Dr. John Behrendt 14 March 2000

Brian Shoemaker Interviewer

(Begin Tape 1 - Side A)

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BS: This is an oral history interview with Dr. John Behrendt as part of the Polar Oral

History Project conducted by the American Polar Society and the Byrd Polar Archival Program of the Ohio State University on a grant from the National Science Foundation. The interview was conducted at Dr. Behrendt's office at the University of Colorado, Boulder, by Brian Shoemaker on the 14th of March 2000. Dr. Behrendt, you were a young man that went to Antarctica as part of the International Geophysical Year. Were you a volunteer?

JB: Yes, I was 24 years old. I had just finished my Master's degree at the University of

Wisconsin in 1956, when I left Davisville, Rhode Island, on November 9th on the USS Wyandot and we sailed for the Weddell Sea and Filchner Ice Shelf where I spent the winter at Ellsworth Station. I was a field assistant, or assistant seismologist, as my grand title was, to Edward Thiel, who was a young Ph.D. of 28 years old. He was my immediate supervisor and he and Hugo Newberg, co-led the over-snow traverse on the Filchner Ice Shelf the following summer. We left Antarctica on 17th of January 1958.

1 BS: What led you to go into science? What's your background? Did your father encourage you?

JB: Yes, my parents encouraged me to be educated and go to college, although I was the first person in my family. My younger brother was the second to get a college degree. My Dad never graduated from high school and my Mother went to a Normal School and taught elementary school. She did this most of her adult life except for 18 years out raising children. I grew up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where I was born in 1932, and attended Central State College which is now the Stevens Point Campus of the University of Wisconsin, for two years. I then went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison where I majored in physics. I was interested in the atomic bomb and I thought I would be an experimental physicist. I decided I wasn't smart enough to be a theoretical physicist. But, about the time I was completing my Bachelor's degree, I decided that I didn't want to sit in the lab all my life and I was looking for something to do. Professor George Woollard of the Department of Geology, was a geophysicist at Madison in 1956, and he convinced me to go to graduate school in geophysics.

BS: OK. We're talking about your background that led to you going into geology and you originally were physics and now you're into geophysics.

JB: So I started out as a geophysical field assistant in the summer of 1954 and traveled around the United States taking gravity readings and magnetic readings with another young geophysicist. Worked on my Master's degree with Ed Thiel as my supervisor in 1955. I went to work in the Uinta Mountains in the summer of '55 - and started my association with Edward Thiel, which lasted for some years. He was one of the people selected to go down to Antarctica in 1956 as a geophysicist, as was I, Charlie Bentley, Ned Ostenso, and Hugh Bennett. All but Bentley were from the University of Wisconsin.

2 Bert Crary, Albert P. Crary, would be the overall charge of the Antarctic Program in the winter, but more specifically the over-snow traverse program which was the only field science program in the 1957 - going down in '56 for the '57-'58 summer. Later, there was an explosion of field programs. But, basically, the over-snow geophysical traverse program to measure the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet and its snow accumulation, temperature, was the primary objective of this US program. The Soviet Union had a program similarly coordinated under the International Geophysical Year and the French ran a similar program. No other countries were doing that sort of work at that particular time.

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So, we applied, those of us from the University of Wisconsin and Charles Bentley, who was just finishing his Ph.D. at Columbia University at Lamont Geological Observatory under Morris Ewing as it was called at that time - now it's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. But, they originally rejected me and I think most of us young students because we didn't have enough experience in geophysics. I think they wanted to get some industry men, or more renowned university scientists. But these wouldn't go down for a year and a half, and so they ended up getting stuck with the people who Woollard and

Ewing and Crary selected in the first place. It was the Old Boys network operating that actually got us our jobs. And there were only boys in those days. No women were in the United States program.

BS: Who's Dr. Woollard?

3 JB: George P. Woollard was a well-known geophysicist for 30 or 40 years. He was professor in the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Geology and later went to Hawaii where he started the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics.

BS: He was big in oceanography too, wasn't he?

JB: That's right. But primarily although, his oceanographic work had a geologic bent, he and Crary and Ewing worked in the 1930s, doing geophysical work on the Atlantic coastal plain and continental shelf of the United States. And so they continued to be close and arranged the over snow geophysical traverse program. There were many fewer geophysicists in those days than now. So everybody knew each other. And as I said earlier, the Old Boys network is sort of what put this part of the IGY program in Antarctica together.

BS: OK. What did you do to prepare to go?

JB: Nothing in particular except I was finishing my Master's degree in the Uinta Mountains - gravity and magnetic survey of the Uinta Mountains, with Ed Thiel. He, by that time, had gone to the University of Utah, but eventually came back to Wisconsin. I was a mountain climber and worked on the Juneau Ice Field the summer of 1956. I guess that was a specific preparation. After I had been selected to go, Ed Thiel and I went up and worked with Ed LaChapelle and some other people on Lemon Creek Glacier where we measured the ice thickness. Attempted to do it with seismic methods, but ultimately made a gravity survey. So this was where I first became familiar with crevasses, although I had quite a bit of rock climbing and mountaineering experience, primarily rock climbing, prior to this time. And winter camping experience, but nothing exactly training me for Antarctica other than my general scientific education.

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BS: Crevasse work?

