The Ross Dependency of Antarctica comprises that sector of the Antarctic continent between 160° east and 150 west longitude, together with the islands lying between those degrees of longitude and south of latitude 60. British exploration began with Captain Cook, and names closely linked with the Dependency include Sir James Clark Ross, Capt. R. F. Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton. New Zealand's political association with the Dependency dates from 30 July 1923 when an Order in Council of the British Government brought the territory within the jurisdiction of the New Zealand Government. By the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 no country claims actual ownership of any part of Antarctica, but New Zealand, like others, is held responsible for the administration of her sector. The responsibility is unusual in that there are no permanent settlers but, since the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58, there has been a continuous occupation of bases in the Ross Dependency sector by New Zealanders and Americans. The bases are irregularly disposed from the Pole (United States) to Cape Hallet (joint United States–New Zealand) at approximately 72°s. Scott Base (at approximately 78°s) is the main New Zealand Station and the administrative “centre” of the New Zealand Antarctic sector, notwithstanding the fact that the annual permanent establishment there is about a dozen persons. The United States main base, McMurdo, on western Ross Island 30 minutes' walk from Scott Base, “winters over” some nine times this number. The number of bases and the number of persons in the Ross Sea sector vary throughout the year, for the summer immigration increases the population by a factor as much as five or six. Other established bases are Little America and Byrd, both of the United States. Williams Air Facility, the “international” airstrip and local air base – is associated with McMurdo base and lies some four miles off shore of Ross Island on the sea ice. Permanency of settlement in Antarctica is unknown; no economic basis for occupation has as yet been found.
The “occupation” of Antarctica can be broadly described as having three phases: (1) A reconnaisance phase beginning with Captain Cook and continuing in the explorations of whalers and sealers to the turn of the century; (2) an expedition (heroic age) phase climaxed by the Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen sorties; and (3) the scientific occupation phase of today which was pioneered in the “heroic age”. Modern methods, developed to meet the requirements of the IGY programme, rely more and more on established bases, some permanent, which serve as scientific laboratories or as centres for summer field parties. By using aircraft, tracked vehicles or dog teams, these parties have furthered the primary exploration by survey, geological, and glaciological investigation.
Work in Antarctica today has three aspects: (1) The static, represented by scientific instruments and laboratories in the various bases (auroral, ionospheric, meteorological, seismic, etc.). (2) The mobile, which is field work concerned with penguins, seals, fish, birds, insects, and plants (algae, lichen, mosses, and plants of the sea) and the more spectacular field traverses during which surveyors, geologists, and glaciologists on long summer journeys explore the 5 million sq. miles of the continent. (3) The support, which is the annual maintenance, reprovisioning, and restaffing of the bases both by ship and by aircraft. This fundamental task has precedence over all other activities excepting that of rescue. Despite the growing reliability of voyages by sea and aircraft flights, there are always such hazards to be faced as storm, pack ice, radio blackout, early or late breakout of sea ice and barrier ice, and mechanical failure.
The disc-shaped Antarctic continent, with the Pole as its centre, has three major features marring its symmetry–Graham Land peninsula (known to the United States as the Palmer Peninsula) facing S. America, the Weddell Sea embayment facing the South Atlantic, and the Ross Sea embayment astride the 180° meridian. During the “open” season, the Dependency is four to five days' sailing distance from New Zealand, or 10–12 hours by air. Removal of ice would reveal a Ross Sea embayment almost reaching the Pole and perhaps linking with the Weddell Sea opposite. The coasts of the Ross embayment are approximately those of the New Zealand Ross Dependency. This Antarctic sector is largely ice-encrusted sea, having to the east an indefinite, ice-concealed coast terminating northward in the King Edward VII Peninsula, and to the west marked by a long (1,000 – plus miles), narrow (50 – plus miles) coastal mountain range 5,000 – 18,000 ft in height. These mountains run the length of Victoria Land to continue along the west and south of the Ross Ice Shelf to within 200 miles from the Pole. This radially disposed range of Antarctica, traversed in polar journeys by Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Hillary, and Fuchs, dams the great ice plateau of Antarctica (9,000-plus feet), preventing complete ice inundation of the Ross embayment. Only comparatively minor overflows like the Beardmore Glacier (probably the world's largest in volume and length) cross the range barrier to feed the Ross Ice Shelf (130,000 sq. miles) which covers the southern portion of the Ross Sea embayment.
The Ross Dependency sector, then, is largely shelf ice and sea fringed to the west and east by ice-clad coasts, just within and paralleling the 160°E and 150°w boundaries. The bulk of the continent is buried deep below the vast ice plateau broken by occasional nunataks (peaks which project above an ice sheet), whereas in the west of the Ross sector the great range is a continuously exposed line of mountains from the Admiralty Range (inland of Cape Adare) to the Queen Maud Range (100 miles from the Pole). This range contains “oases” of rock, free from ice and snow, which are veritable “windows” in the almost continuous white cover. To date, mineralogical rewards in Antarctic exploration have been negative but, as if to compensate for the paucity of terra firma in the Ross Sector, this great range which contains a number of these ice-free areas, offers the best opportunities for geological investigation in all Antarctica.
