Compelling Continent

(See Cover)

Wrapped around the flattened underside of the earth is a massive, high-domed shield of rock and ice. This is the Antarctic Continent, a frozen and almost lifeless wasteland studded with glistening mountains that stand like icy tombstones over a cosmos-sized graveyard. In its skies, angry clouds drift over seas of corrugated sastrugi and sparkling glacial spillways. To the explorer this continent of 5,000,000 square miles--three-fourths as big as the U.S. and Canada combined--is a geologic throwback to the Ice Age. It is the world's most hostile environment of earth and air, a land of near motionless molecules and rapacious winds, a patchwork of ice fields with blue-seamed crevasses and jumbled hummock beds, all set tenuously on a continent rumbling with pressure and restless with movement.

In the continent's center is a vast and featureless plateau 750 miles across and two miles high. And here, protruding into space, is the heartland of the antarctic's terror, the vat where much of its wrath and weather is brewed. Over this plateau sweep winds from distant seas, and here snow crystals have fallen like eider down, layer on layer, millennium on millennium. The meridians of the earth converge upon this great snow desert, closing in to pinpoint that half mystical, half mythical objective of adventurers, scientists and explorers, the South Pole. At the Pole the temperature may drop as low as 120DEG below zero, and there, as far as any man knows, no creature has ever survived the long antarctic winter night.

Last week the clatter of hammers, the whine of saws, the growl of a tractor shattered the Pole's chill silence. Under the skilled hands of 24 U.S. Navy Seabees, a tiny community of six multihued polar huts was rising from the snow--the home, for many months to come, of 18 American scientists and Navymen.

No Second Chances. As the Seabees worked, a bulky figure in mohair-lined parka, Byrd Cloth coveralls and heavy boots moved among them, carefully, almost instinctively checking every construction detail. For no man knows better than Paul Allman Siple that the antarctic tolerates few mistakes, permits even fewer second chances. At 48, Paul Siple (rhymes with disciple) has spent more time on the continent than any other person. He came there first as an eager, wide-eyed Sea Scout with the Byrd expedition of 1928-30; when he leaves it for the sixth time, in February 1958, some 5 1/2 years of polar life will lie behind him.

A ponderous, thick-girthed giant (6 ft. 1 in., 250 lbs.), Siple moves inexhaustibly from job to job at the remote and lonely Pole station. As the camp's scientific leader, he saw to it that each of the items among the 450 tons of supplies parachuted from Air Force and Navy transports was retrieved, catalogued and stored. If the parachutes failed, the gear had to be dug out from beneath as much as 15 ft. of snow and ice. The camp's huts were put on stilts: on the surface they would become uncomfortably humid as their radiated heat melted the snow beneath them. Oil stoves had to be checked; properly installed, they are the antarctic's greatest comfort, but explosion can bring fiery death, and carbon monoxide, silent extinction.

To the camp's bubble-domed science building, Siple gave his most loving attention. Painstakingly he made certain that only copper and brass nails were used to hold the frame together (steel would interfere with magnetic readings). Caustic soda and aluminum chips to make hydrogen gas for meteorological balloons were carefully stowed so that they would be convenient in winter's long dark. The subterranean ice cellar for the seismographs was laid out so that the vibration of tractor and Weasel (the antarctic jeep) would not be confused with the vibration of distant earthquakes.

One for the Navy. The scientific research is the Pole camp's reason for being, and from this site in the coming months Siple and his co-workers will seek secrets hidden for eons in the ancient ice and wild skies of the antarctic. (It is literally true that more is known of the sunlit side of the moon than of the white face of the antarctic.) In this broad task they will not be alone. Some 65 other American scientists--meteorologists, glaciologists, seismologists, physicists and upper-atmosphere specialists--will be doing the same at six other widely scattered bases on the continent (see maps). And ranged in support of all of them will be the ships, men and know-how of the U.S. Navy's Task Force 43.*

When the U.S. put its antarctic program under way, it handed to the Navy the immense and complex task of establishing and maintaining its polar-region bases. The Navy dubbed its assignment Operation Deep Freeze, and set to work in 1954. As dean of American polar explorers, 68-year-old Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd was given the title (largely honorary) of Officer in Charge, U.S. Antarctic Programs. Command of the naval forces on the scene went to Rear Admiral George J. Dufek, 53, a salty, brisk, blue-water sailor who had made a reputation as a top ice navigator on two earlier expeditions, was called back from retirement to take on the new assignment.

