Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Gilbert Dewart, PhD conducted on March 26, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: Today is the 26th of March, 1999. I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with Dr. Gilbert Dewart about his experiences in Antarctica.

Good afternoon, Dr. Dewart, and thanks so much for talking with me.

GD: Good afternoon, Dian. I'm happy to be here.

DOB: Tell me briefly a little about your background. I'm interested in where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and in particular any threads that might suggest you would end up in a place like Antarctica.

GD: Well, I guess we could go back to the beginning. I grew up in New York City originally. My family was from both Pennsylvania, coal mining areas of Pennsylvania and coal mining areas of Kentucky, so we're kind of Appalachian people once removed. I simply remember from my earliest visits down to the mountain areas was my interest in the earth, in rocks. I remember when I was a little kid my grandfather, who was then a mine surveyor, took me down into a coal mine. And it was just a fantastic experience to be down there and to be looking at all this black, gleaming coal all around me and hear these guys working off in the distance, you know, strange sounds, and here we were underneath of a mountain. I think that's really what hooked me on trying to learn about the earth.

In any event, I was sure I was going to be either a geologist or an engineer, something related to that line of work. And so I was very much interested in taking science courses and learning as much as I could about the earth, and I was very much interested in geography. Even when I was a little kid, I used to pore over atlases and look at maps of places.

And I do remember Antarctica—not that it caused me to want to go there, but I do remember that it's just simply the shape of that continent down at the bottom of the globe being intriguing to me. But there were other places, in fact New Zealand was very intriguing to me. There was something about the shape of those islands. And again it was kind of ironic that later I would spend so much time in New Zealand, when I was a child I was fascinated by this little funny- shaped island down there.

In any event, I ended up in science and I attended MIT and got my bachelor's degree and my master's degree there in geophysics. As I say, when I first started my undergraduate work, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into engineering or into something that had to do with geology, and eventually I was directed towards geophysics, especially I was interested in seismology and the study of earthquakes.

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And that's really how I got started, and I remained in that field, although eventually when I got to the Antarctic, I got moved over a little bit into the ice ages and glacial geology and so forth. But basically I remained a seismologist as far as my basic training was concerned.

In any event, I worked on several projects as an undergraduate, and my graduate thesis had to do with seismology. And then I went in the Army after I had gotten my master's degree, and I ended up in—actually these were the early days of ground-to-air missiles, and I ended up in anti-aircraft artillery, which was then shifting over into the missile field.

DOB: When would that've been?

GD: This was in the mid-'50s. This was the Korean era and so I kind of overlapped the Korean War era, although I actually never left this country, but I did spend a lot of time down in the New Mexico desert testing missiles. So that was where I spent a lot of my Army time. I was in the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. I went in as a private and came out as a corporal, so I didn't make any great strides in a military career.

In turned out later, interestingly enough, that the canyon where we were testing these anti-aircraft missiles in New Mexico was just about a mile from the atomic test site, and I didn't realize this until much later. I simply had the curiosity, where were we? Where was this canyon? I think I could find it on a topographic map, and I did, and it was just over the hill from the original Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was set off. Downwind from it, too, I might add. In any event, this was also kind of linked into my later career because I later got involved in seismic investigation of how to detect underground nuclear explosions.

So again, some of the threads kind of run through my life like that. The things that eventually snowball and we look back and say, hey, there's a link back there.

DOB: So how did you find out about opportunities in Antarctica?

GD: Yes, well this was while I was still in the Army, and I think I was probably getting the Transactions of the AGU, I think is probably where I saw it because I remember I was receiving that journal at that time. And there was simply an announcement. They needed people in certain fields to go to the Antarctic, and they said, "Get in touch with Albert P. Crary," and it was directed towards people with a background in geophysics. So I did, and he sent me an application form and I filled it out, and the first thing I knew I was accepted. It just went just like that. One thing led to another.

But unfortunately I was still in the Army, and so I made a request for an early release. By that time the war was over and there wasn't any great presumable need for my Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 3

services with the military at that stage, and so they let me out a couple of months early so I could make the deadline to prepare to go to the Antarctic.

So that was really how I got involved in the IGY program. I heard about it. I was interested in it. I really hadn't made up my mind about what I was going to do in my career at that time. I'd been looking at some other possibilities.

One of them, again it's kind of interesting in that one of the oil companies was working in Southeast Asia—they were looking for oil in Indonesia—and that kind of intrigued me a little bit. I was kind of interested in that part of the world and the tropics and so forth, and then at the last minute they decided they were going to shift to Libya, which at that time, of course, was a U.S. ally. In fact, I later did go through Libya on my way to various places. But all of a sudden I'd already spent two years in the desert in New Mexico, and the thought of going back to the desert again in North Africa wasn't all that appealing.

And besides, there was something about Antarctica. There was something about the mystery of this continent, this strange place that nobody knew very much about, and this would be the first really big worldwide type of scientific investigation of this unknown continent, and that really drew me in.

DOB: It didn't take you long to decide?

GD: Yes, I gave up the idea of a permanent career with an oil company, for example, for something I knew would just be a one-shot affair—it would be over in a couple of years—but I really couldn't resist it. I just had to go.

DOB: Where did you get prepared and what did you do to get prepared to go and live in Antarctica and work there?

GD: Well, as I mentioned, I got out of the Army a little bit early, and I was sent to Southern California because the job I was enlisted for was to set up a seismograph station, and this would be the first of a network of permanent seismograph stations. Now there had been a few instances in which people had set up seismographs in the Antarctic previously, but these were for limited periods of time and just at single locations. Now we were going to have a network. The major bases being established by the major participants in the IGY would have seismograph stations there. Mine would be at a particular location and I would be—I would establish it, I would set up the station, I would maintain it during the first year and then simply turn it over to somebody else, and then it would continue from then on so we would have continuous earthquake coverage of the Antarctic.

Well, for this, there was a new type of seismograph had just been developed, and it was developed by Frank Press and Maurice Ewing—Press at Caltech's seismological lab at the California Institute of Technology and Maurice Ewing at the Lamont-Doherty Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 4

Observatory at Columbia University. So this instrument was specially designed—it was what we call a long-period instrument. It was designed specifically to pick up long waves from earthquakes, what we call surface waves, and they travel through the surface areas of the earth, and by analyzing them you can find out kind of what is the outer layering of the earth—what is the structure of the outer part of the earth.

This is one of the things we especially wanted to know about Antarctica. We wanted to know about its continental characteristics. So this was a natural place to put these instruments, and our particular station was located so that it was across the continent from a highly active seismic area, and so we could expect to get a lot of earthquakes that would send waves right across Antarctica to us. And since they would be covering that path, we could analyze the path they had covered, and this would give us some idea of the structure of Antarctica.

Well, it turned out that this site was a place that at that time they called the Knox Coast, and so we thought it was going to be called Knox Station. It turned out it was later called Wilkes Station, and it really wasn't on the Knox Coast, but that was what we were first told. As I remember, some of the first packages that we addressed to be sent to the Antarctic—or to be carried to the Antarctic—had Knox written on them because nobody really knew where they were going. We didn't even know where our station was going to be at that stage, except that we knew it was on a certain sector of the Antarctic.

So my station then would be the first seismograph station in this particular part of Antarctica, and it would be the beginning of a continuing recording of earthquakes in that area. And especially for this type of instrument, it would be recording particular types of waves that are especially useful in determining what is the structure of the earth—the outer part of the earth. In other words, trying to find out to what extent is Antarctica really a continent. That was one of the big questions still at that time. Is this a bunch of islands? Is it a real continent like North America and Asia? Or is it something kind of in between? Is it just a great big pile of ice with a few islands under it? We didn't really know at that time. So this was kind of basic research, just trying to basically find out some very, very fundamental geological questions.

DOB: So you knew before you went that that's where you would be going?

GD: Yes. As soon as I got out of the Army I went to Washington, D.C., and I saw Dr. Crary there and we talked over what the project is all about and what I would be expected to do and so forth.

DOB: Were there counterpart stations then on the other side?

GD: Yes. There were other stations set up at other American bases, and other countries also had comparable instruments. Not the same ones. As far as I know we were the only ones that had the Press-Ewing instrument, but the Russians had a long-period instrument Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 5

also, for example, for the same type of research. So this was part of a network of stations that would give us coverage of the Antarctic for answering some basic questions. Not so much just for picking up earthquakes as for looking at it from a point of view of long-term geological research.

DOB: I want to come back to that. But let me back up for just a minute. I'm interested in how you got there, to Antarctica, and what it was like. Were you on a ship or a plane?

GD: We went down by ship.

DOB: Which one?

GD: It was the Northwind, and I remember it very well. I remember that day because I had to go to several different sites to talk to people who were involved in my program. The last one was, of course, at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and then I left from there—now at that time my family was living in Northern California, so I was able to make a stop at home, say goodbye in San Francisco, and take off.

In this case I was carrying quite a bit of material with me, and so I took a train—I remember I took the Shasta Daylight—I took a train from San Francisco up to Seattle, and that's where I boarded my ship.

I met Carl Eklund, who was going to be the station leader at Wilkes Station which was the station when they finally decided on the name of it, and we boarded the Northwind in Seattle. That's a Coast Guard icebreaker which was just absolutely crammed and packed with people and equipment of all kinds. Now of course a lot of the equipment was going by cargo vessel, but even so they put just about everything they could on the Northwind also. And there were many people aboard, scientists and Navy people and just about anything they could get on the few ships that were going down there, so it was very, very cramped quarters.

I remember I was in a triple-decker bunk just over the drive shaft of the screws of the vessel, and you could hear this grinding going on all the time all night long. You got used to it after a while, but it was very, very noisy. Very, very cramped, very, very noisy, very, very stuffy, very hard to get out. I was in the upper deck, so every time I woke up suddenly, I had to be careful I didn't bang my head against the overhead just a few inches above my head.

DOB: So did it get noisier as you got farther south?

GD: Yes. It got worse and worse, yes. But again, I was used to military life by this time so this didn't bother me all that much. I was just coming out of the Army and I was used to cramped quarters. And in particular the work that I'd been doing did put me into small isolated stations where we had radar sites or missile firing installations or testing Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 6

facilities. So this was not too different from what I had been doing for the last few years. I wasn't looking forward to any particular problems of spending a lot of time in an isolated place with a few people that you had to learn how to get used to.

I don't know whether that had anything to do with my being chosen or not. To what extent my background counted—of course I did have a background in geophysics. I was used to this type of life. Maybe that's how I got chosen, because I have no idea of what the criteria were that caused me to be chosen for the expedition.

DOB: Were you aware of psychological testing going on?

GD: Yes.

DOB: Did you have some?

GD: Yes, we certainly did.

DOB: Well, tell me about the ocean as you got farther and farther south on an icebreaker over the screws.

GD: Well, of course you've got to remember, an icebreaker is not built for stability on the open ocean, and it's kind of a bathtub-shaped vessel. A couple of days after we came out through the Straits of Juan de Fuca up in Puget Sound into the North Pacific, we hit our first big storm—a big North Pacific storm—and it rocked and it rolled from side to side.

Now I had never spent any significant time at sea before that at all. So this was again really my first introduction to being on a vessel at sea for any length of time, and I got used to it very fast. At first I felt a little bit uneasy, but I never really got sick. And after a while, it became just a part of life. And in fact I remember actually enjoying it after a while, you know, kind of being rocked—rocked in the cradle of the deep, as they say. It lulled me to sleep at night. In fact [laughs] I wish I could sleep as easily these days as I could then.

DOB: Well, what happens when you wake up and look at icebergs and then you have to start breaking that ice?

GD: Well, yes. Of course we headed south across the equator where we had a great big ceremony, you know, for first-timers. And then we got to New Zealand, spent a little time in New Zealand, and picked up some Australians who we were going to be taking south for transfer to another vessel to be taken to their station. So we had an even larger, and jollier crew I might add, once we left New Zealand, and then we started heading south.

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And again, all this was totally new to me. The tropical Pacific was new to me, New Zealand was new to me, but again New Zealand was a little archipelago that I'd had my eyes on since I was a child, and yet just by chance, I didn't plan it that way, but here I was in New Zealand, and it was a great thrill to be on these islands. I used to have fantasies about them. I would have imaginary people living in New Zealand when I was a little kid, and here I was myself really there. It was just a pinch me, you know, type of thing.

So anyway, then we started heading south. Then we hit the Antarctic Convergence and we started seeing lots of life—lots of life on the ocean. And then we hit the ice. And again, this was totally new to me. I'd never seen sea ice before, and I'd never seen icebergs before, and it was just fantastic. Just amazing to see these things that you'd seen pictures of or you've read about and to actually be there to see them.

And then you started seeing penguins and started seeing the various sea birds. Of course we were followed by albatrosses across the Pacific, but now we saw the skuas and the snow petrels and all these fantastically beautiful birds, and we started seeing whales. Once in a while we'd see whales surfacing and so on, and then the seals. Of course I'm not a biologist, I'm a hard rock type of person, but this was just so amazing.

I can still remember to this day, I remember the first time seeing that iceblink over in the distance beyond the horizon and see the reflection off of the ice, and then everybody comes up to the bow of the ship and looks over, and then you see the ice coming into view. It's just a revelation. It's just fantastic.

DOB: What does it look like, this ice?

GD: Well, white. The dark blue water and then the white ice on top of it and the light blue sky overhead. And it's just so fantastically beautiful and pure, and no sign of humanity—we are the only living things around there that are human—you know, the only human beings. Here's this huge human-made machine, this clanking icebreaker breaking through it, but it's completely surrounded by nature on all sides for thousands of miles. And just that idea of isolation, of being in this totally new place, was amazing. And as I say, it was one of the most revelatory and exciting episodes in my life.

