Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica's Age of Science

by Dian Olson Belanger

Overview

In Deep Freeze, Dian Olson Belanger tells the story of the pioneers who built viable communities, made vital scientific discoveries, and established Antarctica as a continent dedicated to peace and the pursuit of science, decades after the first explorers planted flags in the ice.

In the tense 1950s, even as the world was locked in the Cold War, U.S. scientists, maintained by the Navy's Operation Deep Freeze, came together in Antarctica with counterparts from eleven other countries to participate in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On July 1, 1957, they began systematic, simultaneous scientific observations of the south-polar ice and atmosphere. Their collaborative success over eighteen months inspired the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which formalized their peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge. Still building on the achievements of the individuals and distrustful nations thrown together by the IGY from mutually wary military, scientific, and political cultures, science prospers today and peace endures.

The year 2007 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the IGY and the commencement of a new International Polar Year - a compelling moment to review what a singular enterprise accomplished in a troubled time. Belanger draws from interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official records to weave together the first thorough study of the dawn of Antarctica's scientific age. Deep Freeze offers absorbing reading for those who have ventured onto Antarctic ice and those who dream of it, as well as historians, scientists, and policy makers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607320661
Publisher:	University Press of Colorado
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Historian Dian Olson Belanger is the author of Enabling American Innovation (Purdue University Press, 1998) and Managing American Wildlife (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

Read an Excerpt

Deep Freeze

The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica's Age of Science

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By Dian Olson Belanger

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2006 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-066-1

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CHAPTER 1

THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR

Idea to Reality

The IGY is the world studying itself. It is seldom that this world of ours acts together. ... Yet, for the next 18 months, east and west, north and south, will unite in the greatest assault in history on the secrets of the earth. ... At the same time, it may well help to solve the real problem — the conflict of ideas.

— Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1957

Early Antarctic explorers often used scientific research to legitimize and attract support for their expensive expeditions. The disappointed Shackleton brought back coal, fossil plants, and petrified wood from his near-conquest of the South Pole, proof of a temperate past. Sometimes there was genuine interest, as with Scott who supported a broad science program besides famously man-hauling thirty-five pounds of rock specimens to the last. Byrd showcased science on his own expeditions and promoted it as a worthy context for Operation Highjump. Now, in mid-century, science was enjoying unprecedented respect and popularity, having been widely credited with winning World War II with such breakthroughs as radar, the proximity fuse, and the atomic bomb. The establishment of the Office of Naval Research in 1946 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950 were but two governmental responses to the increasing glorification of science. For scientists, expectations were high, opportunities great. So perhaps it is not surprising that a small cadre of influential scientists would audaciously propose a worldwide commitment to probe the secrets of the earth. But could they pull it off in a world teetering over a nuclear abyss?

In this pregnant atmosphere, internationally renowned British geophysicist Sydney Chapman of Oxford visited the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the spring of 1950. One scientist he called on was James Van Allen who, after critical wartime work, was leading early research on guided missiles. Van Allen invited Chapman to his home in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, on 5 April, along with a few other American scientists similarly making careers of bringing science to bear on U.S. military and security interests. Among them was Lloyd V. Berkner, a leading ionospheric physicist, telecommunications expert, and veteran of the first Byrd expedition, who headed a unit called Exploratory Geophysics of the Atmosphere at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and whose presence was said to fill any room. Sometime during that evening of spirited conversation, mellowed by Abigail Van Allen's "splendid" dinner, Berkner proposed, "Well, Sydney, don't you think it's about time for another Polar Year?"

The others knew Berkner was referring to those previous periods of cooperative scientific observation in the high latitudes. By the timing of the first two, a third Polar Year should occur in 1982. But fifty years seemed too long a wait for enthusiasts who were also well aware of the rapid advances being made in the research tools of geophysics — radiosonde balloons to transmit weather data, radar to track them, rockets to lift scientific instruments even above the atmosphere, cosmic ray recorders, improved spectroscopes, and electronic (albeit room-sized) computers. Berkner suggested a twenty-five-year interval. "Good idea, Lloyd! Why don't we get together on that?" Chapman replied — so immediately and specifically that Van Allen believed the Britisher had already thought all this out for himself. It was Chapman who pointed out that the twenty-five-year mark, 1957–1958, would coincide with a period of maximum solar activity. Berkner later called his words "spur of the moment," but he came superbly prepared for that moment. In 1949 he had contributed the ionosphere proposal for a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study, "Antarctic Research: Elements of a Coordinated Program," a paper requested by the State Department in a renewal of polar interest. His newest report, "Science and Foreign Relations," linked international scientific cooperation and national security, with emphasis on the poles. Virtually every aspect of what was to come had precedent in his work.