Early Landing. Task Force 43 is Dufek's strong right arm, and for his assault on Antarctica he selected Christchurch, N.Z., 2,250 miles distant, as his staging base. In December 1955 the task force moved south into the antarctic's outer defenses. At 40DEG, still thousands of miles from the Pole, the ships wallowed through the "Roaring Forties." Beyond them lay the "Furious Fifties" and the "Screaming Sixties," where the air nd waters of the great ocean systems clash, swirl and spin off great gales, and at 63DEG began the outer edge of the ice pack that surrounds the continent like an enormous white halo.

Leading the way for the supply ships was Glacier, an 8,600-ton, 21,000-h.p. monster that can hammer its way through 15 ft. of ice. It slammed into the Ross Sea ice pack at 17 knots; when it failed to shatter the ice frontally, it rode up on the cakes and smashed them with its enormous weight. Thus Glacier cleared a 400-mile passage to the towering ice cliffs that mark the Ross Sea's shoreline. The landing, on Dec. 18, was, seasonally speaking, the earliest ever made on the antarctic mainland.

Frozen Beachheads. Dufek's immediate objective was to establish beachheads for the major assault. To accomplish this, his construction crews swarmed ashore at McMurdo Sound and at Little America V, near the base camp of four earlier American expeditions, some 450 miles to the east across the Ross Sea ice. So swiftly did his crews work that by the time the thickening March ice forced the ships to withdraw, 93 men were set up in winter quarters at McMurdo, 73 at Little America. Orders for the wintering-over party on the sound: build an airstrip from which other U.S. bases in the antarctic could be supplied in 1956.

From the first it was a tense race against time. If Operation Deep Freeze was to remain on schedule, if Paul Siple and the other scientists were to be at their instruments when the International Geophysical Year began, then McMurdo had to be ready to handle air traffic by the time the antarctic summer returned in October. Working under floodlights and headlights, in temperatures as low as 69DEG below zero, the McMurdo crews moved a million cubic feet of loose snow off the site selected for the 6,000-ft. field. A blizzard promptly blew the snow back on. When they tried to freeze the surface with sea water, their pumps froze. Then, when they got the pumps working, the treacherous salt leached through the ice and created mushy pockets that would not support airplanes.

Desperately, putting in two 12-hour shifts a day, Dufek's men set to work at a new site. On Oct. 17, 1956, the day after the camp cheered completion of the job, a Navy Skymaster with Dufek aboard came rumbling out of the antarctic sky and touched down after the long flight from Christchurch. ("Landing on that strip," said the Navy's crack polar flyer William Hawkes, "is like landing in a bowling alley in somebody's basement.")

Into the Interior. With spring daylight Operation Deep Freeze got into high gear. Task Force 43 poured men and supplies ashore at the two Ross Sea bases. From Little America a tractor train pushed deep into the previously unexplored heart of Marie Byrd Land to set up a year-round base. From McMurdo on Oct. 31, Dufek and other high-ranking task force officers rode a Navy R4D (a modified DC-3 named the Que Sera, Sera) to a tricky ski landing--the first landing ever made at the South Pole.

Dufek was the first out of the plane, the second man since Norway's great Roald Amundsen (1911) and the first since Britain's doughty Robert Falcon Scott (1912) to feel Pole snow crunch underfoot. He was slapped in the face with a minus-58DEG cold, 90DEG below freezing. ("It was like getting slammed with a piece of ice.") Quickly he and another officer chopped an 18-in. hole in the snow with an alpine ice ax and planted an American flag. Into the bamboo flagstaff Dufek stuffed a letter verifying that he was there. Someone set out radar reflectors which would pinpoint the Pole for the flights that were to follow.

Then, with frostbite already showing on Dufek's nose, the party stomped back into the airplane, its engines still turning over. But when Pilot Conrad Shinn gunned his engines and fired four JATO (jet assist) bottles for takeoff, the R4D stuck fast, its skis frozen to the icy surface. Only by blasting off his eleven remaining JATO bottles did Shinn wrench the plane loose and stagger into the thin air at well below normal take-off speed. Back at McMurdo, Dufek ordered establishment of the Siple camp delayed for two weeks ("If it was too cold for me, it will be too cold for those Seabees"), then headed off to the hospital with a serious case of bronchitis.

The Violent Land. The men of Operation Deep Freeze found the continent a harsh, hauntingly beautiful and, above all, strange land. The snow crystals that drift down over its great central plateau seem dry as sand. Yet, because there is little ablation--return of moisture to the atmosphere--this light precipitation has become a glacier of up to a mile or more in depth. Under its own weight the ice moves glacially, spilling down off the plateau, flowing imperceptibly but inexorably toward the sea, squeezing through valleys, crawling over hills, plunging down the sides of mountains in great frozen cataracts. What it does not bury or crush, it encircles. And finally, at the continent's rim, it meets the frozen seas, and ice battles ice on a titanic scale. Vast crevasses shudder open along the tortured ridges; ice rafts as large as the state of Connecticut are torn loose from the continental shelf and set floating like derelict monsters in the frigid waters.