DOB: Where did you go first?

GD: Well, we went into the Ross Sea, and one of the things we had to do, we had to go to McMurdo Sound and pick up some equipment there. And then we were going to take part in the establishment of another base, Hallett Station, near Cape Hallett, near Cape Adare near the entrance to the Ross Sea. Well, it turned out that we had some problems in the ice, and we got caught in a big storm and the Northwind suffered some damage. So we went back to McMurdo Sound, we had another trip back to McMurdo Sound, and there we were transferred to the Glacier, the U.S. Navy icebreaker Glacier, which was a Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 8

larger icebreaker. And we went with the Arneb, the attack cargo vessel, then to Cape Hallett and helped to establish that station.

DOB: It must be a little scary to be on a ship that's been damaged in a storm.

GD: Yes indeed. It was very interesting and I remember it was kind of a joke because we did have some journalists aboard, and they were sending back some very alarming Titanic stories, we called them, about icebergs about to crush us and so on. But it was dramatic and it was interesting. Here we were held in the grip of the ice with an iceberg heading for us and this type of thing. But it came out okay.

As I say, we got out of there, but the vessel did need repairs so we had to go back. But this enabled us to go to McMurdo twice and had a chance to stop and see some of the old huts—of course now they've been preserved as historical sites, but they were in very dilapidated condition at that time—the huts of the old explorers from the heroic age, the Scott and Shackleton huts. So we got a chance to visit those and we went down to Scott Base and met Sir Edmund Hillary, for example. So this was interesting. We met the Brits and the New Zealanders and all these different people that were down at McMurdo at that time. So that was also very interesting and very exciting.

DOB: This would've been in late 1956?

GD: Yes. We were down there during the summer of '56-57. Of course we were there to get it ready for the IGY, which would start in the middle of 1957 and carry over to the end of 1958. So we had to get everything done. We had to be on the ice, establish our station, be ready to start our scientific programs by the middle of the next year. So we were getting afraid. Now this was kind of delaying us a little bit with this moving back and forth and having to help set up Hallett and so forth, and of course we had no idea what we'd encounter when we got over to our sector—you know, how long it would take us to get in. We already had our baptism by ice, and I remember we were quite concerned about the time factor and getting our program started on time.

DOB: And how tough was it? Did you run into trouble over on the Knox Coast?

GD: It turned out we did, yes indeed. Once we got over there, we started heading in to the coast, and we called this—now this name has recurred several times, and I'm sure everybody uses it when they encounter a lot of icebergs, but we called it iceberg alley. And we went down this lane surrounded by icebergs, and we made several sorties or several attempts to get in to our area, the Windmill Islands, this little group of islands and little rocky peninsulas jutting out from Wilkes Land from this area that Charles Wilkes had passed back in the 1840s with the American exploring expedition. So we were heading for this old landfall—you know, this was American turf down there. This is where the Americans had been before, albeit a long time before, and the Russians were Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 9

not very far away from us, of course. They were over at Mirnyy. Only a couple hundred miles away the Russians were setting up their major base.

In any event, one of the things that surprised us when we got there was the Russians had already been there ahead of us. They had stopped by briefly and had left a little note in a bottle type of thing on the shore. But in any event, just getting there was very, very difficult. Later when I talked to the Russians about it, they had had the same problem. They had a lot of iceberg and sea ice problems.

But again, we had this big powerful Glacier icebreaker, and we made several attempts. We got into ice we simply couldn't penetrate or at least not in any reasonable amount of time, so we went around and came back and tried another approach. So we made several attempts to get in, and we finally got through. But again, it was very, very thick ice and a lot of icebergs. And we were starting to get worried, not that we were in any particular danger so much, but that we were going to be late, that we were going to be delayed getting in there, if we got in at all. We didn't know if we could even get in at all.

DOB: Well, in fact the site was not chosen until very late in January. Offloading began on February 1, according to the reports, and construction was completed and the base dedicated and the ships left by the 16th of February, just hardly more than two weeks.

GD: Yes. Obviously it was completed officially, but there was an awful lot to be done still after that. Things were laid down on the beachhead, and we were shifting stuff around for a long time after that.

DOB: Well, tell me about those—

GD: But the buildings were constructed and the Seabees did a marvelous job. The mobile battalion going in there did a fantastic job of getting those things done in a short period of time.

DOB: What was your responsibility during those hectic few weeks?

GD: Well, probably common laborer. First of all, we had to get the station set up, and we had to be ready for the winter and we had to be dug in. So I couldn't really start on establishing my seismograph station until the base got completed. So we had to pitch in, you know, it was an all-hands type of operation, and whatever we could do, the civilian scientists who were working there, to facilitate and speed up that operation was really necessary. But as I say, it went by very, very fast and they did such a good job and they did it so fast and everybody worked together on it, that we did get to work on our scientific projects very, very soon. So it really was remarkable that we got that thing going.

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DOB: Well, Wilkes Station is located in one of the few places in Antarctica that's actually outside the Antarctic Circle.

GD: Yes.

DOB: And I believe Wilkes Station is just about on it.

GD: Yes. The station itself is just outside of the circle. Right.

DOB: And photographs indicate that even in winter there was relatively little snow there, and in the summertime there's bare ground and open water, temperatures were fairly warm, about -24 to about 41 or so, no crevasses anywhere nearby. It sounds like it might've been a fairly cushy spot in Antarctica to have a polar adventure. And my question is, was it? And what were the primary natural hazards at Wilkes?

GD: It was a pretty nice place if you didn't go looking for trouble, but unfortunately our job was to look for trouble, so we went to find the crevasses. It was an easy walk up the ramp to the ice sheet behind the station, except that during the wintertime the very fact that the ice did melt meant that there were deep gullies, and some of these gullies were flowing underneath of the snow cover. So whereas we didn't have crevasses there, you could find yourself falling down into a snow gully and be carried off by the raging torrent. So that was one of the things we had to look out for.

Another thing was that we did have very violent storms that would come up—very strong blizzards. Again, we were subject to the usual drainage winds, the katabatic winds which come down off the continent. But also, since we were on the shore, we were subject to cyclonic storms coming along the coast, and these would bring very strong blizzard conditions and sometimes some of the most fantastic drops in pressure.

Now I hadn't had all that much experience in meteorology, although I had had some exposure to it, but some of the people there who had worked under fairly extreme weather conditions before—like Rudi Honkala had worked on top of Mt. Washington, a notorious place in New England for very, very severe weather—showed me after one of our blizzards the barometric pressure, the barograph record, and it showed a vertical drop. In other words, the pressure would be going along and all of a sudden the bottom would drop out from under the pressure when the storm arrived.

But you could see it. You could see it coming. You'd see all the snow coming up, just rising up over the ice cap, and then you could see it coming towards you and coming towards you, and then it would hit you at about eighty miles an hour, and all of a sudden everything would be covered by blowing snow.

So we did have very, very strong winds, but then again, if you look at the average winds there, they certainly don't compare with places like Commonwealth Bay further along the Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 11

coast, Home of the Blizzard-type places, where you get constant winds. But when the wind did come, it was very, very strong.

So we'd get periods of beautiful, dry, warm days, very, very still, and then a big storm would come up, and we would just be immersed in snow. And then we'd get great big drifts—you know, we had put the buildings in, and again, we really didn't know what type of conditions we would get there, and it turned out that we wished we had put in some tunnels between the buildings, because it turned out that the drifts would form in just the wrong places, in other words just the places where they would block passage from one building to another.

So we didn't get very much of a fall of snow there, but we'd get all this snow blown down from the interior, and it would pretty well cover the base, mainly because the base acted as a block to the winds and so that's where it would be deposited. So we did have quite a bit of snow shoveling. We would be digging out for quite a long time after every one of these blizzards.

DOB: How often did you get them?

GD: Well, during the wintertime, every few weeks we'd have a major storm coming in. But again, as I say, on the average we'd have an awful lot of very calm days, extremely calm days, and then a storm would come in and you'd have blowing snow, and then we'd come out and then we'd have to spend a couple of days digging ourselves out.

DOB: Did you ever get caught away from safety during such a storm?

GD: Well, very early, safety was emphasized. And of course here we had our station scientific leader, Carl Eklund, who had been in the Antarctic before. He'd been down there with Byrd during the 1940 expedition, and he was well aware of these types of conditions. So we had lifelines set up, and we did have ropes connecting the buildings, and we had an outer perimeter so that if you wandered out there, you would know you were getting out into a dangerous area. So that was pretty well laid out. We had the lifelines out there, and you couldn't very well miss what was the outer limits of the base.

And then again, when the spring came—we weren't in a position to be able to put in any tunnels before that—but eventually we did get around to putting in kind of little breezeways you might say, or blizzardways, between the buildings.

DOB: Why weren't those tunnels built in the first place? Did you run out of time?

GD: Well, again, yes, we were in a tremendous rush and it didn't seem to be a major problem at that time. We just had a lot of other things on our mind as far as that goes. We didn't realize that we'd have a bunch of snow put between the buildings that we'd have to get rid of. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 12

DOB: Did you have a winter night at Wilkes?

GD: Well, it's right on the edge. It's right on the circle, so you get one day of the year in which the sun comes right down to the horizon and then circles all the way around. And then in the middle of winter, you have one day of the year in which it just pokes up above the horizon and then goes back down again, and then you don't see it for twenty-three-and-a-half hours. So we were at that place where you have one white night and one long night essentially at that astronomical location. But it did get very, very dark. Now again, we didn't have the long months of total darkness that you get at some of the further south stations in the interior.

Of course one thing about the Antarctic that softens the impact of the darkness a little bit is that because of your location, of course you have these months and months of darkness, or near darkness as in our case, but also the sun is not very far away. It's just behind the curve of the earth, so you get long twilights and that tends to make up for it. You don't see the sun, but it doesn't get totally black. So this alleviates it a little bit.

But again, as I would say, we didn't have the severe situation of the light deficit type of psychological situation perhaps that you would at stations where you were underground or under snow throughout much of the year.

In fact I seldom missed a day in which I didn't go outside. I used to go out and run with some of the dogs. We had a dog team there, and a couple of my favorites—there was one dog or a couple of them that were my favorites—and we would just go out and run, just for exercise, run around the base. And I'd run along and the dog and I would just go out there and run for a couple of miles and come back again.

And as I say, unless there was a blizzard going on, even in the middle of winter there was enough twilight if the sun wasn't up. I probably wouldn't have time to do it when the sun was actually up, but there was enough twilight to be able to run around the base in that kind of half darkness.

DOB: Carl Eklund, the scientific leader at Wilkes, wrote that "From the beginning," and this is a quote, "our men claimed Wilkes as the number one station in Antarctica." Do you agree with that statement? And to what do you attribute the overall truth of it, if you do?

GD: Well, I would hate to make any invidious comparisons. I'm sure everybody thought that their station was the number one station. I do know that we had very high morale. It was a very congenial group of people, and the individuals got along for the most part on an individual basis pretty well, and the civilians vis-a-vis the Navy people in general got along very well.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 13

And as I say, I think morale was high. Partly this was due to Carl Eklund himself. He was a very good leader. He was a very easygoing, lenient kind of guy who, when a decision really had to be made and the law had to be laid down, he didn't hesitate to do it. But he was a type of person who would give you a lot of leeway and didn't try to interfere in the projects.

His goal was to make sure that all the science was done and that was what he was there to facilitate. He would get rid of any obstructions or make things as easy for the scientists as possible. He was there as the scientific leader, and he wanted to see that the science was done, and he would do anything that was necessary to help our programs along. And that's what we were there for, obviously, to carry out our projects, to get the program under way, to make sure that it worked. And we knew we could count on him, and we knew that we could count on the Navy people to support us because they were very well versed in what their goal was, which was to help us out, to get our program off the ground and keep things going.

And there were no real fights—again, I can't speak for other stations, but as far as personality problems are concerned, when you have a very small group which is held together in a very small area, obviously there can be interpersonal friction. And again, maybe we were simply fortunate in the sense that we didn't have any major problems. Of course, obviously you have the occasional bit of ill temper or friction between individuals sometimes occurs, but it was something we got over very easily. In other words there were no grudges. There were no long-term feuds or grudges or anything of that nature.

So aside from, as I say, the usual type of thing you would expect when you have a group of people pressed together under those circumstances for a long period of time, I would say that maybe we were fortunate in that the personalities involved were those of people who were able to deal with this situation and maybe head off any problems. They were very aware people. Everybody who was at the station, really, they were savvy people, let's say. They were with it. They understood that there would be trying times, and I think everybody made an effort to get along. And it wasn't any great problem to get along, because for the most part they were very congenial people. DOB: There were no cultural differences between the Navy people and the civilians?

GD: No, I didn't find that at all. In fact, I found that there was quite a bit of bonding across the Navy/civilian lines there, and people would become very good friends regardless of what their organizational background was. So again, as I say, this may simply have been that we were fortunate in that we had just the right personalities there that they were able to make it together.

DOB: Eklund said that you were good housekeepers. He said housekeeping was shared and maintained at a high standard. Is that true?

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 14

GD: [Laughs] Well, I don't know. Again, I'm kind of a natural slob myself. I'm not the best housekeeper, but again, probably coming out of the Army and being forced to be something of a housekeeper, this was not too much of a problem for me. And I remember I used to get into kind of mock contests with the Navy. I was Army, you know, or just out of the Army and they were Navy guys, you know, and we would kid around about that quite a bit, but it was all done in good fun. And I say, we enjoyed the repartee between Army and Navy, for example.