Thus crystallized the concept of what would become the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Chapman's international prestige and personal initiative would go far to make the IGY a reality. Berkner, more of an "idea man," was a gifted promoter. For example, at an NAS symposium designed to "sell" the IGY to the press, government, and popular audiences, geographer Paul Siple, who by then had wintered over three times, could not reply with certainty to queries about alternate routes from the ice shelf to the polar plateau. Berkner, presiding, exclaimed, "It is an extraordinary matter that we who are living in 1954, sitting in the National Academy of Sciences, in which some knowledge of the earth presumably should be present, should discuss one of the continents, having 6 million square miles, and not know whether there are some high mountains in an area or a gentle slope available for a cat [Caterpillar tractor] train." It was a quotable plug for polar science.

These leaders' efforts brought the still-named Third Polar Year through subsidiary groups to the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), a nongovernmental umbrella organization made up of thirteen international scientific societies and forty-five countries, acting through their national academies of science. The ICSU executive board, meeting in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, enthusiastically endorsed the proposal, and the ICSU Bureau, its operating body, invited its members to join the effort. It also included the Soviet Academy of Sciences, not then an adhering group but obviously, for the country's size if nothing else, important to any worldwide scientific data gathering. When the World Meteorological Organization agreed to join in planning the "Year," it felt the polar focus was too narrow. Chapman then suggested an International Geophysical Year. The ICSU General Assembly approved this expanded scope in October 1952 and formed a special committee, the Comité Spécial de l'Année Géophysique Internationale (CSAGI — called Ca-Soggy), to coordinate it. The CSAGI elected Chapman president, Berkner vice president, and Marcel Nicolet — an authority on the chemistry of the upper air at Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute — secretary-general. Nicolet's office in suburban Brussels became the IGY headquarters. At first anticipated to run from August to August, the IGY became an eighteen-month "year," 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958, to allow completion of all planned programs and encompass the entire period of maximum sunspot activity. That period also provided a fuller span of seasons in both polar regions, where access might be difficult.

Planning for the IGY was a huge undertaking, with little precedent to guide it. The special committee urged the ICSU member nations (and others) to form national IGY committees to develop their own national programs. Naturally varying in scope according to means and interest, these programs would be coordinated for consistency and overall geographic and disciplinary coverage through ongoing efforts of the pertinent scientific unions and annual CSAGI meetings. By the time of the first CSAGI meeting in Brussels, 30 June to 3 July 1953, twenty-two nations had committees working on "specific planetary problems of the earth." By the second meeting in Rome, 30 September to 4 October 1954, thirty-six nations had detailed plans. (There would eventually be sixty-six.) About 100 of the world's leading scientists met to hammer out an integrated IGY program from the various components. Among them was a small delegation from the Soviet Union, apparently a little freer to participate internationally after Stalin's death in 1953. Their leader, Vladimir Beloussov, pushed hard to include seismology and gravity, areas of Russian strength. Numerous disciplinary, technical, and regional working groups labored throughout the conference to draft recommendations on scientific activities and stations, uniform experimental methods, and information-coordination mechanisms. By its end, Berkner recalled, the delegates had a "rather thoroughly complete" IGY program in place.

An important criterion for justifying a global effort was that the national projects require simultaneous observations over a broad area. To facilitate and amplify these synoptic measurements, an international panel with Berkner as rapporteur worked out dates and other details for concentrated scientific observations — three so-called World Days per month and periodic ten-day World Intervals for intensive data taking, especially in meteorology. The International Scientific Radio Union (URSI in French transliteration) helped set up a communications network so that last-minute World Days could be quickly implemented if, say, a solar flare or major storm suddenly developed.