Storms with winds up to 200 miles an hour sometimes come howling like banshees down off the highlands, often to be followed by unearthly silences. The antarctic has other tricks: when a man breathes its winter air, he not only can see but hear his breath, for as the frozen moisture drifts back across his face, its ice crystals break against his ears with the tinkling of hundreds of tiny bells. When the uncertain light of an overcast day is trapped beneath the clouds above and the snow below, everything between fills with a thick and milky film, devoid of feature or contrast. This is a whiteout, and in it, pilots may become dizzy and nauseated as they grope blindly for a surface which can vanish even as they come in for their landing. On the ground, in a whiteout, a man cannot tell whether a dark spot ahead is a distant mountain--or a matchbook cover on the snow 50 ft. away. When he looks down he may see his feet but not the surface that he stands on. And when the winds finally sweep the milky film away, they can drive the granular snow so furiously across the continent's face that static electricity is generated, and phantom flames dance eerily in the blinding drift.

Kindness & Contempt. The antarctic, with all its grandeur, is far more contemptuous of man's machines than of man himself. In the winter cold, kerosene pours like oil and oil pours like molasses. Machines wear out fast when lubricants congeal, and engine metal becomes brittle and shatters in the bitter temperatures. Electrical systems fail when their rubber protection disintegrates; Prestone antifreeze freezes solid. Polar flights leave the Air Force's massive Globemasters coated with tons of ice, and there are few occasions when ice, clouds, storms and magnetic interference do not harry navigators almost beyond endurance.

Yet the antarctic can be strangely kind. Its eternally frigid air is of such pristine purity that few germs survive; men at the American bases catch cold only after receiving packages from home. No metal rusts, no wood rots. (Food left by the Scott expedition in 1910-13 is still perfectly preserved in 1956.)

From March 22 to Sept. 22 the antarctic is in twilight or darkness; at the Pole, Sept. 22 to March 22, the sun never sets. Both perpetual light and perpetual dark throw the waking and sleeping mechanism of humans out of balance. At McMurdo Sound insomniacs have established the continent's largest and most thriving social order: "The Big Eye Club." Its membership's chief off-duty activity: drinking coffee while waiting for sheer fatigue to bring on sleep.

The Modern Touch. Little can be done for the insomniacs, but the planners of Deep Freeze, Dufek's Task Force 43, and the attached Air Force crews and Army specialists have left little else undone to assure the comfort and efficiency of the men ashore. The expedition's supply list contains almost a quarter-million items, ranging from electric blankets to automatic washing machines and including refrigerators (some foods are damaged by the extreme natural cold), cooky cutters and cake decorators (for birthday parties) and sun lamps (for winter tans).

Off duty, the men occasionally take overnight camping trips "just to get away from this damn place." They ski or slide down nearby hills--at speeds up to 20 miles an hour--on the seats of their well-insulated pants. One hard-working practical joker spent several days sprinkling geologic specimens from Greenland over the antarctic ice, simply to throw the geologists into a flap. Every Saturday night McMurdo relaxes at a "happy hour," a period of no-limit drinking during which the camp physician turns bartender, pours with a free hand "medicinal" alcohol fondly known as Old Methuselah. Under its benign influence, even Big Eye Clubbers find relief from their problems.

Among the things that fail to attract enthusiastic followers: news broadcasts. When radio reception is good, few listen; during the Hungarian rebellion and the fighting in the Mideast, Dufek's men paid little attention. Their physical isolation is too great; the rest of the world is too far away. Even enforced celibacy is no real problem. As Admiral Byrd once said, "The greatest lack in the antarctic is the lack of temptation."

In their isolation men find new values. Serious quarrels are rare, disruptive cliques and factions almost nonexistent. Figuratively and literally, no man walks alone in the antarctic. By sheer necessity men pair off and assume responsibility for each other's welfare under the "buddy system.'' Each depends on the other for everything from detection of facial frostbite (the victim seldom feels it) to help when the hours hang heavy and the winter night stretches ahead into infinity. Few men who have lived such a life come from it unchanged.

"Once you've been here," Paul Siple sums it up, "there's something a little special about you--everyone feels it, and so do you. I think this may be what draws people down here, and even though they hate it, they feel it's worth buying with a little time and a little discomfort. It will last them a lifetime."