But as far as other people, of course people came from various backgrounds—from quite different backgrounds—but I think they caught the spirit of kind of maintaining things. For some people it was a totally new experience of being in an isolated site like that and having to live with other people, but everybody kind of caught the spirit of it very well, and we realized that after all, we were isolated. We had to make it there together until the ships arrived, and we had to be very, very careful that nothing went wrong.

And we were well aware of that, and again, Carl kept us aware of that. He had plenty of old Antarctic explorer stories to tell us about things that had happened and gone wrong in the past. Again, this is one of the values of having a man like him there in that he did have this experience, and he was a man of pretty good breadth of vision and able to get along with people pretty well. So this was helpful, too, in having somebody who could remind you of things that can go wrong and how you really have to keep a pretty tight ship under those conditions.

DOB: Can you give an example of his stories about what could go wrong?

GD: Well, he told us about the Byrd expedition which he had been on, and how sometimes people would lose their mittens, their gloves, and things like this if they weren't careful. It's very easy—for example, suppose you're doing something that requires very careful hand work and it's very, very cold out there and blowing, and you take off your gloves. Now of course we had special arrangements for having your gloves attached to your parka, for example. But still and all, it's very easy to take something like that, throw them down, start working on something and get carried away and then look around and it's gone. Okay. So there you are and you have no mittens—you have no gloves. Of course you can always plunge them into your parka, but then that becomes difficult if you have to climb on something and so forth.

So it's a good idea to always keep track of all your accoutrements that you need to keep yourself alive and healthy in the Antarctic. And again, he mentioned cases like this where people were severely embarrassed, let's say, by not having all of their gear handy when they needed it. So we'd watch things like that. He kept us aware of things like that and to make sure you're well dressed when you go out. Make sure you hold onto everything you're going to need when you go out. And as I say, he reiterated that over and over again.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 15

DOB: Let's talk about your work as a seismologist. You've mentioned a little bit about that, but I'm—well, just tell me about your seismology work in the IGY context and in particular how it meshed with the overall IGY goals.

GD: Well, one thing to remember about the IGY is that a lot of it was oriented toward space. In other words, outer space or the atmosphere. Atmospheric sciences, space sciences. Remember on the base there we had meteorologists, we had upper atmospheric physicists looking at the ionosphere, we had an aurora observer to look at the aurora australis, the southern lights. So a lot of the geophysics that was part of the geophysical year was atmospheric physics and space physics.

But I was doing solid earth physics, and we did have glaciology going on, looking at the glaciers, trying to understand the glaciers, and actually, organizationally, I was with the glaciology group. But I was there to set up a seismograph station to record earthquakes and especially record certain types of waves generated by earthquakes that are of use in determining the structure of the earth.

So my first task, of course, was to go out there and install my station. I had three instruments which had to be aligned properly, essentially orthogonally, that is, at right angles to each other, so I had to have the help of a surveyor. I had to line them up. I had to know precisely which way was north and which way was east, and I had a vertical instrument. And so putting these instruments in, leveling them, making them level, bolting them down—I had rock bolts that I put them in to secure them—I found good secure rock and that's one thing we had there, at least. One of the problems, of course, in the interior is if you're going to put in a seismograph station, it's going to be on ice, and the ice is always shifting. I didn't have to worry about that. I was on good solid rock. But I did have to make sure my rock was planed off so it was perfectly level. So there was quite a bit of adjusting and bolting down and securing the instruments.

And then I had to have an instrument shelter, and I had to set up a recording device and make sure that it wouldn't be environmentally affected. Remember, we would get buffeted by very strong winds, and so everything we put up there had to be wind-proof.

And not only that, as I mentioned, and this I didn't realize to be a problem—this is one of the things that I didn't anticipate was these fantastic changes in atmospheric pressure, and they would affect my instruments. The pressure changes would disturb the instruments so that I could see when they occurred. I could tell the meteorologist exactly when this storm arrived just as well as they could with their barograph, because it would show up on my instruments because the change in pressure would cause the instruments to move off scale. So I could see when the storm started. Well fortunately they didn't move off scale enough to give me a problem with my readings, but it certainly was visible, and this was something I attempted to remedy. I had to put in a little bit of countering on the instruments to take that into account.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 16

Another thing I didn't realize was that I would have something else set up that I had encountered when I was doing some of my research previously when I was working as a graduate student. I was kind of working indirectly for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and one of the things I was doing there was looking at various types of seismic oscillations including those which occur along the shoreline, what we call a seiche. That is a standing wave that is set up in an enclosed body of water. Well, we had a lot of enclosed bodies of water right nearby. The Windmill Islands is just a complex of little islands and bays and peninsulas and so forth, and it turns out we got a lot of little standing waves set up in these inlets and that put a lot of noise into my recordings.

In fact, so much—it was so interesting that later on going beyond the original research that we were doing on the long waves coming across the Antarctic from earthquakes—I also got involved in a project to make use of the noise and see what that would tell us. You know, make use of everything on the records. But anyway that's another story. Trying to make a virtue of a necessity because there wasn't much we could do about this noise except to realize that it was going to be there and something you had to deal with.

So there were a lot of technical problems, in other words. It turned out to be a very noisy site because it was near the ocean, because we did have the storms, even though it was on good solid bedrock. Also, of course, there would be station noise which I avoided by having my little instrument shelter far away from the rest of the base.

[End Side A, Tape 1]

[Begin Side B, Tape 1]

GD: So I set up my seismograph instrument shelter quite a distance from the base so I could avoid at least all that human-made noise and commotion, which again was a little bit of a problem when I had to go out and service it during one of the blizzards. So again, I laid out a lifeline out there and so forth. I was able to get the operation under way by the deadline, and we were recording earthquakes pretty soon.

DOB: Are earthquakes common in Antarctica?

GD: Actually up until the IGY, of course, there really hadn't been a worldwide network of seismograph stations, so we didn't really know how seismic Antarctica would be except that it was known there hadn't been any large earthquakes down there. Large earthquakes that would've been recorded worldwide simply didn't exist down there, but we didn't know if there'd be relatively small earthquakes.

One of the things we found was that Antarctica was essentially what we would call aseismic, that is, there are very few earthquakes there. That is what you might expect. Most of the continent is pretty solid block of shield area, core continental area that has Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 17

not been deformed significantly for a very, very long time geologically. West Antarctica shows a little more structure, more recent geological activity, and there is a very active arc leading up toward South America—the Scotia Arc up there where you have volcanos and earthquakes and so forth. But much of the continent proper is pretty stable, and it turned out to be that way seismically.

Now we did get some what we started calling cryoseisms, or cold quakes, and this presumably had to do with movement of the ice. Maybe the calving of an iceberg or a sudden slip of a glacier, the opening of a crevasse on a glacier, things of this nature which don't make very large earthquakes but are certainly interesting, and they represent the vibrational activity going on.

Now my instruments, as I mentioned, were not so much designed for actually picking up earthquakes, especially small ones. They addressed a part of the seismic spectrum that's very, very long, and very small short-period earthquakes probably wouldn't be picked up by these instruments. In other words that was not their purpose. Their main purpose was quite different. But nevertheless we did pick up moderate-sized earthquakes that were occurring in the ocean or not too far from Antarctica.

So my instrumentation would not have picked up relatively small earthquakes a considerable distance away, say in the middle of the Antarctic continent. But it would've picked up anything fairly large on the Antarctic continent, and that we simply didn't do. We didn't find any large earthquakes there, and as the years have gone by, we found that this is indeed true. There are a few earthquakes down there, but again it's a pretty quiet place. It's pretty much quiescent as you might expect. As I say, it's a relatively stable part of the earth's crust.

DOB: What did you learn about the earth's crust? GD: Well, what we did learn was mainly from picking up distant earthquakes, very large distant earthquakes. For example, I had a very large earthquake in Chile that occurred while I was there. And this earthquake's waves came right down across the ocean between South America and Antarctica and across pretty much the breadth of the Antarctic continent down to where we were. And when we went back and analyzed this, this gave us a very good picture of the crustal structure coming right across pretty much a profile of the continent.

It gave us the idea, we can kind of say, in a sense from a geological point of view that Charles Wilkes, who gave his name to our station, really outlined the continent. In other words, other people had seen Antarctica before he got there, but he sailed along it for a long enough distance to say hey, this is a big chunk of land—this is probably a continent. And we kind of could say the same thing. When Frank Press and I looked over these records and looked at what we had, we could kind of say the same thing that in a sense that hey, this is really a continent. It's really thick crust. It's really thick Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 18

continental crust all the way across, or practically all the way across, and so what we've got here is it's a real continent.

And one of the big questions about Antarctica was how continental is it? Is it a real, big, thick continent like the other continents, and the answer was yes to that. And that was one of the first things Press and I did when I got back was we wrote a joint paper laying these findings out.

DOB: How much of that was postulated before?

GD: Well, it was a guess before. People probably thought that well, it's probably true that this is what it was. I think probably most people would have guessed what our results would be, but we didn't know for sure.

DOB: How much have we learned since the IGY about that question of the continent, or did you pretty much create the map at that time?

GD: Well, at least we—we didn't fill in all the details. We had several sections across the continent as a result of these long-period wave traverses, in a sense. Now, of course, we know much more because we've done a lot more, not only making use of these what we call teleseismic or distance seismic types of studies, but also of course there's been a lot of work on the ground now. And we've actually been able to do deep seismic sounding and finding where the base of the crust is in Antarctica. So we have a much more detailed picture today than we had at that time.

As I say, at that time we just had the general outline that this is indeed a continent. Now we have a very detailed picture of just where the edges of it are, how thick it is, and so forth. So we know a lot more obviously today than we did then, but we gave the general outline at that time.

DOB: So nothing that has been learned since has contradicted what you—

GD: No, it just kind of filled in the details.

DOB: Did you make use of explosives? I know other seismologists out in the field were blasting holes all the time. Did you?

GD: Yes, we did. But again, that was my own private project. It was not something that I had been called upon to do, but I decided to do it anyway because we did have plenty of explosives around and I did have some experience with explosives. And the Navy was very eager to do something like that, and so we did it. So I set up some very large blasts up on the ice cap. Again, my particular equipment was not designed to do really this type of thing. So it was kind of iffy that we would get any results out of this, or very significant results, but it was worth doing—it was worth trying. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 19

But it was a major project, and we had to go up on the ice cap and set this off and set up the timing of it and try to see if we got any results. Again, it worked. We got off the blast and we got the timing pretty well, but the record of it, as I guessed, would not be all that good. We didn't get very much. We got a little impulse indicating that this blast had occurred, but not enough to give us—you could just kind of measure on it that the velocities of the waves were about what you would expect coming through the ice and the rock at the edge of a continent. But as I say, it didn't give us any kind of detail. In the best of all possible worlds, I was hoping that I'd get some kind of a detailed picture of what was between the ice cap and us, but it didn't pan out that way. And I didn't really expect it to. It just showed that we could pick up a blast of a certain size up on the ice, and it would come through at about the velocity you would expect. But beyond that, it didn't give us anything very profound. But we did try. At least we tried.

We did it several times, first trying one and then we made an even bigger one and made a huge blast out there, which turned out to have a problem because the charge didn't go off. We had a failure, and so I had to make sure that the wiring was connected, and so this is where I swam down to the bottom of our pit. So anyway, we had dug out a huge pit, okay? We had put the charge down at the bottom of the pit, and we'd filled it in because we wanted to contain the charge. So we put all this loose snow down into it.

Well, we had a misfire. Someone had to go down and make sure that the fuse was inserted in the primer. So I swam down—I actually swam down because it was slush, it was sort of slush, and I had to just kind of swim down through it and follow the line down being very careful, because of course one of the things I didn't want to do is set off any static electricity that might cause it to go off. So I actually swam down into the pit, found that the fuse had pulled out, so I put it back in again, swim back out again, and then we set it off and we had this gigantic blast which of course blew all the slush up into the sky, and that was the big one. That was a big charge, several hundred pounds of high explosive that we did pick up on the seismographs.

But again, as I say, it was just something I felt we had to do, or we should do, because we had the explosives, we had the capability, we had access to the ice cap, so let's do it. But it didn't come up with anything very significant. It was just kind of what you'd expect.

DOB: How deep are you talking about swimming?

GD: Well, I don't know exactly. It was several human heads high. We dug this thing down deep enough so that we were down in a pit that you had to climb out of, and then we filled it all in with the snow that we dug out of it.

DOB: How long did this take you to do?

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 20

GD: Well, it was quite a while because I was very careful. [Chuckles] Kind of following the leads down, you know, making sure not to touch them, but kind of swimming my way down into the slush.

DOB: But you can breathe.

GD: Yes. Well fortunately I could. Yes. It was open enough so that I could breathe. But they had a lifeline on me. If anything went wrong, they could've pulled me out. So they had a lifeline around my waist if it looked as if I was going to be swallowed up in all the slush. So anyway, like I say, it did work. But those things do happen.

DOB: It sounds like something you'd only do when you were very young.

GD: Yes. Exactly. There was a lot of other digging done, and I presume you will be talking to people like Dick Cameron who was in charge of the glaciology section. They, of course, dug the deep shaft up on the ice cap. Now he can tell you about that, of course. But there they did get involved in some very violent weather because up there they had very low temperatures and very high winds and a very strong windchill factor. We used to joke about being on the banana belt, of course, right down at Wilkes Station. But up there that was really very severe conditions.

Once we had to go on a rescue mission up there because we had a three-day rule, seventy-two hours. If you don't hear from the people in that period of time, regardless, you've got to go in and see if something's gone wrong. Now it's probably just that they couldn't make radio contact, but you have to go. So that happened, and I went in on a rescue party once when they hadn't had any contact with them. And we got caught in very severe blizzard conditions on the way up there, and we had to stop for quite a long period of time to wait until things cleared up.

