Real Climate Records

By Peter; Hastings, reviewing The Silent Continent.

Just 44 years ago four men stood on a plateau about 11,000 feet above sea level and cheered themselves hoarse.

It wasn’t the scenery—stretching away on all sides in limitless rolling wastes of snow and ice that excited them, but the spot on which they stood. For from It’s every direction pointed north. The men who cheered and stuck a Norwegian flag into the snow were the first to stand on the South Pole, 90 degrees south dead reckoning.

It was the end of an era of nearly 200 years of human effort, first to find the great Antarctic land mass and then to reach its centre.

But if Roald Amundsen’s magnificent achievement that day in December, 1911, marked the end of an era, it also marked the beginning of a new one the exploration and exploitation of the sixth continent.

Antarctica is the last great geographical mystery left on earth. Cloaked in calm centuries of white, it lies like a sleeping giant at the bottom of the world.

Unlike the North Pole, a shifting mass of ice floating on a Polar sea, Antarctica is a continent.

Covered in a huge sheet of ice, in parts nearly 8000 feet thick, the continent is high, mountainous and huge. Semi-circular, surrounded by a frozen moat of dense pack ice hundreds of miles deep, it spreads over more than 6,000,000 square miles a larger area than Australia and Europe combined.

It is accessible in brief summer months only when ships can make their way through the pack ice to its frozen shores. For a few months the sun appears above the horizon before disappearing, to plunge the continent into darkness.

The North Pole is warm compared with Antarctica, where winter temperatures plummet to 80 and more degrees below zero and where 20 below is considered a mid-summer heat wave.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, before the earths’ orbit tilted to bring the ice ages, Antarctica was tropical and steaming.

All that remains today as evidence of a warmer past are huge mountains of almost pure coal and active volcanoes that rumble deep in the continent’s frozen heart. Deep beneath the ice is evidence of gold, uranium and other minerals.

The continent is the world’s highest, mean average about 6000 feet. Tremendous, uncharted ranges curl themselves in and around immense valleys and glaciers.

Many of the mountains thrust black snouts through the mist at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet. Some are reddish gray, so swept by wind that even ice will not cling to their sheer sides. There is no hint of the rock beneath the ice and from the air they give off a brilliant green and blue light which makes them scintillate like huge diamonds.

Despite the cold, the winds and the snow the continent is a land of contrasts inexplicably there are areas free of snow where lakes of deepest blue and a green carry ice-free water and considerably warmer than the surrounding ocean.

A 13,000-foot volcano rumbles and belches mile long plumes of steam into the frozen air.

A land where only recently the world’s largest bay has been sighted and almost as recently a 100- mile wide glacier—a vast, slowly moving river of ice grinding its way from the Polar plateau through immense gorges to the sea.

Down this glacier and hundreds of others the frightful winds move at speeds up to 180 m.p.h. to change into snow, fog and ice as they meet the warmer sea.

At the centre of this land of mountains, frozen rivers and immense valleys lies the Polar Plateau itself a monotonous bank of snow and ice some times calm and sunny, yet spawning within minutes the fiercest storms known to man.

Beyond the Pole the world ends, for no man has explored the area between the Pole and the Atlantic Ocean. For that matter, only the fringes of Antarctica have been explored.

Even veteran explorer Admiral Byrd, who flew over great areas of Antarctica in the well organised and equipped U.S. Operation Highjump” in 1947, has seen only a fraction of the continent.

The desire to explore is one of the reasons why Britain, Australia, the U.S.. Russia, France and other countries chose Antarctica for detailed , expeditions during the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58. Their advance teams are on their way south at this moment.

Up to the beginning of the 19th century the name that stands out among South Polar explorers is that of captain Cook, probably the greatest navigator in history.

In ships half the size of a Manly ferry he daringly penetrated as far as 71 degrees south latitude, three times crossed the Antarctic circle and twice circumnavigated Antarctica, unable to penetrate farther south through the pack ice.

Bitterly disappointed, be concluded there was no southland and sailed on to find Australia.

It was left to an American whaling skipper, scarcely out of his teens to sight in 1821 the northernmost tip of Antarctica.

And by a curious stroke of fate it was left to a Russian to name the peninsula after the American.