Flowerless Summer

During the Northern Hemisphere's winter, a summer of a sort comes to the great white continent of Antarctica, bringing 24-hour-a-day sunshine and a brief, spongy softening of the coastal pack ice. That cold and flowerless southern summer is the season when dedicated men arrive by ship or plane to extend man's scanty knowledge--and tenuous possession--of the earth's most inhospitable region.

Last week two shipborne expeditions prowled among the antarctic icebergs. In the Amundsen Sea, east of Little America, the 6,500-ton U.S. Navy icebreaker Atka, with 250 men aboard, headed south, battering its way through pack ice in search of a harbor along the continental shore.

Far to the east, a seven-ship, 1,000-man Argentine expedition, paced by the new, German-built. 4,400-ton icebreaker General San Martin, headed north for home.

Cold Cold War. The Argentine flotilla set out from Buenos Aires in mid-December to carry supplies and men to Argentina's eight permanent antarctic outposts, and to bring back the men whose one-year tours of polar duty were done. On the shore of a bay at 78DEG south, 39DEG west, the expedition built a ninth year-round outpost--a weather station--and left 20 men to staff it. Buenos Aires claimed that it was the southernmost permanent base in the antarctic.

The expedition's radioed accounts of its adventures made front-page headlines in Buenos Aires. The Argentines take great pride in their antarctic expeditions, and in the nation's claim to a huge pie-slice of the wind-whipped south-polar wasteland.

It bothers the Argentines little that neighboring Chile claims part of the same slice (see map}, but they simmer at Great Britain's pretensions to sovereignty over every square mile of Argentina's frozen empire. Since Strongman Juan Peron came to power in 1945. Argentina and Great Britain have carried on a sort of supercooled war along the antarctic coast, each protesting whenever the other side acts as though it regards any particular expanse of ice as its own.

International Incident. To avoid serious clashes, Britain, Argentina and Chile signed an agreement in 1949 to refrain from sending warships south of the 60th parallel. Last month a Foreign Office spokesman in London issued a warning that Britain might be forced to disregard the three-nation pact if "incidents" kept occurring in Antarctica. The point was that the General San Martin's new base not only lay well within Britain's claimed slice of Antarctica but was near the announced starting point of a planned British-New Zealand attempt to make the first overland trek across the antarctic continent.

Besides Great Britain, Argentina and Chile, four other nations--Australia, New Zealand, Norway and France--claim slices of the polar pie. The U.S. puts forth no claims of its own, and does not officially recognize those of other nations. Before World War II, the U.S. held to the doctrine --laid down in 1924 by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes--that no nation could rightly claim sovereignty over an area that it could not effectively occupy.

In the air age of today, the U.S. 1) maintains that national claims in the antarctic are matters to be settled by international-court decisions and 2) reserves the right to claim any part of the continent.*

Bay That Vanished. It was not to fortify any U.S. territorial claims that the icebreaker Atka steamed into antarctic waters early last January, but to collect scientific data and scout out a site for a large-scale U.S. geophysical expedition in 1957-58. Off Little America, the Atka made an unwelcome discovery: the Bay of Whales, which had served as a harbor for Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd's expeditions in 1928, 1933, 1939 and 1946, had disappeared. An enormous chunk of shelf ice on which Byrd and Co. set up camp had broken off and drifted away.

Last week the voyagers aboard the Atka saw the sun set--it just dipped below the horizon for a few hours--for the first time since they crossed the Antarctic Circle. It was a sign that the brief, flowerless antarctic summer was coming to an end.

Ahead of the Atka lay a month of rapidly shrinking days and lengthening nights, then the long voyage home.

# Russia also reserves the right to put in a claim, based on the 1820-21 voyage of Admiral Fabian von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German in the service of Czar Alexander I. Bellingshausen never set foot on the antarctic continent, but he did catch sight of some offshore islands. Soon afterwards, to his disappointment, he met a mariner who had been there before him: a Yankee named Nathaniel Palmer, skipper of a U.S.-flag sealer. Bellingshausen (clearly the kind of sportsman who would displease the Soviet Union today), magnanimously named the territory he had sighted after Palmer.

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