It was kind of funny because when we got there—they'd been sitting there for now all by themselves maybe four days. It was about fifty miles up there from the ice cap, and it was at about four thousand feet or about thirteen hundred meters. So they were up there isolated for all that period of time, and then all of a sudden it's sort of like, you know, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. Why do you say these things? But anyway, we just came up and knocked on the door, you know, knock knock. [Laughs] Who's there? And they just about jumped through the roof when they heard this knock from out of nowhere. It was really funny. But they were okay. It's just they hadn't been able to make contact with their radio.

DOB: Let's talk a little bit about this inland ice cap station because it wasn't in the plan—

GD: No. No. That's right.

DOB: —as I understand it and— Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 21

GD: We did a lot of things that weren't in the plan, it turned out.

DOB: Yes. It seemed like Carl Eklund always had, well, why don't we do this, why don't we do that? And why was this unplanned ice cap station put in and not begun until March, which is getting pretty well into wintertime. Tell me about that. What was the thought behind it?

GD: Well, first of all we had Site One, and as I said, I worked part-time with the glaciologists. I had my seismograph station and I had to maintain that and I had to read the records. But, as I say, once the intense work of getting the station installed, making sure everything was operating all right, once I was on a routine basis there, I was confined by the fact that I had to change the records and read them every day.

But it turned out Dick Berkley, the geomagnetic observer down there, and I had a little agreement, and if one of us needed some time he could fill in for the other because we did pretty much the same type of thing. In other words, our instruments were not all that different. He was reading magnetic variations and I was reading seismic signals, and we had very similar types of recording devices. So Dick and I could kind of trade off, and if he wanted to go off and do something and let me take over his station for a few days, I could do that and he could do mine. And I still feel bad because I was kind of ahead there. I still owed him time when the year was up, and I still feel I owe him that time.

But in any event, when I had time, I would go out with the glaciologists and work with them. And we had several projects. One of them was to measure the rate of movement of the Vanderford Glacier, a very large glacier coming down to the ocean south of us. So this was a matter of going out on the ice, on the glacier, and setting up stakes and then surveying them in and then seeing how fast they moved. It was a fairly simple thing. Glaciers move and the stakes will move, but you have to find a fixed point from which to measure them, of course, because everything's moving. This is a place of relative movement. The whole continent is in motion.

So we found a place, a nunatak, a rocky hill that was jutting up through the ice, and we set that up as our survey site. So there were some adventures going down to the nunatak there. We got caught in some very bad weather down there, but eventually, as I say, several times I went out and helped them on that. Well, that was one of the projects.

Another one was to set up what we call Site One, and Site One was a place right at the edge of the ice where the great big ice ramp—the edge of the actual Antarctic ice sheet comes right down to the Windmill Islands. So we had a little site there, and we were doing temperature measurements and digging snow pits to look at the snow accumulation and so forth. And so we had our Site One, and that was pretty well under control, and I had my seismograph station under control. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 22

And so here we are, you know. The idea just kind of grew that we've got things pretty well under control, we have a long winter in which we're going to have time to spare. There's just so much we can do here. We're not going to be able to get down to the glacier very well during the wintertime, but if we can get into the interior, get up on the ice sheet, there's a lot of interesting work we can do there.

But it involved really a very large logistical operation, and the question was—the Navy was going to have to help us. We were going to have to drag things up there, we were going to have to have tractors available, we were going to have to have sleds available, we're going to have to have people available who are willing to do that and who had the time to do that.

So it was a matter of consensus. This was not something that was planned, it was not something the Navy had to do, it was not something that we had to do. It was something that could be done, so if it can be done, let's do it. Let's go out there, let's dig a deep pit, let's dig a shaft down, let's see how far back in time we can go.

Now this is something, of course, that has developed into one of the major, major projects of science today. And again, we were among the pioneers in this, I must say. I think, I'm not sure, I think we got further back earlier than anybody else. Now as I say, I'm not making a claim to that, but we certainly got pretty far back in time in the sense that digging down into the ice—remember the further down you go the further back in time you go, just as going further out in space the further back in time you get. And we got down a little over two hundred years. We got back about the time of the American Revolution, which is also about the time of the Industrial Revolution, which of course became extremely important because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect and global warming. And all of these things that are such an important issue today, we were really on the ground floor from doing that at the time.

DOB: Did you find evidence of all that?

GD: Well, of course, this went into ice cores which came back. Of course eventually, this is only a very small part of it. As I say, we just scratched the surface and now, of course, we're going back hundreds of thousands of years with deep cores. So this was a start, and as I say again, we didn't find anything terribly startling at that time, but we got it started. I guess we can say that. We kind of got the ball rolling.

But it was a tremendous effort for the small size party that we were. We had the three glaciologists, and of course I couldn't devote very much time to this. I would go out there every once in a while, as I say, when I had a chance. And one of the reasons, of course, was the quote unquote rescue operation, so I didn't get to put in very much time on it myself.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 23

But various people would. You would get volunteers. For example, the aurora observer, Ralph Glasgal, had some time available when it was too light to observe the aurora, so he could go out there. And he made a great movie out of it. I don't know if you've had a chance to see that. He goes down the shaft and has some great footage of that which he has put on a video. And some of the Navy people when they had time. Of course the Navy photographer, Paul Noonan, went out there and took some photographs of it and so forth. So it got to be a little bit of a tourist site for the people on base who got a little bit of time to go out and visit it.

DOB: Well it does sound a little like it was sort of an R&R opportunity.

GD: Yes, it was. Until the wind started, and then it could get very, very fierce out there. But anyway, as I say, of course this was Dick Cameron and Olav Loken and John Molholm, and they would trade off. Two of them would be out there and one of them would be back working on the station, and then another two would be out there, because you always had to have two people out there. You couldn't just have one. The Admiral Byrd Advance Base thing was well learned, so we weren't going to put one person out there by himself.

DOB: But there would be two people then—

GD: So there would always be at least two people out there.

DOB: —for several months. GD: Yes.

DOB: How did you manage to scrounge the materials and equipment to do all that?

GD: Well again, we were over-supplied. One of the nice things again was that the Navy brought down a lot of back-up equipment. I mean we had Jamesway huts there that were just crammed with all kinds of material. You could find just about anything you wanted there. I don't know. We seemed to be ready for any eventuality, and we made use of anything we had.

Now of course there was always the possibility that something would go wrong, and we would have to move out of our main base. So one of the things we maintained throughout the winter was an emergency base. We had this emergency camp which was a Jamesway camp, and it had to be kept in operation, and we had to have the generators for it working. So there was always this parallel universe there. We always had to have this parallel base in operation at all times just in case . . . just in case our camp burned down or blew up or something like that happened. So anyway, we had enough for two bases there basically.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 24

So there was plenty of stuff around, and we had some very able people. Bob McIntyre, our master mechanic, was a fantastic person. George Magee, our carpenter, was a great builder. Fred Charlton, our electronics chief, again, great with anything electrical. So we had some tremendous talent there for putting things together. And these guys were very willing. Again, these were volunteers. These were guys who wanted to do things. These were guys who really were interested in the project. They weren't just doing the job. They were out there and they were very much interested in what was happening.

And of course we helped with that because one of the things we did was every one of the civilian scientists would give lectures on what they were doing down there. That's one of the things that Carl encouraged. We wanted these guys to know what we were doing, you know. What their role was. What was the significance of it, you know. Why are you coming down here to help some guy put this piece of equipment in the ground? What does it mean? What good is it? We wanted to give them some feeling for what the science was all about. What was coming out of it? What would be the outcome? What were they contributing to? Why were they becoming a part of history? Why was it history and so forth. And this again I think kind of helped with the morale of the station, because the people had an idea of what they were there for.

DOB: It's great psychology.

GD: Yes.

DOB: There was no over-snow traverse from Wilkes Station as there was from several of the others. Why not?

GD: Well, again—this is interesting—there simply wasn't one planned for this station. I don't know what the reasoning on the highest levels were, but certainly it was known that the Russians were planning some major traverses not too far from where we were. So it may have been that we kind of decided to let them do our sector—the Wilkes Land sector—and we were doing what might be considered at that time a little more interesting area over in West Antarctica, because that's where our major traverses were, again, coming out of Little America and Ellsworth and so forth, because this was the big divide. This is the place where you had West Antarctica on one side and East Antarctica on the other.

And again, one of the big questions at this time was we still didn't know if there might've been a submarine channel between the two parts of Antarctica. Again, as I say, this is one of the things that Frank Press and I, our work cast doubt upon it. It didn't mean it wasn't impossible still, but we indicated it was pretty much of a complete continent across there.

But nevertheless, there were a lot of interesting things over there, a lot of structure that people were very much interested in. It was generally thought that maybe that side of Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 25

the continent, as far as the bedrock was concerned—everything was interesting. We wanted to know everything about how thick the ice was, but also maybe in that area there were some major long-term questions that we wanted to answer so that we zeroed in on that side, and we kind of left the over-snow traverses to the Russians over on this side. And again, as I say, I don't know what the big picture was on that. Of course I later did become involved in a Soviet traverse over on our side of the continent, and it turned out to be quite interesting.

But as I say, it simply wasn't planned for us, but we planned one. We decided well, why shouldn't we do an over-snow traverse. Of course, you know, you sit around during the Antarctic winter and you fantasize about all kinds of things. But we actually set a plan in motion, and we got it as far as sounding out support from people at McMurdo, in Washington, D.C., from the Navy. It would have to be supported, of course, by naval air, so we got in touch personally with some of the pilots who might've been involved in it.

And we got this thing rolling. People started thinking about hey, these guys want to leave Wilkes Station and go across to McMurdo, say. We hadn't really decided what our route would be. And we had it buzzing all over. We got this thing rolling, and we were looking for volunteers, who wants to go, and I raised my hand. I remember Dick very reluctantly, he said, "Well, you know, I can't resist it." I mean we had families, responsibilities. Another year in the Antarctic? This is not something we had planned on. Some of the Navy guys, again, had volunteered for it and we actually got volunteers. People who were willing to stay down there, spend another year—

DOB: So it would've been a second summer.

GD: Yes, so we would've had to stay over.

DOB: So it wouldn't have been the summer following—

GD: Right. We would've had to finish it up. We would have to stay over another winter and get it done. Well, it kicked around and finally they decided no, they weren't going to support it. So it fell through after a while. But it was really one of those things that kind of kept us occupied, you know, making these grandiose plans for a great traverse. But no, they never planned for us to have something like that out of there. Although later the Australians did do some work into the interior from that area when they took over the area later on. But no, we just, as I say, we had our Site Two, which was quite enough of a job for one season.

DOB: Well, there was plenty else going on as well in Eklund's or someone else's fertile imagination.

GD: Oh yes. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 26

DOB: There were zoological studies that went on that nobody else was doing.

GD: Right.

DOB: Can you tell me anything about that?

GD: Well, of course, Carl was an ornithologist. He had been with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and he was there to be station scientific leader, but also he had his own little program to do, and one of them was banding birds. Of course he was the world's greatest expert—the only expert we used to joke—on the South Polar skua, or skua gulls as they're sometimes called. They're kind of a predatory, scavenging type of bird that has its lovers and haters in the Antarctic. It does some very nasty things, but Carl thought it was a noble bird anyway. It got him a Ph.D. [laughs] so he thought it was a pretty good bird.

But anyway, so he wanted to follow the migratory patterns of this bird, so he had a bunch of bands. One of the things we did—and we did this from the start—when we got into McMurdo Sound, the first party from the Northwind that went ashore was a party with Carl Eklund, and we went down there with great big nets looking like butterfly hunters down there catching birds and putting bands on them. So we were working on Carl's project from the start. And again, when I had time, I would go along with him and we'd go out—in this case, one of the reasons why Carl wanted dogs was for his projects. We didn't know we were going to have a dog team at first and we put in a request for them, and when we found that we were actually going to have dogs at Wilkes Station, that this request had been allowed, there was great rejoicing and we had a big party that we were going to have this dog team at Wilkes Station. And they were mainly used by Carl for his coastal studies, because he'd be going along the shoreline and wouldn't have to depend on tractors, you know, heavy naval construction equipment. He had this dog team, and they were much more suitable for some of the work he was doing going into very, very iffy types of places where you might not want to take a tractor, you know, thin sea ice along the coast and so forth, which the dogs were perfect for. So it was an enormous amount of fun working with the dogs and working with Carl when I had a chance.

Again, when I had a chance, I would go out with Carl and work on his ornithological project. And so we would be banding different types of birds, mainly the skua, of course that was his main objective. We would put these bands on them and then when they would show up at some other station, people would note that they saw the bands from Wilkes and so forth. So we had a general program set out all around Antarctica with questionnaires to fill out—when did you see the bird and so forth, and how many did you see with red bands or blue bands and so forth. So it was a typical wildlife-type survey that he was doing.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 27

DOB: And tell me about your cannon net.

GD: Oh yes. Well, we had the cannon net, and he was going to try this out. And this is where Carl and Fred Charlton, our electronics chief, and I worked together. This was simply a quick way of capturing a lot of birds.

We would have some bait for the birds out there, and the bait would be a seal which we had killed. We would take the seal, we would butcher it, bring the meat back and feed it to the dogs, and then the entrails and the skin and so forth would be left out there as bait for the birds. So the birds would come flocking in, and once we had a whole cluster of them there, we would fire off the cannon net, and simply it was a series of tubes sort of like mortars with little pistons in them which would fly out like mortar bombs, only they would be carrying the net. So it would just fly up over the thing, bring the net down, and the birds would be caught underneath of it, covering them completely without the problem that if you try to swing a net on a bird or grab the bird, you're liable to harm it. This thing would—as long as you didn't hit the bird with the cannonball, it would cover the whole area, the birds would be down there underneath the net, and they could be easily banded, and then pull the net back and allow them to escape.