A regional focus also emerged at the Rome meeting — to create geophysical profiles of the Arctic, the equatorial belt, and three pole-to-pole meridians chosen to include all the continents. Trumping these in glamour and attention were bold reaches to the earth's two profoundest unknowns. One was space, to be probed by rocket in the upper atmosphere and by earth-orbiting artificial satellite — an idea Van Allen had promoted since 1948. Five months later, NAS and NSF officials shared their anticipation that sending up a U.S. satellite (code-named LPR — long-playing rocket) would, beyond expanding geophysical knowledge, provide useful military and diplomatic leverage and "display American scientific leadership." They noted that Pravda had "publicized the Soviet intention to launch an artificial satellite," but when was not clear — during the IGY they thought "unlikely." The other great mystery was the frozen continent of Antarctica.

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In Washington in March 1953, the NAS Office of International Relations, headed by Wallace Atwood, established the United States National Committee for the International Geophysical Year (USNC-IGY, or USNC). In addition to a core of leading geophysicists, it also named subsidiary technical panels for each of the IGY scientific disciplines to review proposals from public and private institutions such as laboratories and universities and formulate their respective programs. The national committee met two or three times a year, its executive committee about monthly. Joseph Kaplan, professor of physics at UCLA, director of its Institute of Geophysics, and an authority on upper-atmospheric spectra (aurora), was tapped to chair the USNC. Berkner used his influence to have Alan Shapley, a radio propagation specialist who forecasted ionospheric disturbances at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), appointed vice chair. The self-styled "quite junior" Shapley had helped map out the World Days, and Berkner, impressed, maneuvered him into leadership of that effort and even membership on the CSAGI. In Shapley's mind, the distinguished Kaplan served effectively as the "front man"; he was the "working stiff." He must have earned high regard, as very little USNC activity occurred without his involvement. In fact, it was he whom the committee dispatched to NBS in late 1953 to lure away the much more senior Hugh Odishaw, then assistant to the director, to become executive director of the USNC-IGY. A former Westing-house radar expert, Odishaw would eventually lead a staff of forty-eight to provide administrative services and programmatic leadership for the USIGY.

Berkner, unsurprisingly, "had Antarctica on his mind" from the beginning, remembered Shapley, "and he made sure it was on our minds, too." In the fall of 1954 the USNC appointed a U.S. Antarctic Committee, though not before spirited discussion about the risk of committing to an expense so great that it might sink other programs with it if Congress balked. Siple, winning the day, called it unthinkable to leave to other countries such a vast and potentially valuable area. This committee, chaired by Laurence Gould and more often meeting in ad hoc groups, considered logistics, policies, technical planning, and leader and personnel selection. President of Carleton College, the suave Gould enjoyed friendships with senators and entrée to the White House. Prominent, constructive, and influential, he was a "wonderful, wonderful guy," according to Shapley, who also served on his committee.

Energetic, avid Harry Wexler, director of Meteorological Services at the U.S. Weather Bureau, became vice chair of the Antarctic Committee, which also included Odishaw and John Hanessian Jr., who headed the IGY Regional Programs [Antarctic] Office; Admiral Byrd; Air Force colonel and veteran polar pilot Bernt Balchen; Paul Siple, representing the Army and non-IGY Defense interests; Antarctic explorer Richard B. Black, from the Office of Naval Research; Lincoln Washburn, who headed SIPRE — the Army Corps of Engineers' Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment; Grant Hilliker of the State Department; and a few others. Finn Ronne was listed as a consultant. Admiral George Dufek was a "visitor" at first, by summer a member. Siple, who with Byrd understandably chafed at having their "Antarctic authority" snubbed by "untried newcomers," sniffed that Gould had "last been" in the Antarctic twenty-five years earlier and Wexler had never been there. For Atwood, building the Antarctic Committee was a "delicate procedure," there being "very definite factions among the Antarctic experts."

