ANTARCTIC REGION.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 228, 25 August 1938, Page 17

ANTARCTIC REGION.

MR ELLSWORTH’S VIEWS. PLANS FOR AIR EXPLORATION. LONDON, Aug. 5. Antarctica, now under its barrier of ice, once lay steaming under tropical forests, says the noted American explorer, Mr Lincoln Ellsworth. One hundred million years ago, let us say, its climate was humid and hot, and the air was thick as stagnant water. That stretch of time rolled back momentarily two years ago when I found fossils ad shells which told incontestably of the tropics. The snow held evidence that its ancient atmosphere was also one of coal and oil. The world has changed since, and perhaps will change again, amVthe ice will not be a bar to transport (as it is now) when that happens. If the United States files a formal claim to the 350,000 square miles which I discovered in its name, it will have stored up wealth for that changed time. We are going to Enderby Quadrant, an almost unknown area of 750,000 square miles on the African side of Antarctica. Nobody has gone more than one or two miles inland. My wife and I will fly first to Nairobi for a mountaineering and picturehunting trek, which promises primeval forests, bamboos, elephants, ' buffaloes and leopards. Our ship, the Wyatt Earp, is due at Capetown on October 1, and in the last week of October we head for the Ingrid Christensen coast, which is treacherous and is littered with hundreds of islets and reefs. I shall fly in order to determine whether the Polar plateau extends far toward Africa and whether the Victoria Land mountains run across the magnetic Pole to the opposite side of the continent. No new territory will be added to the United States, though nobody has ever seen what wo shall see. Australia already claims it by virtue cf landing on tlie coast.