DOB: How many would you catch at once?

GD: We might get a dozen birds at one time. So Carl and Fred and I worked together on this thing, and it turned out it worked perfectly, and we did a lot of catches that way. We never harmed any of the birds, and we got them banded and released them. It turned out to be a quick way of catching a lot of birds at one time.

DOB: And then there were also open-water studies out in the Windmill Islands—

GD: Yes.

DOB: —and all that. Was that part of the plan also?

GD: Once the ice went out—well, there were several things here. Ralph Glasgal and I had our own little excursion—again, I got Dick Berkley. I forget how I bribed him, somehow I bribed him into taking over my seismograph station for several days this time, and Ralph Glasgal and I went on our manhauling traverse. This is harking back to the heroic days of Scott and pulling the sled. So we loaded up the sled and headed south across the ice. We wanted to go to the southern part of the Windmill Islands, and Ralph was kind of along because he liked to do anything he could—anything to get out of his aurora tower.

So we headed out there and I was doing geology. And geologists, of course, always come back with more weight than they leave with because they're always bringing back specimens. So this was something, of course, that Dick Cameron—the head of the Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 28

glaciology section, was also basically a geologist—was also interested in, so we went down there to pick up geological specimens basically. It was a geological expedition, but also to look at the terrain and to look for any things that had been missed when the Navy first went in there, looking for anything we can describe, anything that we could see that might be of interest beyond the Arctic Circle down in the southern part of the Windmill Islands towards the Vanderford Glacier.

So we spent several days down there trekking around the islands. We carried everything on our backs or pulling it on one of these little boat sleds, and again we got caught in a very severe blizzard down there. But again, we weathered it pretty well. It was very interesting, it was a lot of fun, nothing too serious went wrong, and we carried back a huge load of rocks.

DOB: How many days did the blizzard last?

GD: We had a couple of days in which we were hunkered down in the blizzard just off the ice. We discovered a little shelter, a little nunatak that we didn't know had been there before, and we set up our tents there and it worked out pretty well. We found some very beautiful wind-erosion features in these rocks, where they had been hollowed out in a very interesting way.

So that was again one of the little adventures that we enjoyed. We were always trying to find some little thing to vary the monotony. Again, this is where we had some advantages—there was a lot of interesting topography there. Now later on I spent a lot of time at Byrd Station, for example, way out in the interior of the ice sheet. It's pretty monotonous after a while. I mean white snow and blue sky and that's it. Here we had the ocean and we had rocks and we had glaciers with huge blocks of ice coming down, and icebergs calving off and the sea ice forming and blowing out. We'd have sea ice forming, a blizzard would come along and it would all be gone. It would all blow out. And of course this was one of the things we would have to worry about.

When Carl got interested in going further and further out to some of the outlying islets where there were little penguin rookeries and skua rookeries, and of course we didn't know what the weather might be—we didn't have weather satellites at that time. I remember the first satellite went up while we were down there, the Sputnik went up, and we didn't have a weather satellite until Tiros in a couple of years, so we didn't know where the weather was coming from. It was coming out of the interior of the continent, so we didn't know when one of these storms would show up.

So we started pushing it and going pretty far out on the ice. We weren't always sure if we would get back to land before the wind hit, and we saw how quickly that ice could blow out. And then the ice is miles off shore and there's open water between you and it, and it's a long swim and a very cold one. So anyway, this got a little bit iffy sometimes, Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 29

but we would go out about as far as we could and we'd go to some of these little outlying islets and do some banding and count penguins and do some of the basic bird studies.

We also went up the coast the other way, and this was kind of a major type of operation, the Cape Poinsett expedition. And again, this was basically Carl's wildlife expedition, but also just to kind of see what was up there along the coast, and this was where we encountered—although we never found the rookery—but we encountered some emperor penguins up there. Mostly we had a lot of Adelie penguins, the lively little fun penguins, but the big, more sedate, stately penguins, the big emperors—there is a rookery up there and we were in search of that. And we did find some of the penguins wandering around, but we never actually got to that emperor rookery up there. But again, it was exciting to see the emperors. We didn't know if we'd see any because we knew nobody had found any emperor rookeries right in the Windmill Islands, and there weren't any, but there was one further up the coast so we did finally get to see some emperors.

DOB: They're so wonderful. There was no air support for Wilkes, and you didn't get any company—

GD: No.

DOB: —as many of the stations did. What was good and bad about that? GD: Again, we were very isolated and we knew we would be from the start, and we didn't expect to see anybody until the ships came in. We were waiting for our ship to come in; that was it. So in a sense, this drew us together. We knew these are the guys you are going to see pretty much for the next year until the ships can get in here—and again, of course, recognizing the problem we'd had getting in on the way in, we realized there was—it wasn't considered to be a great possibility, but there was a possibility that they wouldn't come in until the next year. And this again was the reason why we had to have double rations down there because they might not be able to get to us. We might have to stay another year. This was understood. And again, it was one of the reasons why maybe we were a little more receptive to our planned traverse. This was something that was always in the back of our mind.

But in any event, we knew that we weren't going to see anybody until the ships got there, if the ships got there. So again, this meant that we pretty well had to accept—we had to deal with it and we had to accept that these were the guys we were going to be living with for the indefinite future. And I think that also the acceptance of this maybe helped us to get along pretty well.

But I do remember—I will have to call it a certain induced chauvinism that occurred when the new people came in the summer—we called them the summer people, you know—when the tourists came, because I remember when the first helicopter landed from the ship and we were so overjoyed to see people. You know, here was the outside world. They hadn't forgotten us. Here they were. Well of course we were on ham Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 30

radio and everything. We were in contact with people out there, but to see real live people from the outside was very exciting, at first. But you know, this was our station and we had built the station, or at least we felt it was ours, and pretty soon, well, the first few people that arrived, fine. Pretty soon there were hordes of people coming in wandering around over our station, tripping over our safety lines. And I detected a little . . . I don't know what you'd call it. A little bit of resentment.

DOB: Some territorial imperative?

GD: Yes. Yes. You know, that guy should've asked me for permission to go over there. That's my territory. Just a little bit of that. Not that we resented anybody really in a sense that not wanting them to be there, but there was that little territorialism that had developed that I noticed, and I thought it could've been a great thesis for a psychology major.

DOB: And it happened everywhere. Well, when the first ship did come in, what were you most eager to see on it or to get from it?

GD: Well, of course we had mail. That was one thing that came in. We all had an enormous amount of mail that had come down, and pictures and all of these things from back home.

Another thing was my replacement came down, and I was glad to see him [chuckles], that I was going to be replaced. And it turned out again a little bit fortuitous because I had no idea at that time that later on in life I would be spending a fair amount of time in the state of Ohio at Ohio State University. And I got there kind of by way of Dick Cameron who was my party chief from the glaciologists, because he was at Ohio State University and he induced me to go there later.

But in any event, my replacement was Father Francis Birkenhauer from John Carroll University in Cleveland. So I had to kind of fill him in and show him what I was doing, and he was new to this type of thing. He was a seismologist, of course, but again just like me, he had never set up a station before, certainly not one in the Antarctic. So we spent a lot of time together, and it turned out we were very congenial, and we worked together quite well.

And later on, of course, with Father Birkenhauer at John Carroll in Cleveland and I being in Columbus, Ohio, and he later became the president of John Carroll Jesuit University up there, we renewed our friendship later on. But I worked with him and filled him in. So I had to spend quite a bit of time, and he wanted to rearrange things at the station to fit what he wanted to do, so we actually moved the station to another location, the site that he wanted. So I was kept very, very busy.

DOB: How much of an overlap was there? Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 31

GD: We didn't have very much time, again. Golly, I don't know. It may have been a week or so. It was again a very short period of time.

During that time, though, several people—here's where I kind of missed out—Carl Eklund and a few other people went to Mirnyy, made a courtesy visit to the Russians and came back during that time. It turned out later I would be at Mirnyy, and later I would see their pictures of my former station chief, Carl Eklund, hobnobbing with the—schmoozing with the Russians.

But in any event, I didn't get to go on that trip. I was totally tied up with bringing new stuff in, getting new equipment, getting things in operation, material from Frank Press back at Caltech about how to improve certain things. I had told him about some of the problems I'd had with the pressure and the waves and so on, and they looked into this and giving us some pointers on what to do about it and so on. So there was a lot of useful information for me to impart to Father Birkenhauer and get him launched. So that took up pretty much my time, as far as that was concerned. And then we boarded another vessel, we got aboard the Arneb this time and headed back to Australia. This time we went to Australia and headed for Sydney. So we were on another ship. So we came down on the Northwind, we went across on the Glacier, and then we went back on the Arneb.

DOB: I'm having to push myself a little bit. It's very tempting just to have this go on for a long time. Let's talk about the IGY a little bit. I was very struck at the symposium in Columbus, the American Polar Society symposium, where you suggested that the International Geophysical Year represented some kind of human impulse for survival, and you were talking about the cold war context at that time. Tell me a little more about that.

GD: Well, this was the depth of the cold war, of course, and the United States and the Soviet Union were kind of circling each other like two wolves. And the whole mentality, of course, has to be reconstructed to really understand how people felt. Remember there were hydrogen bombs. There were fears of mutual annihilation. We were talking about killing each other in enormous numbers. I mean this was a very, very serious time and people took it very seriously. As I say, you have to put yourself in the mood of the time, and people had the feeling almost they were being driven to the edge. This was what consumed people. This was the big issue at that time—nuclear war.

So I kind of had the feeling that somewhere, not so much consciously, maybe subconsciously, we realized that somehow we had to get together. That somehow we had to find some common ground. And I just had the feeling that this maybe was what was behind a lot of the effort for scientific cooperation at that time.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 32

Here was a place where we could work together. Here was a continent that didn't have any borders, which didn't have any sovereignty questions, which didn't belong to anybody, which didn't—as far as we knew at that time—have any value to anybody. It was way down at the other end of the earth. It was not on the way to anywhere, but it was a place that everybody wanted to know about. And Russians and Americans are just as curious about the world they live in as anybody else.

So maybe, just maybe this was how it all began. Like I say, I can't speak for the political leaders and the scientific leaders of that time. But my feeling definitely is that this was a realization that there was a place, a distant place, where the cold war could be kind of put on freeze where these conflicts, these issues, that divided us could be set aside where we could work on something together, where we could be one human race again working together for a common cause. Working on something that is universal, that is international, and that is science.

In any event, we did. We were able to work together. And I found when I got down there and was working with the Russians, that this whole cold war mentality, this whole idea of mutual annihilation just simply dissolved. It evaporated. It wasn't there anymore. As soon as we crossed over into that magic kingdom of Antarctica, we weren't at each other's throats anymore.

[End Side B, Tape 1]

[Begin Side A, Tape 2]

GD: Well, we were trying to find out more about the planet we live on. And of course if you're spending so much time and effort and interest and money and treasure in trying to find out about something, you're certainly not going to be motivated to destroy it. So I think there was something there along that line, the very fact that it came along at that time. Now the IGY, of course, was chosen because this was an astronomical period of interest as far as the solar cycle is concerned. Okay. That was why that particular period was chosen. But that it was chosen at all, that we decided to do this thing at all, that we were able to work together in this field was really remarkable. Extraordinary in that time period that we did it.

And I see a connection there, as I say. I don't know if there really was or not, I don't know what was behind it all, but I think that's the way it worked. I think there was something inside of us that said hey, we've got to break out of this. We've got to get out of this trap that we're in where we're, you know, the two scorpions in the bottle. And where better to do it but in this open, limitless continent, this mysterious place that draws us there. What does it draw us there for? To find out things and also maybe to find ourselves. To find out more about ourselves and how we can live together on this planet.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 33

DOB: That's very insightful, and you did it in a very personal way by going back. I assume you came home and then went back to spend a year as an exchange scientist at the Soviet station at Mirnyy. What made you do that?

GD: Well, yes. Of course when you first come back, you swear you'll never go down there again. I went down in '56, spent the year '57 getting the IGY program under way, and came back in '58—in the southern summer of '58, of course the northern winter. And that was an interesting thing in itself in that we were billeted aboard the USS Arneb, and we were supposed to go back by moving around the Southern Ocean. It had a great big cosmic ray telescope aboard measuring cosmic radiation coming in from outer space, and they wanted to stay pretty much along the 30th parallel south.

So after various adventures in which the ship had to stop at Melbourne for a while for repairs, some of us just kind of wandered off and decided to explore Australia. We went to Tasmania, we went out to Perth. I was out at Perth way over on the other side of the continent when we got news that the Arneb was getting ready to leave—soon. I mean you better get back to Melbourne. Well, this is where these strange things happen. Somebody ran into somebody in the Royal Australian Air Force, and there was an Air Force flight that was going down and doing a weather observation flight down into the Southern Ocean coming back to Melbourne, and you can get aboard if you want to. And so one thing leads to another, and here I was crawling into this airplane that was just crammed with equipment in this very uncomfortable position, because I just had to get back. So we got back and we got aboard the ship, running up the gangplank just as they were lifting it, and then we headed across the Indian Ocean.

And that was very interesting, but we got tired of spending a lot of time at sea, so several of us decided to jump ship, so to speak, in South Africa. So we got off in Durban and went our various ways. Actually it started out with Ralph Glasgal, our aurora observer, and the Norwegian, Olav Loken, another of the glaciologists who was in our party. We got off together and we spent some time together, and then gradually one of us would become interested in staying in one particular place or seeing something, so we eventually split up. And I returned by way of Nigeria and the Mediterranean Sea area and made my way back to California.

