Real Climate Records

MELBOURNE, Sat — Chief Geologist A. J. Lambeth of the Australian Antarctic Expedition is anxious to get to Heard Island to test a theory that the earth is slowly getting warmer.

He will do this by examining glacial deposits and making a geological survey of the island.

Already there is evidence that glaciers in Europe’s Alps and in Greenland are slowly shrinking.

Mr. Lambeth, a Bachelor of Science, has a year’s leave from his job as chief geologist to Australian Consolidated Industries.

Said he today: ‘There is good evidence that the world went through an ice age at the time of man’s first development — about 10,000 years B.C.

Since then geologists believe it has been getting steadily warmer.

Every glacier gathers pieces of rock and rubble as it moves down its bed. When it melts this debris is dropped. If it is dropped in one place the glacier has not shrunk, but if there is a long stream of this deposit with the glacier on the uphill side of it then we know, there has been an increase in the temperature.

When the oldest inhabitant of a country town says “We never had droughts like this in my day,” Mr. Lambeth is inclined to support him rather than to ascribe the claim to an old-timer’s faith in his own generation.

Leave Today

The 14 men who leave to morrow on the first leg of their year-long visit to Heard Island have been equipped with Air Force flying gear to keep them warm and submarine crew clothing to keep them dry.

They will live in 14 insulated prefabricated huts. Cook N. Jones, who won this experience in R.A.A.F. cookhouses and several hotels, will work over kerosene stoves. He will have no

special equipment or rations. The party is taking a library of books and gramophone records, a piano and two radio-gramophones.

Carrying the first section of Australia’s 1947-48 Antarctic expedition to Heard Island between South Africa and Australia, the L.S.T. S501 left Melbourne today, is due at Fremantle next week. Establishment of a scientific base on the island is a preliminary part of Australia’s long range plan for development of the Antarctic.