Burton Island (AGB 1) - Naval Cruise Book

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The main entrance at Byrd Station, for both men and vehicles. The monster on tracks is a Nodwell Fire Boss, and the men riding in it are the two top Navy officers of the station: Lt Gordon W. Callender, Officer- in-Charge tleftj, and Lt Robert B. Hunt, the doctor. ciAt Byrd the snow starts picking up at 20 knots, because there's so much of it,', says Lt Norm Terrell in the weather central at McMurdo. HBy the time you get to 30 knots visibility is al- most invariably below minimum. For aircraft itis zero-zero, since blowing snow makes itevenworse as you get closer to the ground. Byrd, the largest inland station, ought to be a citadel, imper- vious to weather. It is entirely underground, but hand-lines are rigged outside for the men who have to reach the antennae, vents, or any of the four scientific towers. In iihand-linen weather, Brent Scudder, who will winter-over for the U. S. Weather Bureau, walks the 200 steps from his quarters to the galley- in-shirtsleeves. 'iWhen the hurricane howls outside, you donjt even know it, he says. c'You can't hear it.'7 The weather station picks it up, SinCC all indicators inside are piped to instruments outside. . Scudder has charge of measuring ozone, a .kind of super- oxygen whose movements can be used to trace air movements into the Antarctic from elsewhere. The ozone instruments are in the Aurora tower, so three times a day -in his shirtsleeves -he climbs a 62-foot ladder which is in aclosed shaft. He has no fear of falling, as the shaft has shelves all the way up. When he gets tired, he just leans back. 'iWhen thereis a storm out there, you know it in the tower. It rocks with a steady motion. Certain measurements require 21 needle to stand still on a dial. Not only does the tower shake the needle but the generator voltage fluctuates as well, so the recorder makes a wavy line. At least it's never blown away. live decided on a 50 mph rule, above which the ozone ob- servations can go hangf' 72 B

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'- who is 45, compares his age with that of Munoz. i'At 38, I was driving with dogs in the Belgica Mountains .... I want torepeat the Amundsen-Scott journeys with dogs, says Munoz, his eyes glowing. In the future they will use Hovercraftf' Picciotto answers gloomily. A hundred yards out on the ice is the cosmic ray hut, where Doug Thompson spent most of last winter counting things that are invisible. These are subatomic particles that come from some- where -in outer space and from the sun. They reach the Poles more easily because they can slide down the earthis lines of mag- netic force instead of ramming through them. Their intensity, though, varies from minute to minute and from year to year, depending on the sun. The International Geophysical Year, which was timed to take advantage of the sun's maximum activity, was the original reason for Operation Deep Freeze and produced an unprecedented ex- change of data. With a new monitor that transmits information to high-speed computers, Thompson was able to detect infinitely more subtle variations in the neutrons, or low-energy cosmic rays, during the period of minimum solar activity H964-55. Its name has a delightful Chinese sound: The International Year of the Quiet Sun. This little hut is one of two high-altitude cosmic ray stations beyond 60 degrees, the other is at Vostok, the Russian base. Led by Madeira, Thompson walked back and forth every day during the six months of darkness to tend his instruments. He installed a hi-fi set, which brings him literally the music of the spheres? At night he spends hours fiddling with the ham radio, gossiping on the most trivial subjects with people all over the globe. When a plane lands, he is invariably on hand to help with loading and unloading. The winter doesn't bother him. By the time he turns things over to Lars Andersson, he will have spent three years, altogether, in the Antarctic. Teilhard de Chardin said that one cause of man's loneliness may be his awareness of the coldness and vastness of the uni- verse, but Thompson is perfectly at home in the solar system. Far from being a mere technician, he sees an overall picture of the upper atmosphere as well as the stunning mosaic of related sciences. Instead of being made lonely by the cosmos, he is re- assured by a series of cosmic coincidences. Byrd Station, for in- stance, is linked with the Great Whale River in Canada, since they are Hconjugate pointsf' or opposite ends of the same magnetic line of force. , In May, 1965, Carl Disch, an ionospheric physicist for the National Bureau of Standards, was visiting a fellow scientist at the radio-noise building, a mile and a half from Byrd. He head- ed back to the air station from the hut, exactly the size of Thomp- son's, and was never seen again. A search was made as far as the old Byrd station, six miles away, and around the 21-mile VLF antenna which lies on the ice, but the darkness and the cold and the wind made it futile. ' 71 Dr. Mike Gadsden of the National Bureau of Standards is one of two principal investigators on a grant from the National Science Foundation for the Study of the Dis- tribution of Sodium at High Latitudes, the Spectral Dis- tribution of Polar Cap Aurora, and Auroral Luminosity Pulsations. The aurora is caused by particles from space that slide down the vertical and near-vertical lines of force around the geomagnetic pole, striking the upper atmosphere and causing it to glow lmore or less like electrons striking a TV picture tubel.

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