In late April 1955 Wexler was summoned to IGY headquarters and invited to be chief scientist for Antarctica. He consented, but at "gray dawn," after a sleepless night, he worried to his new diary, "what am I getting into? Am I losing 5 years of my scientific life with global meteorological problems to concentrate on a small area, to act as father-confessor to frustrated Antarctic scientists, to battle with the Navy for scientific program priorities?" Occasionally indulging in private peevishness but to others an open, hearty colleague and mentor, Wexler vowed he would "not be swallowed up by IGY" — and he never did devote himself full-time, to Odishaw's dismay. Hardworking Albert Crary, infectious science enthusiast behind what Newsweek called a "mournful moustache," later agreed to be deputy chief scientist, as well as chief scientist for Antarctic glaciology. In his mind this meant being the chief "in all but name as soon and as long as I am in Antarctica." There was nothing he wanted more, he wrote home, though he added his belief that Wexler had gotten the senior title through politics and self-promotion. Crary would spend more than two years, spanning more than the IGY, on the ice.

Significant Antarctic decisions had already been made. At its second meeting, on 1 May 1953, the U.S. National Committee had agreed to one primary and three satellite stations to sustain the IGY in Antarctica. But they needed specific locations so that detailed scientific, logistical, and financial planning could begin. USNC members met at the fledgling National Science Foundation, then in the old Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square, where they spread out a map of the polar continent on an ample conference table. A return to Little America seemed a given, in deference to the venerated Byrd and to extend the history of weather data there that went back to Amundsen. But there had never been a year-round station in the forbidding, unrevealed interior, an obvious need for geographic coverage of the globe. By now, such coverage seemed technically feasible and, thus, tempting.

Seeking scientific justification for a site, Wexler remembered that George Simpson, meteorologist on Scott's last expedition, had reported "pressure surges" that seemed to emanate from the area around latitude 80° South, longitude 120° West. Investigating that phenomenon could be defended (though it was later found baseless). Maximum auroral activity was also expected there. Nor was it lost on anyone that this region of Marie Byrd Land lay in territory unclaimed but broadly viewed as the "American sector." Observing this, Shapley, who knew the importance of the angle of the sun in ionospheric measurements, pointed to the geographic South Pole, where the zenith angle would be constant. Well, he later chuckled, if others saw strategic considerations there, too, he had first claimed the spot. Later, the Navy refused to use the advancing ice shelf at Little America as a staging area for the South Pole, since compacted snow runways could not support heavy wheeled aircraft. So the logistics base was moved to McMurdo Sound, in New Zealand's claim, where because of the nearness of Scott Base no science was planned (a policy later modified). Odishaw and Shapley helped NSF prepare the first IGY budgets for Congress based on these four U.S. Antarctic stations.

* * *

As the national polar programs rapidly developed, IGY leaders recognized the need for international consultation on Antarctic planning. Berkner, pressing this point in a letter to Nicolet in February 1955, suggested Paris as a site neutral to political differences and Colonel Georges Laclavère of France, secretary-general of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, as convener. The able and astute Laclavère duly organized the first CSAGI Antarctic Conference, which was held in early July 1955. He was elected president, Gould vice president, and Odishaw one of the secretaries. Eleven countries sent altogether forty-eight delegates (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Federal Republic of Germany, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, the Soviet Union, and the United States). Japan, newly freed from postwar occupation, sought "international moral support" (which Chapman urged) for its planned south polar expedition but could not send a delegate. The interested Union of South Africa was also absent.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Deep Freeze by Dian Olson Belanger. Copyright © 2006 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Maps and Figures,
List of Illustrations,
List of Terms and Abbreviations,
Foreword,
Preface and Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Prologue: The Call of the Ice,
Chapter 1. The International Geophysical Year: Idea to Reality,
Chapter 2. All Hands on Deck: Logistics for the High Latitudes,
Chapter 3. Gaining a Foothold: Operations Base at McMurdo Sound,
Chapter 4. Little America V: Science Flagship on the Ice Shelf,
Chapter 5. Marie Byrd Land: Crevasse Junction, Privation Station,
Chapter 6. South Pole: Dropped From the Sky,
Chapter 7. The Gap Stations: Hallett, Wilkes, and Ellsworth,
Chapter 8. On the Eve: People, Preparations, Policies,
Chapter 9. Comprehending the Cold: Antarctic Weather Quest,
Chapter 10. Looking Up: The Physics of the Atmosphere,
Chapter 11. Under Foot: Ice by the Mile,
Chapter 12. Life on the Ice: The Experience,
Epilogue: Science and Peace, Continuity and Change,
Notes,
Notes on Sources,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