JB: Yes. We encountered many crevasses on the Filchner Ice Shelf traverse in Antarctica, but my first experiences with them were on the Juneau Ice Field on the Lemon Creek Glacier where I had the opportunity to spend 8 weeks watching a small mountain temperate glacier go through the annual melt ice cycle. So, when you went up there in June, you would barely see any crevasses and then as the summer glacier season progressed, they would open up and we learned to deal with them either roped up or not roped up, walking all over this small glacier.

BS: How many people who were in the over snow traverse program had prior ice experience, I mean on ice?

JB: Well, Charles Bentley had done his Ph.D. thesis on Greenland and part of the group that were going down to Antarctica worked in Greenland that same season that Ed and I were in Alaska. Hugh Bennett, Ned Ostenso and Nolan Aughenbaugh, who also was in Ellsworth Station, worked at Greenland. Bentley had finished his Ph.D. thesis by this time, but was continuing doing seismic reflection work in Greenland. But I don't think they had the crevasse experience, or crevasse problems, such as we were encountering in the Lemon Creek Glacier, although Greenland is more analogous to Antarctica and better training for Antarctica than a small mountain glacier in Alaska might be in other ways.

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BS: So, you were off. How did you get down there?

5 JB: Well, we sailed away from Davisville, Rhode Island, adjacent to Quonset Point Naval Air Station on November 9th, 1956 - sailed out of Narragansett Bay on a cold November day. I remember two IGY secretaries standing with a sign as our ship pulled away saying, "Is this trip really necessary?" I've told this story in several talks and no one under 50 even understands the humor in that.

BS: Which ship was it?

JB: The Wyandot. We went down the Windward and Leeward Islands, through the Panama Canal, spent a few days in Panama City, then continued off the coast of South America, crossing the equator and going through the initiation rites on a Navy ship of "crossing the line," and then stopped in Valparaiso, Chile, for a few days. Most of us civilians went up to Santiago and saw the sights. We were joined in Panama by the icebreaker Staten Island, a Navy icebreaker, in those days. A Wind Class icebreaker. We went south, encountered heavy seas and entered the Gulf of Penas and went through the Chilean inside passage. A Chilean Navy officer acted as a pilot through the English Narrows, to Punta Arenas, Chile, where we again stopped for two nights, or three nights. Left there after some very windy days in Punta Arenas, about the 5th of December, and proceeded through the Straits of Magellan and on to the Weddell Sea.

We encountered very heavy pack ice in the Weddell Sea and instead of getting there by Christmas, we were beset in the pack on three different occasions for a total of 21 days. Finally, passing British Halley Bay Station, and then getting down to the front of the Filchner Ice Shelf, we passed Shackleton Station where a small, five person party was wintering over, waiting for Fuchs' main party for the British Commonwealth Trans- Antarctic Expedition, which was a bit behind us, past the Argentine Belgrano Station which now would be Belgrano I, past the site of where Ellsworth Station would be, continued to Gould Bay, and were stuck in the ice. We sat for a long time in this area

6 trying to get around two large icebergs that were about 35 miles long. Eventually got around, continuing on to the west, along the front of what is now called the Ronne Ice Shelf but at that time was called the Filchner Ice Shelf. We attempted to get to Cape Adams on Nantucket Inlet to establish Ellsworth Station. All along the front of the Ronne Ice Shelf, there was no place that we could have built a station. The ice front was too high. But we did measure the elevations which gave us ice shelf thickness. This was the first bathymetric traverse of any ship into this area, although Finn Ronne had flown along the front of the ice shelf in this area in 1946-48 on his private expedition. No ship had ever been in here before.

Finally, we got about 40 miles from Cape Adams, Captain Edwin MacDonald, the commodore of the Task Group 43.7, that we were associated with, flew in with a helicopter, and determined - and I believe Finn Ronne may have been with him on that flight - that there was no place suitable to unload to build a station. With great difficulty, we transited back. Admiral Dufek, over in the Ross Sea area, was sending us messages to stop and build that station or proceed to Cape Norwegia and build it there, which would have been where the Norwegian-British-Swedish expedition had been, so we didn't think that was appropriate.

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Eventually, we built Ellsworth Station on the Filchner Ice Shelf. We landed the 27th of January 1957, and in about 14 days, the Seabee Lieutenant Commander Henry Stephens built this station either 90 or 70% complete, and then the ships pulled out. They were supposed to have 40 days. It was very impressive, the building the station in that short of time. Nonetheless, there was a huge amount of work left over for us to do when the ships finally sailed away on the 11th of February.

7 BS: What date was that, when you stopped there? The 27th of January? And Lieutenant

Commander Stephens was the Head Seabee?

JB: Yes.

BS: Now this was where? It was on the Ronne Ice Shelf?

JB: No, it was on the Filchner Ice Shelf. And the ice front along the Filchner Ice Shelf was low enough in that area in 1957 that ships could tie up to it. It was only about 15 or 20 feet above the sea, partly because of a very high melt rate and breaking off, cantilevering effect. And then slumping of the ice front because of high melt beneath that front of the Filchner Ice Shelf in contrast to the Ronne Ice Shelf.

BS: Were you worried about it floating away like it did on Filchner?

JB: No, we were about two miles in from the front. All generally agreed this was a pretty safe place. For that very reason, we were that far in. And it worked for two years for the Americans and then two more winters with the Argentines before the station was abandoned.

BS: So MacDonald, he was on the icebreaker. Was he captain of the icebreaker?

