reaching tho new lands, but when they got there they could see what the new lands were like; they had, in fact,' arrived. But when you reach Antarctica you have arrived only in a sense. Sir Douglas Mawson emphasises the fact that Antarctica is. covered in most parts with-an ice sheet many thousands of feet thick. On the icedome, 10,500 feet high, you may have beneath your feet a Riiapehu, but you are as completely shut off from the actual landscape as you are from the landscape of the ocean bottom; in fact, more so, because the oceanographers have found out a great deal about the ocean bottom, and have a practical technique for studying it, whereas technical means to find out what Antarctica is like —the Antarctica beneath the ice-cap—have still. to be evolved. Probably science will find a means of penetrating the ice, and here and elsewhere will equip itself to explore the earth's crust, whether iced over or not. The effort of geophysics to look into the earth is not as amazing as the effort of physics to look into the atom. Meanwhile* . land-claiming nations seek to cut the land of ice into sectors, like little boys slicing an iced birthday cake in the hope of finding sixpence.^-