Flying the Antarctic

Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd worried in Antarctica last week. The work of his two-year expedition had gone as far as practicable. He had made several successful exploratory flights. Dr. Laurence McKinley Gould was back, hairy and dirty, from his 1,500-mi. geological trip to the Queen Maude Range. The Byrd ships, City of New York and Eleanor Boiling, were on the way from Dunedin, N. Z., to pick up the 42 men of his party, their records, rock specimens and equipment. The men were fretting for a change of society. Several were ill.

Then came a radio call from the City of New York, which was preceding the Eleanor Boiling. She was at the ice pack. The ice should have been open. It was solid. Although the sea almost never freezes to more than a seven foot depth, vast blocks had piled upon one another to form a 36-ft. barricade of ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea. It extended 400 miles toward the Ross Shelf ice, on whose edge, at Little America, the Byrd party was waiting. Tantalizing was the 150-mi. expanse of clear water between the shelf and the pack ice.

It was both possible and probable that sea currents during the next fortnight would crack a passageway through the pack at about the 180th degree of longitude. The two Byrd ships could then get through, load personnel and goods, and scurry back before the pack reformed.

But this has been an unusual ice year around Antarctica. As far from the Ross Sea as the Weddell Sea, bad ice and turbulent weather have prevented Sir George Hubert Wilkins from making any extensive airplane explorations. All he could do was make three brief flights this year, and those from a ship. He had hoped that he could fly from his base at Deception Island to visit Admiral Byrd at Little America. On the far side of the continent, Sir Douglas Mawson's men were able to make only a brief flight from their ship, the Discovery. In the same general neighborhood the Norwegian whale-spotters, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Luetzow Holm, did not fly far from the Norvegia.

The situation worried Admiral Byrd. If his ships could not reach him, he would be isolated for another dread year. Some of his men would surely die. Some would go mad. The survivors would be obliged to live on short rations. He must forestall that.

So he asked the U. S. State Department to get the English and Norwegian whaling ships at the outside of the ice pack to help his ships break through. Britain and Norway urged the whaling companies to order their ships to the rescue, if rescue be needed.* Company officials said that they would wait a fortnight, in hopes that the pack would open. To send their vessels against the pack now would break the ships and not the ice. If all else failed, they would wait until they could bring the Byrd group afoot over the ice.

That the pack would open, that Admiral Byrd's worry was needless unexpectedly became a promise at the week's end. For the first time this season whales appeared at Little America, south of the pack. Some jigsaw passage they must have had. Admiral Byrd watched them frisking malodorously at the ice shelf, bunted one on the snout with a ski pole.

The map shows the outlines and land regions of the antarctic continent as they were known last week. It is an extension of the map recently made by the American Geographical Society (John Huston Finley, president, Isaiah Bowman, director), most assiduous recorder of polar explorations.

The map further shows the ship and airplane routes of the four parties who have worked around the continent the past two winters: 1) Byrd Antarctic Expedition at the Ross Sea; 2) Wilkins-Hearst Expedition (Sir George Hubert Wilkins) at the Weddell Sea; 3) British- Australian-New Zealand and Antarctic Expedition (Sir Douglas Mawson's) at the Indian Ocean side; 4) Norwegian Whalers (Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen's and Lutzow Holm's).

Discoveries. Wilkins discovered that Graham land was an icebound group of islands, now provisionally called the Antarctic Archipelago. He named new places after friends and backers--explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Flyer Carl Ben Eielson. Publisher William Randolph Hearst, and Geographers Finley and Bowman; also Lockheed (Aircraft), Mobiloil (Vacuum-Oil Co.), (Wright) Whirlwind.

Admiral Byrd, whose better equipped expedition did more thorough and extensive work, similarly named new localities--Marie Byrd Land (after his wife), Rockefeller Mts., Charles Bob Mts. His flight over the South Polar Plateau added very little more to the knowledge of the plateau itself than Amundsen and Scott, afoot, recorded the antarctic "summer" of 1911-12. However, he could see the real lay of the Queen Maude Range, of which the Charles Bob Mts. are an extension. Geologist Laurence McKinley Gould, on a 1,500-mi. sledge and ski trip over the Ross Shelf ice to the foot of the mountains and back, found coal traces in the range. His observations, coupled with prior ones farther north along the Ross Sea, indicated existence of a great coal bed only a few miles inland.

On the Indian Ocean side of the continent Sir Douglas Mawson and the Norwegians were studying the seas for whale and other marine life, and trying to pre-empt some of the shores for their countries. Both made nominal claim to short sectors.

Despite the strenuous seekings of all these men, despite all the peerings of two centuries of exploring, Antarctica remains almost totally unknown. It has an area half as great again as that of the U. S. Ages ago it had a mild climate, indicated by fossilized marine and land life. Apparently never connected with the other continents, it was never inhabited by humans. Its chief denizens nowadays are whales, seals, penguins, petrels. There are no south polar bears.

* Lever Bros., English soap makers (Lux, Lifebuoy), control the company which owns the English whaler now at the ice pack.

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