A Cold & Boiling Sea

Among the more inhospitable segments of the earth's surface, the frigid continent of Antarctica remains--for scientistsZJne of the most magnetic. There is still so much to learn that more than a dozen nations maintain expeditions there. Last week, as they took over their new research ship Eltanin, assorted scientists supported by the National Science Foundation prepared to push U.S. exploration still further--into Antarctica's dangerous, storm-churned seas.

Built originally as a small, tough freighter for lugging supplies to Air Force bases in the Arctic, and named after a northern star often used in navigation, Eltanin was refitted to the Antarctic scientists' tastes. Her holds are stuffed with well-equipped laboratories. Above, she bristles with the strange apparatus that researchers use to draw new knowledge out of air and sea.

Rich Convergence. Early next April, when Eltanin begins her first year-long cruise at the start of the Antarctic winter, she will steam due south from Cape Horn until she reaches the solid pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea. Then a quartering course will carry the ship many times across the "Antarctic Convergence," where cold water from the south dives under the warmer water of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. This region boils with life, from tiny diatoms to whales, and marine biologists believe it may some day become the world's richest source of protein food.

From stem to stern, the Eltanin sprouts radio and radar antennas. The biggest of them, an imposing array of two intersecting squares, is specially designed to listen for "whistlers," the strange, low-frequency radio signals that strike down from outside the atmosphere. Most whistlers heard in the Antarctic are believed to originate in lightning flashes in the northern hemisphere. The radio waves apparently climb thousands of miles into the fringes of the ionosphere, guided by the earth's magnetic field; then they curve down again to hit a "coordinate point" in the southern hemisphere.

Global Greenhouse. While Eltanin's biologists ply their nets and trawls and her radiomen tune for whistlers, meteorologists studying the turbulent Antarctic atmosphere will launch weather balloons from a sheltering hangar on the ship's stern. Oceanographers will study the tossing sea water by measuring its temperature, salinity, and oxygen content at all depths ranging up from the bottom. They will chart ocean currents and plunge long tubular probes into the ocean floor. The cores of silt they bring up will give glimpses of Antarctic geologic history over millions of years.

The oceanographers also plan to measure the amount of carbon dioxide that is absorbed from the atmosphere by the icy water of the Antarctic. Many scientists believe that the carbon dioxide discharged by man's furnaces and engines is accumulating in the atmosphere, where it may some day drastically change earth's climate by acting like the glass of a great, global greenhouse. More cheerful theorists think that cold ocean water takes fresh C02 out of the atmosphere as fast as it is generated. Observations made on Eltanin may help settle the argument.

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