By the way, one of the nice things about those days which the Russians simply could not fathom was that I had these documents, these papers from the Navy, travel orders which had been cut for me which allowed me to take any military flight that had space available anywhere in the world. So this was amazing, and as I say, later on when I met the Russians and I waved these papers in their faces, they just couldn't fathom that somebody was free to move around on military aircraft, you know, somebody that wasn't at least a KGB colonel or something like that.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 34

But anyway, I did make it home sometime around the middle of '58 after all of these adventures, and went back to Caltech again and worked at the seismological lab getting my data in shape for publication.

Well, after a little while, I had a proposal by way of Frank Press, and he had been in touch with Bert Crary again, who was the head of the geophysical program, you know, the chief scientist in the Antarctic, and there was a program of exchange scientists in the Antarctic, and it was already in operation. Gordon Cartwright with the Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service, had been the first exchange scientist, and that had been during the IGY. And he went down to Mirnyy, to the Russian base, and he had worked in meteorology. And then Mort Rubin the following year had gone down, again with the Weather Bureau.

So it had been kind of a Weather Bureau thing, and notice that the weather central in McMurdo Sound was one of these instances of international cooperation, because here we were getting weather reports coming in from all over Antarctica, including from the Russian bases, from the British bases, from the French bases and so forth, all coming into this weather central, and we all had to work together on this. So it was really the Weather Bureau that made the first step as far as cooperation with the Russians was concerned.

Well, in the course of this, Gordon Cartwright got to know the Russian chief meteorologist at Mirnyy, Oskar Krichak, quite well, and the Weather Bureau project in cooperation continued for a couple of years. Then there was a hiatus. Again, I don't know the politics behind that. I don't know if it was simply because things didn't work out, was it because of increasing tensions between the countries, I don't know what that situation was, but for a year we didn't have an exchange program.

Then when we decided to renew it, or were able to renew it, it was geophysics. All of a sudden we wanted to shift the emphasis a little bit to solid earth geophysics. So the Russians wanted a seismologist. They wanted somebody to come in and work with their seismograph station in the Antarctic as a renewal of this program. Well, I was chosen.

Again, I heard from Carl Eklund—by that time, by 1959—and this would be coming up in 1960, so I'd be having to go down there at the end of '59, and I was still at Caltech. I was still in California working on the Caltech project, working on my data from the Antarctic, and also getting involved in other things at that time that Frank Press was doing. Anyway, I was asked if I wanted to go back again. Well, I did have to think long and hard about it. This was something else. This was going back to the Antarctic, spending another winter down there. If I had any career objectives, this would either definitely push me over into an Antarctic career or it would certainly sidetrack me for a long time from anything else I might want to be doing with my life.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 35

I thought about it for quite a while, and again, I was drawn gravitationally, irresistibly, into this black hole. I simply couldn't resist it. I was drawn to the Russians. Here again, something mysterious. Something strange. Something dramatic. Something on the edge. Here we are. These are the guys, you know, that—we're threatening this mutual annihilation, and here I have a chance to do something about it. I have a chance to make friends with these guys. I have a chance to go back to the Antarctic, and by now the unpleasantness of freezing your fingers and so forth had faded. You forget about those things easily, and you remember the beauty and the quiet and the nature and all of these things. And pretty soon I simply couldn't say no.

DOB: But you already knew some Russian.

GD: Yes, I had—again, fortuitously, back when I was an undergraduate I had taken Russian, and it was one of the two languages that I specialized in, Russian and German. So again, I was kind of off to a head start there without knowing it. I had no idea of course at the time I was taking Russian that I would end up with the Russians. I had done it mainly so I could read Russian scientific literature.

It turned out though that I didn't know any conversational Russian. I only knew scientific, technical Russian. So one of the things in preparation for it was I had to learn Russian. So I was sent to the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies in Monterey where you had an instructor from the Army language school there at Monterey, which again was kind of interesting because I did my basic training at Fort Ord which is also right near Monterey. So it's interesting how these things kind of weave together in your life.

DOB: Well, tell me what was—I want you to talk about comparing your two experiences. Tell me about what was different about the base at Mirnyy and how it was run and who supplied the Soviet support like the Navy supplied it for the Americans and so on. Compare these experiences for me.

GD: Well, there were some very large differences. As far as support was concerned, this was—again, remember, the Russians had a long history of heavy logistical support operations in the Arctic with the Northern Sea Route, which was the supply organization. They were the ones who took us down there. They had the icebreakers, they had the logistical experience, and so it was the Glavsevmorput, the Northern Sea Route Administration, which provided the ships and the people and the supplies to support the stations down there. So again, I went down on a Russian icebreaker this time and came back on another one, it turned out.

But in any event, this was strictly a civilian operation because again, the U.S. simply didn't have the civilian capability to support something of this nature at the end of the earth without the United States Navy. The Russians did. They had an organization that fitted right into that and had been doing it in the Arctic for many years. So from Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 36

that point of view—from their point of view, it was not a military operation, whereas ours was half military.

This was true of the station operation, too. Remember, we had a dual command at the American stations. We had a naval commander and a station's scientific chief also. I'd love to read a management expert's opinion of that type of an operation. In our case, again, it worked very well, because Lieutenant Burnett, our naval commander, was totally cooperative, he didn't have any agenda of his own, he was there to support the scientific operation, and he was extremely cooperative. And Carl Eklund had been working with the military for many years and so he had no problems about dealing with the military. So again, it was a very good combination there.

The Russian base, on the other hand, was a one-organization, one-man control. The actual support was provided by the Northern Sea Route, but it was an Academy of Science operation. It was run by the scientific organization of the Soviet Union, and it was directly under the scientists, under scientific control. So we had a scientist, Professor Korotkevich, who was in command, and he was the sole commander. There was no question about dual command there. He was in charge on the ice and he ran things, and it was his decision. Now he had a cadre of experts who would help him. He had a chief engineer and he had a deputy station commander, and there were chiefs of the different sections. It was divided—of course this was a larger base, also. It was the main base.

DOB: How much larger?

GD: Whereas at Wilkes I think we had twenty-seven people in all, this was over a hundred people during the winter. During the summertime, of course, there were a lot of other people who came down for summer construction and summer projects. But during the winter we had a little over a hundred people at Mirnyy station, so it was a fairly good-sized base.

And again, there were different sections, and in this case I was in the geophysical section here. But again, I was kind of in two different groups. I was basically there to help run the seismograph station. And one of the reasons Frank Press had sent me down there as a Caltech participant in this case—and here I was really working for Caltech from a scientific point of view—was to get as much of their long-period instrument recordings as I could and work on them down there and hope that I could bring them or copies of them back. Well, it turned out I couldn't. It turned out that I wasn't allowed to bring anything back, so fortunately I did do a lot of work on those records while they were coming in—while they were hot, so to speak, and coming in.

In any event, so I was going to be working at the seismograph station and helping the Mirnyy seismologist do his thing down there. And he had a lot of things—now that he Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 37

had some help on hand, he had somebody to help him so we did a lot of rearranging of the station, so we kept pretty busy at that.

But I had another goal in mind, and this depended upon the goodwill of the Russian, and this is that I wanted to take part in the over-snow traverse that would be made into the interior at the end of the year. I made this known from the start, and the Russians were non-committal. They didn't know if they wanted somebody else—they already had their people who were going, they didn't know if they wanted to add somebody else, they didn't know if they wanted to add the American to this party, and a lot would depend on the political situation during that year.

Well, it turned out that it was one of the most critical political situations in history, of course, because this was the year of the infamous U2 flight of Francis Gary Powers, of the tiff between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and a sudden plunge in cold war relations, and a lot of fist-shaking and table-pounding and so forth. So by the middle of the year, things looked very, very dim as far as my being a part of the expedition into the interior. But it worked out. It turned out that they could use me.

I carried along one very good card, which Frank Press had given me, and that was a new gravimeter, a new gravity meter, which was my very own possession. If they weren't going to use me, they didn't get the meter, so that may have had a little bit to do with it, because we also wanted to have a gravity traverse. We did have a Russian gravimeter along, but they wanted to compare the two different instruments and so forth.

By the way, that little instrument itself is interesting because it's kind of shaped like a little bomb. And on the way down I would make a gravity reading at every airport on the way down, especially at a lot of stations in African countries which were just emerging from colonialism at that time, and everybody was very much on edge in that area, too. And they'd see me getting off the plane, setting up this bomb in the middle of their airport, and I was arrested several times for this. Not really—I was questioned very closely about what I was doing there.

In any event, I did have this little, very, very expensive instrument to take down there with me, and I think it did help a little bit. But in any event, I think by the time the traverse was ready in the early spring—southern spring, late in 1960—they were ready to take me on and I was ready to go down there with them. So I did get my place on the over-snow traverse.

DOB: Can we just back up one second. How did their scientific methods and apparatus compare to ours?

GD: Well, there were some very interesting things down there. Some of their equipment was very advanced, very much up-to-date, state-of-the-art by the standards of that time. Some of it was extremely antiquated. It was very interesting. There were a lot of Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 38

paradoxes there. They had a very, very well-equipped machine shop beyond what we had at McMurdo Sound. Certainly beyond anything that we had at a place like Wilkes Station, which was a very modest operation. They had all kinds of power equipment there, but it was very hard to find just simple screwdrivers and claw hammers, and just little tools like that were extremely difficult to come by. It was a very, very funny type of thing from our point of view.

Of course another basic thing about it was that again, most of the people who went to Wilkes Station and the other Antarctic stations were kind of young guys like me, you know, just out of college. I was just out of the Army. You know, people in their twenties, very, very young guys. At the Russian base they were mostly much more established scientists. They were people who were career scientists in that field. They had probably—I would say there was an age gap of ten to twenty years, at least, between the average American during the IGY and the average Russian civilian scientist.

And they were also people with a lot of polar experience. Obviously they had people who had been in northern Siberia, in the Arctic, and they shipped them south. They obviously had the talent, and they had the people with the experience, so they're the ones who went down there. So again, this was quite natural. But we didn't have that. We didn't have those people who had done those things and were used to that, so we called on recent university graduates to do it.

So again, there was quite a different sort of spirit—you didn't have that, you know—I mean the Americans were very enthusiastic, you know. They were young guys and were willing to try everything, and the Russians were very dedicated. They were dedicated people, and they were very much interested in what they were doing.

But you didn't have that youthful enthusiasm to the same extent, although, again, my particular partner, Boris Kamenetski, was a young guy. He was just about my age, and we had a very similar background. We drove motorcycles, we had been wrestlers in college. We were almost replicas of each other. It was amazing. We had both been in the IGY, except he had been in Spitsbergen at that time up in the Arctic while I was in the Antarctic. But we had a lot in common, as I say, and he was very young and enthusiastic, you know, always ready for something new. But for the most part I would say that the scientists generally were a bit older, a little more sedate.

DOB: That's an interesting point. Tell me about the traverse, the Mirnyy to Vostok, I guess it was.

GD: I just read that it's being phased out, the last one, just about now. There was an article in Science about it not too long ago telling about Vostok. The big thing now is Lake Vostok. They discovered the water underneath of that area, and they're being very gingerly about getting down there and tapping into it and seeing what's down there. But anyway, one of the things they mentioned in this article I read was that soon there will be Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 39

the last of the brutal—they used the word brutal—traverses from Mirnyy to Vostok, and that's a good word for it. That's what it was like.

DOB: What was the purpose of this traverse?

GD: Well, we had two purposes. It was a combined operation, but there was one priority, and that was we had to maintain the station. So we were mainly a fuel haul. We were hauling supplies, and especially fuel, to maintain the station at Vostok, which you remember is the coldest place in the world. It's the place which has registered the lowest temperature of any weather station in the world. It's at the south geomagnetic pole, which is on the axis, you might say, of the magnetic field of the earth and the center around which the aurora is displayed—the aurora australis. So it's a very interesting place from the point of view especially of the upper atmosphere, upper atmospheric physics.

From the point of view of solid earth physics, which is what we were doing, it was deep in the interior of the continent with an extremely thick ice cap underneath of us, and we didn't know very much about how thick the ice was, what was the subsurface topography there. So from the point of view of our glaciology section, we were out there to map the subsurface, really. So we were setting off the typical seismic blasts to pick up the echoes from the seismic waves coming back to the surface and determine what the thickness of the ice was. And the gravity measurements were used to fill in the gaps in between our seismic stations. You could kind of interpolate using gravity measurements from one station to the next. So I did gravity measurements and took part in the seismic sounding, what we call explosion seismology. So we could've taken a direct route, but the science required some detours.

The other thing we did was to open up Komsomolskaya Station, which is a summer station, and we opened it up and operated it. Now it was already snowed in. We had to open it, dig it out, get everything in operation there, so it would be in operation during the summer flying season because we had to fly personnel in and out of Vostok, supplies in and out. And this was a safety search and rescue station halfway between Mirnyy and Vostok and the refueling site in some cases.

So that was another task. We had several tasks. One was to resupply Vostok, and yet we burned up so much fuel on the way up there, that it's one of these things where you supply a fraction of what you use up in getting there, because these gigantic tractors—we used these huge artillery tractors dragging gigantic sleds loaded with barrels of fuel, and moving along, grinding along through this deep snow at an extremely slow rate of speed and just pumping all of this diesel smoke out into the pristine Antarctic atmosphere there, and it just burns up an enormous amount of fuel. So this was one of our things, to resupply Vostok. To open up Komsomolskaya Station, and we did some scientific observations there, too. The glaciologist did some work there, plus doing the seismic Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 40

sounding along the way, and for this purpose we made a jog into totally unknown territory to just put an added dimension to the subsurface work.