JB: No, he was the Commodore of the Task Group 43.7.

BS: Had the flag on the icebreaker?

8 JB: Well he, depending on which ship. From time to time he moved back and forth between Wyandot and Staten Island.

BS: OK. So, he wasn't driving icebreakers at the time. He'd driven them before.

JB: Yes.

BS: Tell me something about Captain MacDonald. Did you have much to do with him?

JB: Not too much. I was just a young student. But I was impressed with him. He came down the following season and I encountered him again when our ships were returned. Also, one of the things that I and a few others did as the officer privilege class in the ward room, we got to read all the message traffic. I copied down many of these messages. I'm sure they're now lost. I suspect the Navy has no records of these. If they are, they are very hard to find. And so, many dozens of these, I copied and so I got to know MacDonald a little bit through reading these messages exchanged with Dufek and also those of Captain Gambacorta, captain of our ship, the Wyandot. The ship was damaged quite severely while it was stuck in the ice. I'd never been to sea before and I didn't appreciate that the Navy captains and ship's crews don't like it when holes get punched in the hulls and pieces of propellers break off and drive shafts get warped. Since then, I've spent a lot of time at sea and have realized how this must have really concerned the captain of this ship. He showed amazing patience. Also MacDonald, in managing the two ships - the icebreaker was damaged severely, too. Two blades of the propellers.

BS: Was the Wyandot ice strengthened?

9 JB: A little . . . somewhat ice strengthened. Not very much. No ship had sunk in Antarctica since Shackleton's in the 1915 Endurance expedition. So I assumed that ships couldn't sink in Antarctica any more. Since that time, in fact, in the last 20 years, three ships have sunk in Antarctica because of the ice.

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BS: I think more than that.

JB: Perhaps. I'm thinking of the Gottland and the Footsteps of Scott Expedition and the Argentine ship, Bahia Paraiso. But there may have been some others.

BS: Two YOGS are out there somewhere.

JB: Yes. Well . . .

BS: And the Robert Swann's boat was sunk as well.

JB: I saw the YOGs at McMurdo and now I'm jumping ahead several years, in 1960.

BS: I just did Dusty Blades who drove the YOG down. He lives right down here. You know Dusty?

JB: Yes.

BS: He was the Skipper. He was a JG. He was a helo pilot and he didn't know anything about driving a ship. He said, "I have a boat. What do I do now?"

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JB: Well, I know that Con Jaburg, Navy lieutenant on our ship was a helo pilot, but also as one of the officers on the Wyandot who were just riding down to Antarctica, he took turns at being officer of the deck and did a bit of ship driving.

BS: Could I ask you about MacDonald. Where did Finn Ronne come in? Was he with

you when you built the base?

JB: Yes. Finn Ronne joined the ship in Valparaiso, Chile, and rode with us then. We had his book on the ship, Antarctic Conquest, the book about his 1946-48 Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition. We also had Jenny Darlington's book, My Antarctic Honeymoon, and so we read these on the way down to Antarctica. So, we had somewhat of an idea that he was a possibly difficult person. In the various messages that were exchanged between Dufek and MacDonald and Ronne, and also to Gould - Larry Gould who was chairman of the US National Committee for IGY - but on the USS Curtis over in the Ross Sea, trying to argue where the Base should be built. There was a lot of tension building up. Ronne had thought up the idea, which he convinced us nine scientific civilian people on the ship would be a good idea, to build a minimal base and leave most of the VX-6 squadron behind. Only have one airplane and leave most of the support people behind. Dufek said

no way to that. But, there were many messages back and forth on this. Ronne also argued on our behalf in the messages that we should build the base somewhere near Gould Bay or where Ellsworth eventually was established, rather than go to the Cape Norvegia area where the 1949-52 Norwegian-British-Swedish Expedition - that was the only preliminary IGY-type of expedition in Antarctica and we would have duplicated their work if we had gone there.

BS: You were close to Vassel Bay?

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JB: Yes, we were in that area. We could see Moltke Nunatak, and then two years later we, flew in and made gravity readings, collected some geologic samples, and named the Littlewood Nunataks in that same area, after Bill Littlewood.

BS: Was he along?

JB: Yes, he was on the Staten Island ship in 1956-57 and on the Edisto in the 1958-59 season when I went back to Ellsworth Station just for a summer cruise.

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BS: Finn Ronne . . . he had a reputation for being, not getting along with a lot of people.

Where did you first experience problems, or I shouldn't say problems, but Finn Ronne's personality?

JB: Well, that's a big question. I'm not hesitant to answer it. I'm just not quite sure where to begin. When the ships left and we all then began to winter over, there were 39 of us at Ellsworth Station. Nine civilians and 30 Navy people, including Finn Ronne who was the

Station Scientific Leader and the Navy Officer in Charge. This was the only station where this one person was given both of these titles. At others, there was a Navy Officer in Charge, usually a lieutenant, and a physician at Byrd or Jack Tuck at the South Pole who was a Seabee lieutenant. They were all Seabees. The doctor in charge of the detachment Bravo at Ellsworth Station, Clinton Smith, was a Seabee officer, although he was basically a medical officer and if Ronne hadn't been there and we'd not had the Navy air group, would have been the position that normally would have been in charge of the station.

