Real Climate Records

(By ROGER D. GREENE).

WASHINGTON (A.P.) Is the vast frozen dead “continent” of Antarctica slowly warming up again towards life?

American scientists have been pondering that question since news dispatches described the mild weather encountered by Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s U-S. Navy expedition at the bottom of the world.

Pending the return of Admiral Byrd with factual data, Washington scientists, cautiously avoided making any flat predictions that the great frozen wastes may be thawing towards a slow re-awakening of life.

Charles Hubbard, noted Arctic explorer, now attached to the U.S. Weather Bureau, told a reporter he had experienced temperatures as high as 50 degrees above zero fahrenheit with rain and slush near the North Pole.

But of course the North Pole is warmer because it’s at sea level while the South Pole is on a 10,000ft plateau whipped by 100 mile-an-hour winds, he said. J. Glenn Dyer, who accompanied Byrd as a cartologist on the 1939-41 Antarctic- expedition, said that during his stay in the south polar region ‘we had only three or four days of bright sunshine with the temperature at 30 to 32 degrees above zero.’

‘If the South Pole is warming up,’ he added, ‘it will take many, many years. These things do not happen overnight.’

Long ago — perhaps 100 million years in the prehistoric past — the South pole regions flourished in warm and possibly even tropical weather.

COAL DEPOSITS

Plants and trees, including a species like the California, sequoia, thrived in the warm polar sun shine and left their heritage in coal deposits now locked deep be neath the 6 million square-mile wilderness of snow and ice.

Then something happened. A convolution of nature sent 10,000 foot mountains rising from the lowlands and transformed it into the highest and coldest continent on earth.

‘It was the rise of these mountains,’ says Wilhjalmur Stefans son, famed Polar explorer, ‘that gathered the snow which buried vegetation, killed the animals and made that continent the most nearly dead in the world.’

Scientists know that the South Polar ice cap is slowly melting, since the earth is at the end of an ice age at present.

Twelve years ago, returning from his second Antarctic expedition, Admiral Byrd reported it was ‘slightly warmer’ on the average than during his first trip in 1928 29.

Admiral Byrd recorded an average of 42 degrees below zero on the first visit, with the mercury reaching 35 above zero only once.

On the next trip, he – found the mean temperature was a few degrees closer to zero and the high of 35 above was noted several times.