DOB: Did they do airdrops and air resupply at Vostok?

GD: Yes. In fact, they resupplied us by air in part. And this was a lot of fun watching them, kind of the Russian way of doing things. These planes would fly over and just drop them like bombs—just drop the barrels. You'd watch the planes coming in, and you'd see the barrels being shoved out of the plane, no parachute, no nothing, just dropped flat on the snow, and you'd see them tumbling over and over going along for miles. Then we'd head out with a tractor and pick them up and bring them back.

DOB: How many of them broke?

GD: Many of them. Some of them would simply burst, of course. But we were in that part of the continent where there's a very deep snow layer. The snow falls very, very gradually and it doesn't harden into solid ice until you get very, very far down. So it was a pretty soft cushion actually. But some of them would break, definitely.

DOB: But then you'd have to dig them out.

GD: Yes, and sometimes they'd be—oh yes. They'd be buried very, very deeply in that soft snow, and digging, digging, digging. But again, that's kind of the brutality of it. We spent a lot of time digging. A blizzard would come in. The whole tractor train—we had three tractors dragging these huge sleds—we'd be snowed in, so we'd dig it out.

We'd get going and the engines would break down or the couplings would break. The temperature getting down to the sixties below, so under those conditions, metal snaps, and so we'd have to repair it. So it was constantly repairing the tracks. They had these little pins with bolts on the tracks of the tractors, and they would snap, so we'd have to replace those. We'd have to get down and pound them in to keep the tracks going. They said it was a lot like the winter war in Russia during World War II, you know, kind of keeping the tanks going. These constant, constant repairs, and we had old, old tractors—old, old tractors which you were constantly working on. They had some newer ones. They had these new fancy tractors, but they were saving those for other operations. So we got the old ones and we had to keep them running.

We had a master mechanic, Ivan Bubel, and he was like Mac at Wilkes Station. He was a fantastic mechanic.

DOB: How many people went on this traverse?

GD: Well, now here again like everything there, there's a unity of command, so we were under the transport chief, and he was in control of it. So we had three driver-mechanics, a Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 41

radioman, a navigator, and the transport chief (each tractor had a driver-mechanic); that was the transport section. And then there was our science group, and let's see . . . we had five people. We had the glaciologist, a driller, we had the chief seismologist, we had the assistant seismologist, and we had me. Plus a doctor. So it was twelve people in all.

DOB: How long did it take you?

GD: It took us about four months to get up there.

DOB: That's more than there is summer.

GD: Yes, yes. Definitely. It was getting very, very cold by the time we left.

DOB: And how did you get back?

GD: Well, we thought we might be stuck there. We didn't know if we were going to get back. Again, this is one of those things. It's the same suspense we had at Wilkes. But we were, we were flown out. Finally the planes—because it was getting late in the season, you know, if the planes were going to be able to come in and get us, it was getting kind of iffy again there. And again, that's why these stations have to have enormous amount of supplies there. What about the summer people? Suppose they get stuck there. Then you have to feed them, too. So finally the plane did come. Hurrah, you know, and thank God—the Russians say Slava Bogu—and we got out.

DOB: So Vostok is analogous to our South Pole station.

GD: Yes. It's a deep interior station. In fact, but it's deeper and higher and colder even than South Pole.

DOB: Is the ice cap deeper?

GD: Yes. The ice cap is about three miles deep there. Now remember the Russians had Polyus Nedostupnostyy, the Pole of Inaccessibility, which they first reached during the IGY, and that is the geographical center of Antarctica. But they found it was too difficult to maintain a station way out there, and they already had the Vostok station which was more important from an upper atmospheric point of view, so they decided to abandon that station. So Vostok was their deep interior station.

DOB: What was it like as a young man being in this foreign environment, an American in enemy territory as it were?

GD: It was amazing, and as I say, I first met the Russians at Cape Town. I flew down, and I flew down with people who were joining the Vema expedition, an oceanographic Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 42

expedition up at Columbia University, and they were heading for Madagascar and Bali and Tahiti and Samoa. And here I was heading for the deep south, so I was a little bit envious there.

But then I met the Russians. I had an extremely cordial and friendly welcome. I wandered over—I was staying on the Vema. I had been invited to stay on the American oceanographic vessel while I was down there, so instead of staying at the hotel I'd been planning to stay in, I just stayed with the American oceanographers, and helped them out too, because I had my gravity meter and I could help them with that. So that was another little sideshow.

But anyway, so I trekked over to the Kooperatsiya. The Russian icebreaker came up to the same dock that the Vema was on so it was just a short walk up the dock, and I met the Russians. They greeted me with extreme cordiality, great, great friendship, and I invited them to come aboard the Vema. The Americans there had invited them, but they weren't allowed to visit us, but we were allowed to visit them fortunately. They were very restricted of course. They were very envious of me and my ability to fly around the world anywhere I wanted to. But in any event, they were extremely friendly and I was immediately welcomed, really with open arms. There was no problem.

The most severe at that time—it was kind of ironical—the one who kept bringing up political questions and kind of presenting this front, was my colleague, Boris, who I was going to be working with at the station. I thought, oh boy. I'm in for something. This guy's going to be propagandizing me all the time. Well, it turned out that wasn't the case at all. Once we were alone and listening to the Voice of America, [laughs] he was just as friendly as the rest of them. But I think maybe he felt he had to maintain a little public distance because we would be working so intimately together. And Boris is the one that I visited recently over in Eastern Europe.

DOB: While you were with the Russians—this would've been in '59 and '60? Is that correct?

GD: Yes. I went down there in '59 and then stayed over in 1960 into '61.

DOB: So this is just the time of the negotiating for the Antarctic Treaty.

GD: Yes.

DOB: Did you hear much about that while you were there?

GD: Yes. In fact, I was able to make, occasionally, ham radio contact from Mirnyy with my parents who were running a small weekly newspaper in California at that time. So I was able to give them a running account, and they were able to scoop the world on some things that were happening in the Antarctic in this little Cloverdale Reveille, a little newspaper in Northern California. But anyway, my mother was very much interested Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 43

in—this is a family, mom and pop newspaper operation—and she was very much interested and was promoting in her editorial pages the Antarctic Treaty. So she kind of kept me up to date. I didn't have really all that much information from Washington about what was going on, but indirectly through my family I was getting quite a bit about it.

DOB: Did the Russians know also about this and were they supportive of the idea?

GD: Yes, they definitely were, very much so.

DOB: Well, I guess I have to move on. You also spent time in the '60s at Palmer Station and at Byrd.

GD: Yes.

DOB: Why did we start a new station at Palmer when we were closing down some of the earlier IGY stations? Do you know?

GD: Well, I think probably they were looking ahead to the oceanography that was going to be done in that area and the whole Antarctic Peninsula area there. Here was a pretty open-water place where they could bring in what turned out to be a succession of Southern Ocean oceanographic expeditions. So I think that was a large part of it. Here we had a place, a relatively warm place in a very interesting area that was open and that we could build on. I think that was pretty much it.

Now I went down, again, to do geophysics, make magnetic and gravity observations down there on this little ice cap on Andrews Island right by Palmer Station, which is kind of a manageable type of place where you can look at this little ice cap and look at its regime and get some idea of the general principles of what's going on and then maybe expand those to this huge, huge ice sheet which is really hard to get a handle on. So that was one of the ideas from my point of view for going down to Palmer Station was that here we could do measurements of ice movement and ice thickness and so forth on a small manageable scale just to get an idea of what the general principles are.

So I was mainly measuring magnetic—I did some seagoing—I did a little you might say physical oceanography there going out in the Greenland cruiser and towing a magnetometer behind and measuring the magnetic profiles in that area. But again, I was doing solid earth type geophysics, whereas most of what was going on down there was biological. They were doing a lot of biological and weather studies.

DOB: Did you winter over?

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 44

GD: No. I only went to Palmer—the earlier part of my career I did two wintering overs, but the rest of my Antarctic career was summer work at Palmer Station and then going to Byrd.

DOB: You spent two summers then at Byrd.

GD: Yes.

DOB: And what did you do there?

GD: That was seismic traverses measuring ice thickness and movement. It was a joint gravity and seismic observation together with snow measurement, ice deformation measurements. And that was when I was with Ohio State University.

DOB: How long were you at Ohio State?

GD: I went there in '63, after I finished up my work—I had various projects at Caltech trying to detect underground nuclear explosions, working with the U.S. Geological Survey in doing crustal studies of the western part of the United States, so I did a lot of other things while I was at Caltech after the Mirnyy expedition. And then I got a fellowship at Ohio State University and went back there to work with Dick Cameron, who was already ensconced at OSU. He kind of lured me back east.

And then I got involved—well then I started swinging from Arctic to Antarctic, because my doctoral thesis was on a glacier in the Yukon Territory, and I got involved in other Alaskan and Canadian studies. So I would switch—in the southern summer I'd be in the Antarctic, and the northern summer I'd be in the Arctic. So I was going back and forth there until the end of the '60s.

DOB: Cold is cold.

GD: Yes.

DOB: Where did you get your Ph.D.?

GD: That was at Ohio State University.

DOB: What year?

GD: That was in '68.

DOB: You've talked a lot about Carl Eklund. I assume you were an admirer of his. He sounded like quite an interesting and outstanding leader. Can you say any more about him? Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 45

GD: Yes. Carl was a very open and forthright person, and he was very, very motivated—he wanted success, of course. He wanted our station to be a success, and he wanted to make sure that everybody's program got going on time and was producing results. So from that point of view he was extremely helpful. Anything we needed—very often we'd have to go to Carl, ask him to get something from the Navy for us, and it turned out that he was very good at that. The rapport with the Navy was extremely good. He and Don Burnett got along extremely well, and Carl got along extremely well with all the Navy people for that matter. He was the kind of person who really could reach out to other people and get along with anybody. And you didn't really have to get along all that well, because I say they were a very good group to begin with.

So from that point of view, just his personality that he was very, very accessible, very, very helpful, very, very able to get the things he wanted. And he was persistent. If there was something that had to come in from outside that had to be done not locally, from Washington, from McMurdo and so forth, again, he could get on the radio and be very persuasive. He was a very persuasive person.

And he was very concerned—he wanted to make sure. He'd been in the Antarctic himself. He'd seen that people could get problems dealing with other people, so he was always alert, aware about those things. And he kept things going. He was very sure that things were happening, people were taking part, and people were playing pinochle and cribbage and so forth, and they had projects, something to keep them going during the wintertime. The fact that he was alert and aware of all these things was very, very helpful.

He was the kind of person who was on top of things constantly, but not pushy, not pushing things. He let us do our own thing, and he knew that we were—he assumed that we were going to do our job and that we were dedicated to doing it, and he was there to help us. He wasn't there to push us or to try to get us to do something. He assumed that we were out to do the job and that he was there to help, tactfully.

DOB: Were there other leaders there that you thought were particularly fine?

GD: Well, there's a lot of scuttlebutt about what was going on at other bases, but I would prefer not to indulge in rumor or anything.

DOB: I meant at Wilkes.

GD: Dick Cameron, who was the head of our glaciology section, again, he was a strict professional. He was the one who really spearheaded the S2 operation. He wanted to do this thing. He saw the possibilities of it, and he led it. But at the same time, Dick was the funniest guy you've ever worked with. He was a joker. He was extremely light in his touch. He was not the kind of person that would order people around, but he Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 46

would push. He would get things done. He would make sure they happened with a very, very light type of touch.

So as I say, as a leader of our particular little group, at least one that I was kind of semi-attached to, Dick was just the right type of leader for that type of thing. Now remember, we're dealing with people who themselves are very independent; they have their own ideas. These guys were young, but they weren't easily led. They weren't pushovers. These were guys who had their own ideas, and you can't just order them to do something. And both Carl and Dick knew how to deal with personalities of that type.

DOB: Very lucky.

GD: Yes. DOB: When we were at the Antarctic symposium, they talked a lot about tourism—

GD: Oh yes.

DOB: —on the continent now. What do you think of that?

GD: Well, I think it's obviously unavoidable. There's a good side and a little bit of a down side, but certainly the good side—I'd like to emphasize the good side. The more people who know about the Antarctic and the more people who know what's going on down there, the more people who appreciate the value of this place, and the value of any open place, any natural place, the better. So from that point of view, I'd love to see as many people be able to get down there and be able to enjoy it as possible. Of course the other side is that there is this press of human bodies on a small and fragile environment that you have to be very careful about. This is something that does have to be monitored very carefully.

Now when I was there, this was really before there were a lot of tourists, before, you might say, that there was a problem. Of course this is the general thing. The odd thing about Antarctica, of course, is that it's a huge place, and there really aren't very many people there, but the people who are there are very concentrated. And of course this is the paradox of being in an Antarctic station in the first place is that one of the problems is isolation. The other problem is overpopulation for the particular area you're in. So again, this is that same paradoxical thing.

And again, the critical places in Antarctica are very, very small. The places where there is wildlife, where there is a habitat for different types of animals is very, very restrictive. They don't have much choice. They don't have much room to move around. They can't live up on the ice there. They don't have a Northern Sea Route or a Navy to support them. They have to live off the land, and we should allow them to do that. So we've got to be very careful about preserving those very small parts of a huge continent Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 47

that are extremely critical. The cycle of life is very restricted, and things can very easily got awry. We have to be very careful about that.

DOB: The environment today is a hot topic and protected almost in the extreme. How environmentally conscious were you in the '50s and who worried if you dropped an oil barrel and it broke?