12 I was rather surprised that we ate in separate messes (i.e., separate times in the same galley). We civilians were treated - I'm getting around to answering your question - treated as officers so there were 5 officers and 9 civilians and we had one mess and were waited on table by the Navy men who didn't care for this sort of duty at all and it created tension. When there was a movie in the evening, we had to, including civilians, stand at attention when Ronne came in to the galley where it was shown. We had a master at arms shout, "Attention on deck," and then we all had to get up from our chairs and stand, when he was escorted to his chair. These were the first somewhat petty things that gave us an inkling we were in for some troubles.

BS: How many officers were there?

JB: There were 3 pilots, the doctor and Finn Ronne, so there were 5.

BS: How many enlisted?

JB: 25. There was an air detachment of VX6, which it was called at that time. Later changed to VXE-6. We had two single engine aircraft and one more in a crate that hadn't been taken out yet.

BS: So he didn't relax - in such a small group, he didn't relax the officer-enlisted barrier.

JB: Not at all.

BS: Not at all?

JB: Not at all.

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BS: You felt more relaxed at McMurdo with bigger groups.

JB: Much more so.

BS: So he was trying to be Old Boy Navy.

JB: Yes. And he would sign memos and put them up on the bulletin board. He was great for memos, both as Station Scientific Leader but also as Commanding Officer, he would sign his name, Finn Ronne, Captain USN and some one of the Navy enlisted men would always write R after the USN. And finally he got around to signing them Captain USNR, which meant Naval Reserve and was a significant difference that these even lowly regular enlisted men appreciated and wouldn't let him . . .

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BS: Wouldn't let him forget. So, who were the other - I know Con Jaburg, in fact I met

him when I was down at Pensacola, but who else was there that wintered over of the pilots?

JB: Charles McCarthy was the Lieutenant Commander. He was the Officer in Charge of VX-6. Chuck, we called him. Or Mac.

BS: Lieutenant Commander?

14 JB: Yes. William Summerall. Willy. Was the youngest of the officers. He was a pilot and Clinton Smith who was the Navy medical officer. He was a Lieutenant. And Willy Summerall was a JG, Lieutenant Junior Grade.

BS: And Con Jaburg?

JB: Was a Lieutenant. And he was a helicopter pilot, but also piloted the single-engine Otter UC-1 aircraft.

BS: And the doctor. What was his name?

JB: Clinton Smith. Later, when we got into the Dufek Massif peaks were named after all of the people who were on both our winter and the following winter's expedition. Everybody with a few exceptions whose names were put other place, had some feature named after him. However, there's no Smith name because there's so many Smith names in Antarctica, so they named the part of a mountain Clinton after his first name, which was less common than his last name, Smith.

BS: Good. So, here you are. You've been dumped into Antarctica. When did the ships leave?

JB: They left the 11th of February. A storm was coming in and first the Wyandot pulled out. Everybody was put on 24 hour work. The ships company worked very hard - both ships companies, both the Seabees who were building the base and all the civilians, to try and complete the base and get it in order where Stephens and MacDonald felt it would be safe to turn over to Ronne and the rest of us to spend the winter. This was done, but it was a terrible mess of heating tubing and many other items not put in. The aurora tower

15 wasn't completed and met tower hadn't been completed. We civilians worked on that for several weeks afterwards, helping to finish it up.

BS: And a total of 5 officers, 25 enlisted. How many scientists? I forgot to ask you.

JB : Nine.

BS: Nine scientists.

JB: Although I use the term "scientist" loosely. We had one Ph.D., Edward Thiel, and the rest of us were . . . well, a number of us were young graduate students. Hugo Newberg was older. He was the chief glaciologist. Jack Brown was the chief of the ionosphere physics program. He was about 30 at the time. Hugo was about 36. And Jerry Fierle was about 36. He had been a chief in the Navy in World War II and worked for the Weather Bureau and was a very solid individual who really knew the meteorological program.

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BS: Jerry Fierle?

JB: Fierlie. F-i-e-r-l-i-e.

BS: Meteorologist.

JB: Yes. Although, he didn't have a college degree. He had worked himself up in the Navy and spent many years in the Arctic working for the Weather Bureau.

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BS: So what types of science? You got the base built and you're ready to approach the

winter, but you've got to get your science programs going. What went on during the early period leading up to winter and during the winter?

JB: OK, well the over-snow traverse party - the 5 person group that would the following summer go with two Sno-Cats on the Filchner Ice Shelf traverse, worked together doing geophysical work and glaciological work for the next 8 months at Ellsworth. So, at first we did some seismic refraction and reflection work near Ellsworth Station and out on the fast ice on the small bay that the Argentines had named Bahia Chica. We couldn't take vehicles across because of a tide crack. In fact, killer whales came up and gave us the eye as we tried to cross this tidal crack on foot. We man-hauled our equipment out in what we called akias and which they now call banana sleds. Worked on the fast ice and then also worked along the ice front of Bahia Chica, south from Ellsworth Station for a number of miles doing seismic work. We did this for a few weeks as the winter was approaching. And that's where we first encountered Antarctic crevasses which we discovered were quite different from the ones in the small glacier in Alaska as LaChapelle had warned us they would be. Nothing serious happened, although we did break vehicles in two times and stick legs in, occasionally. And then, at one point , I burned a clutch out on a Sno- Cat, or rather I should say I was driving when the clutch burned out, which I felt very guilty about all that winter. So we had to tow the Sno-Cat in with a D-4 tractor and this D-4 broke through a crevasse and then it was a bit of an effort our with a D-8 without breaking that into a crevasse. So we were getting into crevasse incidents at the beginning of the winter and we learned a bit to be careful about them. But it was mainly just the 5 of us on the traverse party that were getting this experience.

