AERONAUTICS: Byrd's Plans

(See front cover)

Of all lands, Antarctica is coldest, windiest, most mountainous, most inaccessible. It is almost entirely unmapped. The nearest human habitation is over 1,000 miles distant.

Upon this forbidding land there will soon advance the most elaborate party of exploration the world has ever seen—the Byrd Antarctic Expedition. Seventy men and 75 dogs are prepared to travel 20,000 miles (round trip), build a village in a frozen continent, roam over some 4,600,000 square miles of unknown territory for a year and a half. Almost incidental is their purpose of flying over the South Pole. No expedition ever departed with such vast objects, or with such luxurious equipment.

Hegira. With a commissariat of five tons of beef, one ton of jelly, 1,200 Ibs. of cookies, 1,200 gallons of assorted pickles, the Antarctic expedition is comparable to an army on the march. Accompanied by business managers, physicians, cameramen, dog trainers, scientists, aviators, newspapermen, the size and diversity of its personnel suggests a circus.

First to leave the U. S. is the stout sailing boat City of New York (nee Samson), veteran of Arctic service, with the three airplanes and.all explorers except a small group headed by Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd himself. This smaller group will leave during the middle of September from Hampton Roads, Va., on the whaler Larsen. Both ships are scheduled to reach Dunedin, New Zealand, in the last week of October. Here a third ship, the Chelsea, joins the flotilla, which then proceeds 2,300 miles across the Southern Ocean to the Ross Sea and the Bay of Whales. The ships will remain long enough to see the expedition established in the ice village, the great wireless mast grounded in the glacier, then withdraw for ten months to escape the six months' night which is the Antarctic winter. In the autumn of 1929 they will return to pick up the expedition, carry it back to the U. S. early in 1930.

In the meantime the explorers will have set up the six houses now stored on the City of New York. Using this village as a base, they will push by airplanes and sledges toward the South Pole, establishing camps 100 miles apart. From these, they can fly over a considerable portion of Antarctica's 5.000,000 square miles, studying many a curious problem. Geologists will have hunted fossils. Astronomers will have gazed at the beautiful aurora australis, southern counterpart of the aurora borealis (northern lights). Cameramen Willard Vander Veer and Joseph T. Ruckner will have filmed scenes for a gripping ice drama of the future, to be produced by Paramount Pictures. Newsgatherer Russell Owen will have assembled material for a hundred exclusive stories in the New York Times.

Problems. Serious-minded Commander Byrd, famed as an aviator, likes to be thought a scientist as well. Indignantly he battles the idea that his flight to Europe last year was any mere trans-Atlantic hop. Science was the lure which drew him to the attempt. And Science, pure Science, calls him to the South Pole and Antarctica. These are the scientific mysteries Explorer Byrd hopes to bring to light:

What causes the curious plateau of ice, two miles high and flat as a pancake, of which the South Pole appears to be the almost exact centre?

Are the mountains of Antarctica related to the distant Andes, the nearer New Zealand ridges, or neither?