"... [A] highly informative and readable narrative account of perhaps the single most striking international scientific endeavor of the twentieth century. ... [A] signal contribution to the slowly developing scholarship on polar, and especially Antarctic, history. Thanks to [Belanger's] work, we now have an essential link between the Heroic Age of dashing adventure and small science and the contemporary era of permanent occupancy and probing inquiry across the entire spectrum of Earth and atmospheric sciences."
—The Polar Record

"Historians should thank Belanger for taking on the daunting task of writing a history not only of the Antarctic parts of the IGY but also of the preparations and some of the after-effects. Belanger's account is indispensable as a lively history and as a resource for scholars."
—Journal of American History


"Dian Belanger has written an exciting and thought-provoking account of the U.S. Navy Seabees, flyers, and scientists who lived through and made the transition from the 'heroic' age to the 'scientific' age of Antarctic exploration. These mostly young men (no women were allowed on 'the Ice') risked lives and endured both cold and dark Antarctic winters and unimaginable isolation from the world to provide a U.S. presence on the vast, remote, ice-covered continent. Deep Freeze, based on countless interviews and painstaking research, is a timely and gripping account."
—John C. Behrendt, president of the American Polar Society and author of The Ninth Circle and Innocents on the Ice

"With its well-timed arrival on the eve of the International Polar Year 2007-2008, Deep Freeze, offers a welcome and thorough new examination of America's involvement in Antarctica during the IGY, often told through the words of the participants themselves."
—Jeff Rubin, author of Lonely Planet Antarctica

"An excellent historical chronology of the United States Antarctic Program and the first establishment of permanent scientific research facilities on the continent of Antarctica. Those who brought this program to life are heroes by every definition of the word. The truly amazing stories of pioneers are chronicled in this detailed and entertaining read. Dian Belanger's countless hours interviewing living heroes who accomplished Herculean tasks give us pause to remember where this all began."
—Jerry W. Marty, National Science Foundation Representative, South Pole Station, Antarctica


"With the fifty-year anniversary of the International Geophysical Year approaching, the author has done a remarkable job in researching the IGY through archival materials and interviews with some of the major individuals involved. Writing for a wide audience, she offers in-depth discussions of U.S. preparations for stations, their construction, scientific research, winterover experiences, and the formulation of the Antarctic Treaty, the glue that holds it all together."
—John Splettstoesser, Advisor to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators

"The story of the beginning of Operation Deep Freeze has finally been told by a dynamic writer and historian."
—RMC Billy-Ace Penguin Baker, USN (retired), Vice Chairman, Antarctic Deep Freeze Association

"This is a comprehensive and lively book about the people and events that transformed Antarctica into an international laboratory for science. Through their vision, courage, and willingness to work together, the people of Deep Freeze and the IGY brought about a legacy of discovery that continues today and that helps us to understand both Antarctica and the forces of global change. To tell this fascinating and important story, Dian Belanger not only used existing historical records but also added to that documentation with extensive interviews."
—Raimund E. Goerler, Chief Archivist/Byrd Polar Research Center of The Ohio State University

"Dian Belanger's account of the historical development of the early infrastructure for the American Antarctic science operation is superb. Compellingly told, the book incorporates significant research from new sources and unused collections. A must read for anyone with an interest in Antarctica and the early science it provided."
—George T. Mazuzan, NSF historian (retired)

"Dian Belanger's Deep Freeze, presents science in Antarctica with fascinating perspective, present and past, all rewarding. Well documented."
—Dick Bowers, CDR CEC USN (retired), Officer in charge of construction, McMurdo and Pole Stations, Deep Freeze I and II

From the Publisher

[A] highly informative and readable narrative account of perhaps the single most striking international scientific endeavor of the twentieth century. . . . [A] signal contribution to the slowly developing scholarship on polar, and especially Antarctic, history. Thanks to [Belanger's] work, we now have an essential link between the Heroic Age of dashing adventure and small science and the contemporary era of permanent occupancy and probing inquiry across the entire spectrum of Earth and atmospheric sciences.

The Polar Record