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Another common phenomena we encountered at this time for the first time in my life, was a class of hoar frost beneath snow ice which sounded somewhat like a snow bridge beginning to collapse, but in fact, it was probably due to recrystallization of the snow surface and one person might walk across it and not set this off. And then two people walking back in the same track would add additional weight and it would sort of something between a sigh and a whosh and you could feel the snow settle a little bit. It was a bit disconcerting when you were in the area of crevasses.

BS: You thought you were in a crevasse.

JB: Yes.

BS: So there were 5 traversers.

JB: Yes.

BS: You, Aughenbaugh, Thiel. . .?

JB: Walker, Paul Walker, and Hugo Newberg.

BS: Paul Walker.

JB: He was an Assistant Glaciologist. Paul had worked for Mark Moser on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic also, so he had some glaciological field experience and some crevasse experience before we went down there. The main work we did during the winter and the other over-snow traverse parties also did it at Little America and at Byrd Station, was to

18 dig a 31 meter pit in the snow, essentially vertical pit, to study snow stratigraphy, snow accumulation, temperatures. This was a rather major operation. Finn Ronne wouldn't give us any support for this and we were supposed to do this ourselves and, in fact, he essentially told us we shouldn't do it. We should just be planning for the coming traverse. But this was our assigned duty and actually it was an important objective. So, it meant we worked outdoors all through the winter. We had a tent over this 3 meter square at the top, tapering to 2 meters square at 31 meters depth, with a wire rope ladder going down this sloping 75 degrees, only 15 degrees from the vertical, and plywood platforms were put every 17 feet or so to work on as we went down. The glaciologists, Paul, and Hugo dug the pit and Aughenbaugh, Thiel and I were up on top with a Weasel pulling the buckets of snow out and dumping them. We'd work at this for 3 or 4 days and we'd get down another 3 meters, or 2. Then Walker and Newberg and Aughenbaugh would spend 3 days working in the pit, which was out of the wind, but still very cold, doing the snow stratigraphy while Ed Thiel and I worked on data reduction and other things in the station. As the pit got deeper and deeper, we got used to going up and down the wire rope ladder, but by the time it got very deep - 60 or 80 feet deep - no one from the station (very few people from the station even went outdoors in the winter) quite had the courage to go up and down a ladder into this pit. It was just the 5 of us who did.

BS: You were doing it throughout the winter?

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JB: Yes. We worked in the dark. It was in temperatures 60 below zero. The coldest we had that winter was 67 below, but we sort of agreed that below 60 below, we wouldn't work. Although we did work out many days when the wind was blowing 45 or 50 knots and it was 45 or 50 below zero Fahrenheit (not that it makes any difference at that

19 temperature). And driving, blowing snow. This pit was about a quarter mile east of the station, so we would walk out through the driving snow. Walt Davis, the Chief . . . well he was actually a First Class at the time, Navy mechanic, would keep a Weasel running for us. We kept breaking these Weasels down - small tracked vehicles. Because they just couldn't take the cold and the kind of work we were doing during the winter. He would also very nicely, since he was one of the first people up in the morning and he was driving a D-4 around putting snow into the snow melters with a Herman Nelson heater on our Weasel and get it going for us every morning. This was unbeknownst to Ronne because he didn't want us to get any support. For instance, we couldn't even get Davis to move the piles of snow that we were taking out from the pit - we were just getting long linear piles and it would have been very easy to take the D-4 and scoop a few of these away. But, Ronne wouldn't allow us to have any help of that sort, so we just had to walk over these long drifted piles of snow as we pulled the snow further and further out.

BS: So you got along better with his men than he did.

JB: Yes.

BS: How were your relations with the men, and this is an aside.

JB: With the enlisted men, the Navy men? Quite good. In fact, there was - it gets into the alcohol problem, which was not a serious problem, but we weren't supposed to associate with the Navy men, the enlisted men, at parties and we officers and civilians were supposed to stick together. Well that was violated all the way around, particularly at the parties.

BS: How about with Finn?

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JB: Our associations with Finn got tenser during the winter for various reasons. But along about in May, he finally got very angry with us and kicked us out of the officer's mess and so we ate with the enlisted men, so our relations with the enlisted men got much better at that point. And we still had very good relations with the officers. Our science building was sort of neutral territory. Kim Malville and I shared one room. Kim was the aurora observer. Don Skidmore and Jack Brown shared another room. They were the ionosphere physics group and Ed Thiel had a private room to himself in that building.

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Hugo Newberg and Paul Walker had a room next to the glaciological laboratory in the communications building and Jerry Fierlie and Nolen Aughenbaugh were in a barracks with Chief Petty Officers. So, I was starting to say, our science building, which contained the ionosphere sounder became a congregating place for all sorts. Officers and enlisted men, felt free to drop in and chat with us and drink beer and shoot the breeze and so.

BS: Did Finn come over?

JB: Yes, he came over. We got through the winter so that we could recognize everybody's footsteps - who they were by the sound of their footsteps. The doors at each end of these buildings, had a rather heavy latch to keep out the wind and snow although by this time we were buried beneath the snow in tunnels connecting the buildings. So, whenever the door would open, you'd hear this reverberation through the building and everybody would stop talking until you identified the footsteps of the person coming in. So, of course, when Finn came in, then the conversation would change the subject, usually, or frequently.

