EXPLORATION: Compelling Continent

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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 120° 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 5½ 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.