Personnel returning from the Antarctic are often asked how they enjoyed, or endured, the cold. The answer to this lies in alpine New Zealand where mountaineers or high-country shepherds often experience temperatures equivalent to those of the Scott Base summer, which fluctuate around freezing point (32°F). This is much milder than a northern United States winter. Summer, then, presents little problem to the adequately clad. In the infrequent windless conditions, it is possible to work out of doors in a woollen jersey, shirt, underclothes and tweed trousers–the form of dress affected by outside workers in New Zealand–except that multi-layered fabric boots (mukluks) are used when standing or walking in snow. For severe Antarctic conditions, the worker wears the anorak (parka with fur-lined hood) and trousers of synthetic material, often nylon, light, little-insulating, but windproof. Warmth of the body is controlled by the retention of bodily warmed air in the clothing, so that a slight breeze (2–3 m.p.h.) immediately cools one unless “windproofs” are donned to prevent the loss of warm air next to the body. Cold is rendered many times more intense with each mile per hour of wind speed. A still air temperature of, say, 20°F (12 degrees of frost) is much more comfortable than conditions at 32°F in, say, a 30-knot breeze. Wind, not the air temperature, is to be feared.
Lack of discomfort in cold is partly due to the extremely low humidity of the atmosphere. In Antarctica biting cold is absent because of this. So dry is the air that wet clothing, even though frozen, dries readily. Ice melts more by sublimation (the direct change from solid water to water vapour without the liquid stage), so that ice melt-streams are rare even near the bare rock “oases” of Victoria Land. Snow patches on rocky surfaces disappear with only a slight dampness temporarily to mark their previous existence. Wood is so dry that it readily breaks or shatters, and fire is a hazard in the tinder-dry atmosphere where the only water available is solid ice or snow.
The preservation of huts and stores, and seal or dog carcasses is remarkable as the huts of Scott and Shackleton testify. Tins of food lying outside for half a century are little rusted and, if they have been sheltered from the abrading gales, their labels are faded but readable. This land is drier than the deserts of Australia, Africa, or America.
In winter, Scott Base and Pole Station experience marked subzero temperature, –30°F and –80°F respectively which, with frequent gales or blizzards of 100 knots or more, and the winter darkness, limit outside activity. Moonlight and occasional windless conditions, however, allow the “wintering-over” personnel to move around the base and repair any damage to huts and radio aerials by wind and drift. At Scott Base the dogs are tethered outside on the nearby sea ice throughout the winter.
One result of the Antarctic low atmospheric humidity is the low precipitation. At Scott Base it is equivalent to a rainfall of but 6–7 in. At Pole Station it is only half this. This is less than that of the world's hot deserts. On the Ross Ice Shelf, accumulation is at the rate of approximately 8 in. per annum, but such scanty falls as this are sufficient to maintain the ice plateau as a 2-mile deep cap over the bulk of the continent.
Scott Base, the New Zealand headquarters in Antarctica, is established on western Ross Island, some 40 miles from the mainland. The stretch of water (in summer) between them is known as McMurdo Sound. The base has seven flat-roofed, aluminum-sheathed huts designed as refrigeration chambers which keep cold out and warmth in. Their insulated doors are of standard freezing-chamber design and they open on to a covered way of arched corrugated iron which connects the main huts. One hut is a workshop-ablutions-survey office; another is the administration-radio station-cookhouse-mess hall-recreation-cinema unit. Another hut is devoted entirely to scientific installations; still another, the generator hut-garage, has a diesel engine delivering lighting and power both for domestic and for scientific use 24 hours a day, year in year out. Other buildings surrounding the Base are a small hangar, another garage, an auroral tower, and a husky dog maternity home. This list gives an inkling of how the base functions as a tiny self-contained town (“resupplied” each summer), with its industrial and administrative districts vying for space with its suburbs, the sleeping huts. Often the transitory personnel, those there for the field season, must sleep beside a standby motor or clacking electronic device. In winter the base contains but a dozen or so “wintering over” personnel who work in comfort and “spacious” conditions, but in the summer (the field and maintenance season) the base becomes a turmoil of incoming personnel consisting of scientific and survey parties preparing for the field. In some years, if the budget is favourable, the base is enlarged.
The New Zealand leader at Scott Base is invested with the powers of a stipendiary magistrate, coroner, and postmaster. Scott Base is the Ross Dependency's official commercial radio link with the outside world by radio and radio telephone, and in summer by letter and parcel post. All mail is franked here and stamped with Ross Dependency stamps. The New Zealand radio link, and all ship and air traffic, together with field-party radio schedules, are maintained by one man who, like the cook, is tied to his job winter and summer.
For commerce this continent offers poor prospects. So expensive and unreliable is the transport link through the world's worst seas and most hazardous ice that a mineral find would need to be of extraordinary value to warrant its exploitation. Coal and radioactive ores can be more readily and cheaply obtained elsewhere. Justification for Antarctic exploration and settlement, then, is scientific curiosity and a determination to explore the world's last frontier. Strategic reasons have been cited and tourism suggested, but the scientific field is the major justification. This continent, together with its fringing oceans, represents some 10 per cent of the global surface, and it is as yet improperly known or understood.
The understanding of world radio transmission, of global earthquake shocks, and of world wind and water circulation, as well as the possibility of predicting southern hemisphere weather, are all aided by the stationing of scientists in this hitherto uninhabited spot. The list of disciplines requiring complete world coverage–which includes the Antarctic–is growing apace with the expansion of the sciences. Projects such as world magnetic and gravity surveys, and the study of climatic cycles and past and future ice ages (if the Antarctic ice were to melt, the oceans of the world would rise 200–300 ft) must be based in part on the work of Antarctic scientists. New Zealand is aware of its obligation in this respect, and its scientists in the Ross Dependency are making a small but effective contribution to world knowledge.
In 1965 more than 50 New Zealanders will proceed with various research projects, with parties at Scott Base and Hallett Station. The research programme will include further studies in upper-atmosphere physics, aurora, ionospherics, geomagnetism, and seismology.
by Ralph Hudson Wheeler, M.A., Senior Lecturer in Geography, Victoria University of Wellington.