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BS: Frequently with him.

JB: Yes. But, nonetheless, we played bridge throughout the winter on Sunday afternoons. Finn would play with Don Skidmore and Paul Walker and me, and we kept this up, despite the problems. We were the junior most people at the scientific group. So, we kept this up throughout most of the winter.

BS: You looked back on this, noting your official expressions, with great humor.

JB: Oh yes, it was a humorous thing. I'm sure we were very difficult for him. He was 57 years old and he probably looked at us as a bunch of whippersnappers, which we were. We were actually nerds. Computer . . . although we didn't have computers, we only had a calculating machine, we had some pretty sharp electronics people there who came up with various means to bedevil him in the course of the winter.

BS: You baited him.

JB: I'm sure we baited him. We didn't think we baited him, but I'm sure there was some of this going on.

BS: The enlisted, did they bait him?

(550)

JB: Yes. We had a phantom in camp, for example. You almost have to say what part of the winter this was, but this was the end of April. We had the phantom cartoonist who

22 would leave notes around, humorous sayings, signed "The Phantom," usually with cutouts from magazines, spelling out the letters. One night, while most of us were at the movie, a knife was stuck in Ronne's door with a note saying "The Phantom strikes," and it had bloodstains on it. And Ronne took this very seriously, as perhaps anyone might in a similar situation, although it was meant as a joke. And so he had two of the officers form a board of inquiry and called in every person who was not at the movie that night and asked them. Of course, no one identified who the phantom was and people began to joke that they had to walk in pairs to protect each other, keep an eye on each other. So he was baited by the enlisted men, too. And in the VX-6 building at the end of a 600 foot long tunnel, there was a small Angry 9 radio put up and transmitted - had a 7-1/2 watts, so it couldn't get very far, with a sign put up called KC4RFA Radio Free Antarctica. They would broadcast to the free world.

Actually, communication was one of the really sore points of the winter and the source of the biggest tension. We had a ham radio, but we were not allowed to use it as at the other stations. There was one Navy Chief who was assigned to operate it and get phone patches or send ham grams, which I can define if you need to, but anyway, it was the only way to get personal phone calls between our families or any personal messages. They weren't very private, as in "I love you, over," as the whole world was listening in. But,

BS: But very important.

JB: Yes, but I only had two short conversations from the time the ship left until September, partly because of bad communications, but partly because of the way the use of the ham radio was allowed.

(600)

23

BS: How so?

JB: Well, basically we weren't allowed to use it.

BS: You mean personally you weren't allowed to use it.

(End of Tape 1 - Side A)

______

(Begin Tape 1 - Side B)

(000)

JB: Chuck MacCarthy also operated the ham radio. When we did occasionally did get a ham conversation, we were not supposed to discuss any of the tensions at the station or the instruction was to switch us off. So, basically, we never did. We also could send 50 word ham-grams through amateurs in the States, although we had to take these in to be censored by Ronne. We civilians, I don't know, perhaps the Navy men needed censorship as well. But we considered this very inappropriate since we were at a civilian scientific station, not a Navy base. That was a source of discussion through the winter that was the case - to determine which was the case. It was never completely determined. It worked out pretty well at the other scientific stations with the joint command. It was particularly difficult at Ellsworth with the one command in both the Station Scientific Leader and the Navy Officer in Charge. So there was great resentment about the ham radio. And then by the end of the winter, there were serious difficulties. Some electronics management difficulties, but mainly, one person couldn't operate the station for everybody that needed

24 to use it. And so, as the sun began to come up and conditions did improve, by coincidence, about that time, one of the scientific party, Don Skidmore, took over the management of the operation of the station and got it working much better and everybody got more phone patches. By the end of the winter, particularly after the over-snow traverse party had gone in the field, there was much more open use of the ham radio by various people operating. In any case, we managed to get illicit phone messages out throughout the winter, particularly as the tensions with Ronne created and our scientific party managed to communicate with people in Washington, DC. One of the people we were not allowed to talk to was Bert Crary over at Little America because Ronne really didn't want us to discuss the difficulties. We considered Crary our boss and the people in the United States that had sent us down, whereas Ronne considered himself the boss of the scientific program. That was the greatest source of the resentment. It wasn't the petty things like standing at attention.

BS: And so he expected the scientists to stand at attention?

JB: Yes, at the movie.

BS: Never happens at any Navy base.

JB: We even had people court martialed for disrespect to the Commanding Officer. Not, of course, actually court martialed, but he wrote up Jerry Fierlie for swearing in front of him and he wrote up Skidmore and sent these messages in. They blocked them at Little America and wouldn't prefer charges against them. Restricted people to quarters for several weeks at a time.

BS: Restricted people to quarters, huh. You mean civilians?

25

JB: Yes.

BS: I would have disobeyed him.

JB: That's when we began to have out secret phone conversations with people in Washington.

BS: Yeah. Well, quite interesting. Doesn't come out in his book.

JB: Read mine.

BS: I will. So, ham was important, but it could have been better.

JB: Oh yes, and it was a great source of discontent because some people were talking - particularly Ronne, but a few others - for long conversations and some had almost no communication at all.

BS: Did you . . . enlisted relations with him, did they put up with him? Was there potential rebellion?