The Right Man. Of all the men now living and working on the frozen continent, few are better fitted by character, inclination and background for the assignment than Siple. Even with Byrd's first expedition he quickly won his explorer's spurs. A 19-year-old whose boyhood in Erie, Pa. had centered around Scouting (he had earned 60 merit badges before joining Byrd), he was jolted but not defeated by the salty, four-letter expletives and the sloppy, earthy habits of his hardbitten shipmates on the way south. Big. strong, self-sufficient, Paul ignored them, won a spot as a regular deckhand, shoveled as much coal, scraped as many barnacles, and demonstrated as sound seamanship as any man aboard.

The same qualities stood him well at Little America. When no one wanted the job of collecting penguins and seals for the American Museum of Natural His tory, Siple volunteered, even though "I don't have a merit badge in skinning." By the expedition's end he was a proficient if dogged taxidermist. He learned, too, how to train and handle a dog team. Among the theories: never bend down, never fall down, and never excrete near them. For 22 months in 1928-30, as Admiral Byrd recalls it, "Paul did a man's work."

Back from his first expedition, Siple re-entered Allegheny College at Meadville, Pa. as a sophomore, soon met a pretty young freshman. Ruth Johannesmeyer. Carrying almost twice the normal academic load to make up for the years he had lost in the antarctic, busy writing a book (A Boy Scout with Byrd) and lecturing before dazzled Scouts and service clubs, he carried on a desultory courtship. But one night he was enticed to a college dance, and as he struggled happily through the steps, a sudden thought struck him: "My God, so this is why people like to dance!''

Geography on the Honeymoon. This homeside discovery was not enough to quell his wanderlust. He toured Europe, North Africa and the Mideast (hiking from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea), then returned to the antarctic with Byrd as chief biologist of the 1933-35 expedition. Home again, Siple decided he wanted to be a geographer ("a safe way around the crevasse of specialization which scientists in other fields fall into") and enrolled as a graduate student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Not long afterward he also made up his mind about romance; six years after they had met, he and Ruth Johannesmeyer were married, in the winter of 1936. Their honeymoon, she recalls without rancor, was spent at a geography seminar in Syracuse, N.Y. Today Ruth accepts his long and frequent absences philosophically: "I don't think a wife should do or say anything that would take away from her husband's work."

In 1939-41, Siple made his third trip south with Byrd, served not only as leader of West Base, Little America III, but as navigator on all exploratory flights over the continent. When he returned to the U.S. in 1941, he was met at dockside in New York by an Army officer who explained that the Army wanted him to become its cold-weather-clothing adviser. First as a civilian, later as a quartermaster officer, he directed weather-and-clothing research for the Army during World War II, played a key role in the development of such gear as the thermal-barrier boot and the cold-weather parka. Retired as a lieutenant colonel, Siple joined the Army general staff as military geographer, but had hardly settled down to family life with his wife and three daughters in Arlington, Va. before he was off to the antarctic again, this time as the Army's senior observer with the Navy's 1946-47 cold-weather-training exercise, Operation Highjump.

Byrd Man. When the first plans for the International Geophysical Year Expedition were being discussed in Washington late in 1953, Byrd pushed his onetime protege hard and successfully for the coveted South Pole command ("A born scientist . . . the best-equipped man there is for this kind of work"). Siple's close and continuing friendship with Byrd (forced by bad health to stay at home in Boston) has proved to be a mixed blessing in the antarctic. Some senior officers of Task Force 43 have found the aging Byrd a difficult man to deal with, and as a "Byrd man," Siple has inherited some of their antagonism. But Siple, the oldest polar hand of them all, has carried the buddy-system philosophy even to these austere levels of disagreement. "Intolerance," he says, "is a symptom of someone's inability to adjust to the next guy's faults."

So Operation Deep Freeze rolls on according to plan. As he labored with the Seabees at the Pole camp last week, Siple knew that the full weight of the biggest, best-organized expedition in antarctic history was solidly behind him.

Hands & Hearts. Yet, when the winter night closes in next April, when the aurora australis shimmers green and yellow along the horizon, when help from the outside can no longer reach the Pole, the success or failure of the mission will rest solely in the hands and hearts of Paul Siple and the 17 men who are with him at the Pole.

For them the antarctic will become again the antarctic of an earlier day. It will be the same savage, mysterious, compelling continent it was when, 46 years ago, Norway's Roald Amundsen pitted his skill and cunning and courage against it and won, and Britain's Robert Falcon Scott pitted his against it and lost.

*Eleven other nations, Britain, France, Russia, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Belgium and Japan, are carrying on similar antarctic programs. All data will be exchanged freely as part of the International Geophysical Year studies of 1957-58.

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