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. Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, 1999 2 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.