JB: Not in any sense that the Navy would consider rebellion. No. I don't think so.

BS: Were you ever concerned about anyone shutting the door on him when he went out and locking it in the winter?

JB: No. No. I don't think so. He didn't go out much in the winter.

26

BS: Tell me about . . . it's really interesting since he was the only military commander and science leader, how . . . what role did he play in the research that you did?

(50)

JB: Well, he tried to tell us at one point how to do our seismic work. I tell you an example. Shortly after the ships had left and we were just starting to do our work . . .we'd been working on base construction for a couple weeks and finally were free to work out on our program. Well, as I said, we'd been man-hauling - to do some seismic work. It was very difficult man-hauling this heavy seismic equipment because of vacuum tubes and heavy batteries and we finally got out to our site on Bahia Chica about 2 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. We set up in this tent and started to cook ourselves some lunch when Ronne and Chief Spear came out to see us shoot some explosions. Ronne wanted to take some pictures. He accused us of sitting in there having a picnic and I spoke sharply to him and disagreed and that was one of the few times I actually got outspoken. He wrote about it in his book as well. I must have surprised him. Hugo Newberg said, "Have some lima beans, Finn," trying to diffuse the squabble. But we realized it was futile to argue with him. Some of the scientific people argued with him very vehemently on various occasions to their own detriment because he had a great deal of power over us and really made strong accusations about trying to get us. The more serious things were related to our traverse and trying to get reconnaissance flights related to it and to choose where we were going to take our, what route we were going to do. He wanted to direct this. It really was unfortunate that we didn't have better relations with him because we later did some serious exploration of the Filchner/Ronne Ice Shelf, which was essentially unknown south of the area where Ronne had made his flight along the front of the Filchner Ice Shelf. Berkner Island was something we discovered. We can go into the traverse at some

27 length, but you're still talking about the winter. But in the planning of the traverse, particularly Ed Thiel and Hugo Newberg, who were the co-leaders, had to argue with him to try and get reconnaissance flights. He wanted to make the flights and tell us where to go. We only agreed that Hugo and Ed Thiel were to lead the traverse, which was the plan that worked with the other traverses. Ultimately that was what we did do. But if we'd had better relations, I think he probably wanted to go and explore Edith Ronne Land. And that might have been a good thing for us all to have used his experience. But ultimately, there was too much discord to have made that a reasonable thing.

BS: So, this was during the winter when you were planning all of this out.

JB: Yes.

BS: Did you do any traveling in the dark?

JB: Just a few miles out away from the station. We had a network of accumulation stakes. Mainly it was Hugo Newberg, Paul Walker and Nolen Aughenbaugh that went out and remeasured these every month. And so we'd get out maybe five miles from the station. I can't remember how far the farthest were, but you could barely see a light on the aurora tower on a clear day. Of course, in the blowing snow, we didn't go out that far. I remember one occasion on a Sunday afternoon, I just went out by myself and walked away a quarter mile or so, just to get away from all the Sturm und Drang at the station, and realized we were really in Antarctica. The troubles inside the station seemed much pettier when you're outside. Besides, it was really very beautiful. We saw aurora every day; you could see an orange glow on the northern horizon as the sun was getting ready to come back. See the Southern Cross overhead at noon. Watching the winter progress

28 and then end made being outdoors, despite the cold, quite an interesting and contrasting experience to all the difficulties.

BS: How did the darkness affect you and the others?

JB: Well, those of us that went out every day probably had a better adaptation to it, but still there were some sleep problems I'll get to in a moment.

(100)

As the winter came on, those of us who were working outdoors would go out later and later and come in earlier and earlier until finally it was dark all the time and then we just went back out on a normal working schedule and worked in the dark, depending on what work we were working on. I'll tell you about the dark, the way it affected my sleep - but everybody else's sleep was similarly affected in various ways. I'd sleep until about 8:30 - we were on a winter schedule so the meals were closer together and the work schedule for most of the people at the station was lighter than in the summer. So I'd get in to breakfast just before 8:30. I'd wake up, walk in, I'd try to skip breakfast but it was too cold outdoors, so I'd force some cereal down. Then we'd go out and work digging this pit and working outdoors for an hour and a half or so. Come in for coffee and, which was a diuretic and we probably shouldn't have had it, but it stimulated us. We'd eat a lot of pastry. Then we'd go out and work for another hour and a half and come in and eat a huge meal about noon. And then I'd sleep for half an hour until Ed would wake me and we'd go back out and repeat the cycle in the afternoon. Work with a coffee break. Then come in and have a huge dinner at 5 or 5:30. There'd be a movie at 7 o'clock and I would take another couple hours nap right after dinner. Sometimes I'd sleep right through the movie. Then I'd be wide awake from about 9 or 10 on and wouldn't be able to go to sleep until

29 maybe 3 or 4 or 5 in the morning even and still have to get up at 8:30 or so to get in for breakfast. So everybody was wandering around all over the station at different schedules. Ronne wanted nobody to be in the tunnels after 11 o'clock at night, so he wrote an edict to this effect. That just didn't work. He wanted the ionosphere people to only do their work during regular working hours. The aurora observer obviously had to work at night. The balloon launching people launched their balloons four times per day and took measurements throughout the day. Don Skidmore who scaled the ionosphere records would work throughout the night and sleep late in the morning and all of this was very distressing to Ronne. Some people slept all day and were up all night. So there got to be a lot of, I wouldn't say sleep disorder, but disorientation. I think this has been reported at other Antarctic stations in the winter. Probably the sleep patterns in the summer on the traverse were a little more interesting when we did have the sun. We got into a different schedule then as well. I'm sure I got a normal number of hours sleep, but I got them broken up. The term "Big Eye" was apparently common around the Ross Sea area during this same period; none of us had ever heard of or even heard the expression.