GD: Well, I must say certainly compared to today, not very. And I know this kind of attitude persisted for some time because of kind of the direction and the goals. We had certain goals, and we were willing to go all out to meet those goals, and if along the way there was some collateral damage, so to speak, in the way of the environment, this was accepted to a certain extent. So I would say we were far less environmentally conscious in those days than we are today, and that was a loss in the fact that we weren't as aware at that time. Although certainly when I got out with Carl Eklund and we were out actually doing bird work, when we were actually working with the animals, clearly he was interested in observing a natural environment. And to the extent that it could be done at that time with what we were being tasked to do, he was as supportive of the environment as he possibly could be, because after all, that was what he was doing. He was studying a natural environment, and he wanted it to be as pristine and as untouched as possible under the circumstances. But on the other hand, we were moving these really gigantic machines into a natural environment. We were putting up structures. We were driving tractors. We were stacking up oil drums. In order to support these various scientific projects we were doing, there was this enormous logistical tail behind it, and it took a lot of messy work that sometimes left a mess behind. There's no question about that.

If we could go back and do it differently as we would do it today, I would be happy to do so if we could be a little more careful about it. But in the rush, in all the things that had to be done in that short period of time, I think we probably did as good as we could under those circumstances.

DOB: I should've asked you this earlier. Do you think it's possible that scientific work in this peaceful international environment, as is the hope in the Antarctic Treaty, do you think it's possible to continue this indefinitely?

GD: I think so. From what I've seen under the circumstances that prevailed in the past, if we could do it then, I think we can do it now and in the future. One of the main issues would be to maintain public awareness of this. Without the public behind us—without public awareness of what the Antarctic means, what this continent without borders means, what this place for international cooperation means—without that behind us, it can fail. It can stumble, and I think it is important that the public be aware of this and know what we're doing and know what the people are doing down there now, and what the impact of some of these studies are on the future. Things like global warming, things that we can find out that are buried, hidden. The treasures of scientific knowledge that are buried in Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 48

that ice cap there could mean the future for us. This is something where the public really needs to know. This is something the public really should know about.

[End Side A, Tape 2]

[Begin Side B, Tape 2]

DOB: Were you ever truly scared for your life?

GD: Well, let's see. There were some times when you wondered if this had been a wise move. Let's put it that way. I remember when Ralph and I were kind of hunkered down in a little mountain tent out there in a blizzard, and we were very, very far away from the camp and we were by ourselves. And we didn't know how long that blizzard was going to last, and we didn't know if we'd be blown right into the bay. I sometimes just wondered about it. Sometimes when I was way, way out on the ice and we saw what looked like maybe a storm coming in and we were out there with the dog teams, I would figure how fast could they go, how far is it to shore, how fast is the storm coming, do those numbers match.

So sometimes there are situations like that when you wonder, you know, you think about it. But you try to maintain a calm mind because you know that you're going to have to be calm about it. There's not much you can do.

DOB: Were you prepared? Did you have food with you and shelter?

GD: Yes. We always carried trail rations. Of course that was another reason for the trip that Ralph and I took was to try them out. This was, in fact, a survival exercise also. It was partly adventure, partly science, partly testing the survival gear because nobody really had done that.

We went out there specifically to see—can you really take snow and melt it and cook this stuff, and can you get it down and keep it down. There was stuff there that was pemmican and a type of a cereal that was as hard as rock, and you had to crumble it up and melt it in the snow water, if you could make the water. And so we tried these things out. Could you survive on this stuff if you were reduced to, pulling a sled and carrying stuff on your back? Could you carry enough of it through this type of terrain to make it? Suppose we had to make it to Mirnyy. Suppose we had to make it to McMurdo. Suppose we did have to get out of there or make it to a landing site that we were told about. Would the radio work? We tried all these things out.

So in a sense, that was another thing we did on our little mini-expedition was trying out the survival gear. And you could eat it [chuckles] if you were really hungry.

DOB: What are you proudest of? Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 49

GD: Well, I would say I think that I had a role. I had a role especially at Mirnyy in bringing people together and reaching hands across the ice between the U.S. and the USSR and especially the people there. The USSR's gone, but the people who were there are still there, and I helped. In some small way I helped to bring things together. And when you consider the alternative of not being together, this is the thing that I remember the most about what I did those years on the ice.

DOB: I've asked everybody that I've talked with, if you were an artist and you could paint on one canvas the essence of Antarctica, what would your painting look like?

GD: Well, I think it would be probably from a site that Ralph and I reached down at the southern end of the islands there, and there was nobody there. We were the only ones there as far as I know. We may still have been the only ones that have ever reached that particular point. And from there you could see everything. You could see this massive ice sheet coming down—the ice age. Here we are living in the ice age. This is what covered North America, much of it, eighteen thousand years ago. This gigantic ice sheet coming down and terminating, ending right on this little neck of land that was coming out there, which has been smoothed off, and you could see exactly where that ice had been in the past. The ice had retreated, and will it continue to retreat? Will the ocean rise? What's going to happen? Okay. There's one thing.

Looking south we could see this great glacier, Vanderford Glacier. It was huge, and you can actually see the crevasses, the gigantic crevasses there, white on top and the deep blue, that blue ice down there exposed where great chunks of this ice are breaking off, and eventually they're breaking off into icebergs, heading north eventually to melt off in the tropical waters far, far to the north. Here's part of—this is the hydrologic cycle. This is what you read about in textbooks. Here it is. Here's the ice, solid water, coming out and joining the liquid water. Fresh water that fell as snow thousands of years ago being brought down, turning into icebergs and floating out into the ocean. The meeting of the waters there.

And then, looking a little bit further out to sea, you can see all these little tiny islets there, and you can just see in the distance there is on the edge of this icy, frozen, lifeless land, life. This unquenchable spirit of life. Because here, why would any creature want to live in this place? I mean you've got tropical rainforests, you've got all kinds of lovely places to live in, why live down here? But here they are—the penguins. Here they are, little penguin rookeries dotted around there, making a living here in this terrible but beautiful place. And here are the birds. Here are the skuas. Nasty as some of their habits may be, here they are flying majestically through the air. And the beautiful white snow petrels there and the Antarctic petrels.

Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 50

All of this life, and this leads you to realize that they're not there in a vacuum. There must be life under the ocean there. There's teeming life under the ocean that supports this life up above.

So there it all is—there it all was. The ice cap, the glacier, and the rocky islets, and the beautiful sky, and the sea ice off in the distance. All of these things together and the colors—the white, the blue, and the dark blue of the glacier and the light blue of the sky and the tan and brown of the rocks. All of this together in one picture. That's what I would draw a picture of.

DOB: Did you take a picture of it?

GD: I've taken pictures of it, yes, with my camera. But I wish I could be an artist. I really wish I could be an artist, because it really takes an artist to do justice to it.

DOB: Would you put people in your picture?

GD: You know, that's a very good question. I don't think I would. I'd leave it as nature left it—made it. The observer is enough to know that there are people there.

DOB: Interesting. Most people don't put people in their picture. I'm waiting for somebody to say that the essence of the experience was putting together a Clements hut, but nobody does.

GD: That is interesting, isn't it?

DOB: Paul Siple wrote that—and this is a quote, I think, from him—"The Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on personality and character, and few are the same after a stay there." Do you think that statement is true and were you changed?

GD: Yes, I think so. I think I was. I can't imagine who I would be if I hadn't been to the Antarctic. Obviously I would be somebody, but I don't think I'd be the same person. There's just something about that experience—the dichotomy, in a sense, the grandeur of these surroundings. There's just simply nothing like it. The sheer vastness of it. And that must do something to the human mind, just being able to recognize and appreciate this just gigantic place and your smallness there. And yet, you're there, you know, and yet you have asserted your humanity by being there, but at the same time you're very, very small.

And then another aspect of it is being together with a group of people. Being together with people that you—some of them you like, some of them you may not like all that much, but you have to work with them. You're part of that group. You're part of that very, very close-knit group. You have to live with them. You have to be with them, and you want to be with them. But there's that, again, that extreme feeling of closeness, Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 51

of closeness to other human beings. Living cheek by jowl with other people who you never knew before. You didn't know one of those people before that time. I didn't know anything about any of them. By the end of the year you know everything about all of them, [chuckles] sometimes too much.

DOB: Did the Russians get along as well as the Wilkes people did, at Mirnyy?

GD: Well, of course, on one hand it was a bigger base, so it would tend to separate out into—I mean each different unit there tended to be a little in-group of its own. And here again, I kind of shuttled between a couple of different groups, so in this sense I was—well, at first I was the outsider, of course. I mean at first people were convinced that I must be a spy. That goes without saying. I mean we're talking about Russia in the 1950s. I mean this guy's a spy, but who's he spying for? Is he CIA, and is he here to spy on us? Or is he KGB pretending to be an American and here to spy on us? So what is this guy?

Well, eventually they realized I was just me. I think everybody realized that this guy's not here to spy, because after a while you get to know people. You get to know people so well that you kind of know what this guy is, what he's all about. He's here to do his job. He's here to do his little proselytizing bit. I didn't hide my feelings about the world and about politics and so on. I felt that—I didn't feel I had a license to propagandize, but I was there to tell them about America, to tell them what I thought about the world, and they had no problem with that whatsoever.

DOB: Did they proselytize?

GD: Well, yes, in a sense. But they didn't see much of a prospect in me, [laughs] let's put it that way. But in any event, as far as getting along, our group did. Now this time it wasn't the whole base really, although there was a feeling of oneness in the whole base. But I think each group that tended to work together—and here again there was something that was different about the Russians, and that is that—remember at Wilkes we had quarters, and we lived in one place and we worked in our separate workstations. At Mirnyy, you lived and worked in the same place, and you didn't get together with the other people except in the mess hall. So again, this was a little bit different.

In other words, we had our own room, our own building where we lived, and we bunked there and we worked there in that room. So we stayed with each other pretty much, and the only time we got together with the rest of the group was in the mess hall. And we didn't always do that. On bad days we ate in our room there.

So whereas at Wilkes, everybody was—we kept seeing the same people all the time, and everybody was working together in the same building, and we all slept in the same building. And again, one of the things that Carl insisted on was that there not be separate quarters for the scientists and the military personnel. He insisted on that, and they had to agree to it. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 52

DOB: And that worked out well.

GD: Yes.

DOB: Well, there's so much on my list that I haven't asked you. What's on your list that I haven't asked you that you'd really like to include here?

GD: Well, of course I might mention what one of the things that really drew us together on the one hand and really cast a pall over our work at Mirnyy was that we did suffer a major disaster there. We had a fire in which we lost—everybody in the building perished. We lost eight members, and among them was my best friend by that time, Oskar Krichak, who had also been Gordon Cartwright's best friend when he was there during the IGY. This was a major loss. A really first-rate man in the atmospheric sciences and a really great guy. A wonderful man, Oskar Krichak.

DOB: When did that happen?

GD: This was in August of 1960. It was the worst storm of the year, we had a terrible blizzard going on. Never did figure out what started the fire, but it obviously spread very, very quickly, and the guys never had a chance to escape from it.

DOB: There was no tunnel or—

GD: Well yes, there were ways out. But apparently as we found them, they were all pretty well—they were probably overcome by smoke before they could do anything.

DOB: So it wasn't a structural design or anything like that.

GD: No. There was an inquiry, but why the fire spread so quickly, why the smoke got through so quickly, we don't know. One man did manage to get out. This was the meteorological building, so there was a tunnel leading over to the balloon release shelter and this was an underground tunnel, and one of the men did manage to get into it. We later found him. The tunnel had collapsed by that time. But we don't know whether he simply passed out from smoke inhalation before he could get clear, or whether it collapsed on him. Again this was not clear. The forensics of what happened were kind of hard to put together.

But in any event, it was a terrible disaster. I think it was the largest number of people that have ever died in an expeditionary situation in Antarctica at one time.

Obviously we lost people who were very close to us, especially—again, as I say, I was not in the—these were meteorological people and I was not in the met section, but I worked very closely with Oskar all the time. In fact, we worked a lot on entertainment. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 53

He was kind of in charge of the entertainment at our evening get-togethers, and I was the narrator for the movies. We got a bunch of movies from the U.S. bases, and I would kind of halfway translate to Oskar, and then he would halfway translate it to the rest of the people. So it was kind of a two-step translation of what was happening in American westerns and such types of movies. But the Russians loved them. They loved the American movies.

So sadly, we did have that major disaster. Fortunately, from our point of view, those of us who went in the field, we got into that project and left not too long after that, so we didn't have to sit around the base and mope about what had happened. We were quickly plunged into our own serious situation very, very rapidly, and we didn't really have the time to think about it until we got back.

DOB: Anything else?

GD: Well, going back to Wilkes again, as I say this really was an opening experience for many of us. Now again, as I say, Carl had been around, he had been in the Arctic, he had been in the Antarctic before, and it was really very good to have somebody like that there who was a scientist, at the same time a very practical person and had been through all this. So really Carl Eklund was unique—his presence there was something. I am extremely grateful for it that we had a man like that on our base.

DOB: And he died not too long after that.

GD: Yes. Unfortunately Carl had a heart attack only a few years after that, a short time later. Now I visited him—of course at that time I was still working with the program, so I used to spend a fair amount of time in Washington, D.C., and he was at Washington so I used to visit him, and I got to know him and his family quite well. So I became pretty close to Carl and to Harriet, his wife, and to his children. So again, they became kind of family to me also.

Also I got to know Dick Cameron, and as I mentioned he kind of led me into my next academic experience which was doing graduate work at Ohio State University. And Dick and I, of course, remain friends to this day. So there was a lot of personal things that developed out of that experience, too.

DOB: That's great. Well, I think we have to call an end, and I'm very sorry about that. It's been a wonderful afternoon. Thank you so much.

GD: You're quite welcome. I really enjoyed it.

[End of interview]