AERONAUTICS: Flying the Antarctic

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Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd worried in Antarctica last week. The work of his two-year expedition had gone as far as practicable. He had made several successful exploratory flights. Dr. Laurence McKinley Gould was back, hairy and dirty, from his 1,500-mi. geological trip to the Queen Maude Range. The Byrd ships, City of New York and Eleanor Boiling, were on the way from Dunedin, N. Z., to pick up the 42 men of his party, their records, rock specimens and equipment. The men were fretting for a change of society. Several were ill.

Then came a radio call from the City of New York, which was preceding the Eleanor Boiling. She was at the ice pack. The ice should have been open. It was solid. Although the sea almost never freezes to more than a seven foot depth, vast blocks had piled upon one another to form a 36-ft. barricade of ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea. It extended 400 miles toward the Ross Shelf ice, on whose edge, at Little America, the Byrd party was waiting. Tantalizing was the 150-mi. expanse of clear water between the shelf and the pack ice.

It was both possible and probable that sea currents during the next fortnight would crack a passageway through the pack at about the 180th degree of longitude. The two Byrd ships could then get through, load personnel and goods, and scurry back before the pack reformed.

But this has been an unusual ice year around Antarctica. As far from the Ross Sea as the Weddell Sea, bad ice and turbulent weather have prevented Sir George Hubert Wilkins from making any extensive airplane explorations. All he could do was make three brief flights this year, and those from a ship. He had hoped that he could fly from his base at Deception Island to visit Admiral Byrd at Little America. On the far side of the continent, Sir Douglas Mawson's men were able to make only a brief flight from their ship, the Discovery. In the same general neighborhood the Norwegian whale-spotters, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Lützow Holm, did not fly far from the Norvegia.

The situation worried Admiral Byrd. If his ships could not reach him, he would be isolated for another dread year. Some of his men would surely die. Some would go mad. The survivors would be obliged to live on short rations. He must forestall that.

So he asked the U. S. State Department to get the English and Norwegian whaling ships at the outside of the ice pack to help his ships break through. Britain and Norway urged the whaling companies to order their ships to the rescue, if rescue be needed.* Company officials said that they would wait a fortnight, in hopes that the pack would open. To send their vessels against the pack now would break the ships and not the ice. If all else failed, they would wait until they could bring the Byrd group afoot over the ice.

That the pack would open, that Admiral Byrd's worry was needless unexpectedly became a promise at the week's end. For the first time this season whales appeared at Little America, south of the pack. Some jigsaw passage they must have had. Admiral Byrd watched them frisking malodorously at the ice shelf, bunted one on the snout with a ski pole.