BS: It's a slang term from the sailors.

JB: Yeah, but I mean the sailors there at Ellsworth had never heard of it.

BS: At Ellsworth. Well, it was invented at McMurdo, I'm sure. They come up with a lot of slang terms.

JB: Well, we had . . . sandcrabs was a common designation way back.

BS: Well, that's a . . .

30 JB: Yeah, I know. But we civilians were sandcrabs. As an aside . . .

BS: Iggies?

JB: No. We were sandcrabs. They were iggies over in the Ross Sea area.

BS: And at Byrd.

JB: Yeah. But we were sandcrabs, then later, it became Fellows of the Antarctic Research Program, which were called by the acronym FARPS, and the marine biologists were the fish FARPS. And later, it became beakers, which is . . .say, in the early 90s, late 80s, the scientists at McMurdo were called beakers. Eventually, the term got around to New York Times articles and the term persisted. The New York Times article was the first I'd ever heard of "beakers" for scientists even though I was down there in those years. But some of the Antarctic Support Activities people, i.e. people who had been down there 4 years who were old timers by then, still called people beakers in 1995. By this time, there are a whole new crop of people and probably some other terms now.

(150)

BS: It's SARP now.

JB: What?

BS: USARP, or SARP. That came along after NSF took over.

JB: Oh yeah, well that was . . . but the R has been taken out of the . . . it's now USAP.

31

BS: That was Al Fowler. He wanted it to be the US Antarctic Program, which, in fact,

it's not. It doesn't include the State Department operations and things like that. It's ARP. Fowler pushed that quite strongly.

JB: I still wear a patch on my jacket, a USARP patch, rather than USAP patch.

BS: Yeah. So, here we are the end of winter.

JB: In the late winter, then, we did a lot of seismic refraction work after the pit was finished and was just a few hours of daylight. Still pretty cold, getting down 40, 50 below zero. And we worked out east of Ellsworth Station for 10 or 15 miles south doing this geophysical surveying, shooting off large charges of explosives and measuring sound waves through the rock and ice. But then the main purpose of our coming summer season was to go out and measure the ice thickness south of the front of the Filchner Ice Shelf which we didn't know extended hundreds of miles. We assumed we were going into Edith Ronne Land. However, in March, the previous fall, Finn Ronne, Ed Thiel, Hugo Newberg in one of the single engine Otters, had made a long flight south and found that the ice shelf continued. There was a large rift about 50 or 60 miles long which the British later called the Grand Chasm, which we did not know existed or I wonder if Ellsworth Station would have been put where it was had it been known. The Grand Chasm appeared to be an insurmountable barrier for us getting south along the ice shelf. They also flew over part of what later came to be known as Berkner Island. And so we realized that there was not a simple ice shelf and then Edith Ronne Land as had been thought when Ellsworth Station was put. So all through the winter we speculated on what this meant. And how to run our traverse. Whether to go west or east around the Grand Chasm, which

32 was where Fuch's Trans-Antarctic Expedition was going to go to get up on the high ice sheet to go to the south pole and across Antarctica. Then, in October, there were several short reconnaissance flights looking at the crevasses in the area. But then there was a long flight in October about a week before our traverse started with Finn Ronne and Ed Thiel . Ronne wouldn't allow Hugo Newberg on the flight. They flew south to the Dufek Massif, which Ronne thought he was discovering with Ed that day. However, it had been discovered by Trigger Hawks flight two years previously from McMurdo, but mislocated by more than 100 miles. And so Fuchs' had those photographs, and they thought they were going through those mountains on their way to the South Pole. It turned out this was almost directly South from Ellsworth almost. So, we made that one of our objectives on our traverse, which was to get south up onto Berkner Island (which we didn't realize was an island at that time), get up on the land and then go on to the Dufek Massif. So, on October 28th, we left in two Sno-Cats. Let me back off and explain about the clutch.

All through the winter, we tried to get a replacement clutch delivered down somehow or other and eventually James Lassiter in an Air Force plane did bring the clutch down, but he didn't arrive until late November. So that wouldn't have helped us much.

(200)

Hugo Newberg did the impossible. He retempered the clutch springs in the kitchen stove and rebuilt the clutch and it worked for the whole traverse on this Sno-Cat. So that was one of the main accomplishments of Hugo's career in Antarctica. We would not have been able to make that traverse as we did because the Weasels were too fragile. They broke down too easily and would have fallen in crevasses, even more easily than Sno- Cats did. So we headed east around the Grand Chasm, stopping every 30 or 40 miles to

33 put in a seismic reflection station, measure the depth to the bottom of the ice shelf and the bottom of the seawater under the Filchner Ice Shelf. We also stopped every 4 miles and measured gravity and magnetism and snow hardness. On these major stations overnight stops, the glaciologists would dig a snow pit and measure snow stratigraphy and drill a 9 meter hole and measure temperatures accurate to about a 10th of a degree Celsius with a thermister to determine mean annual temperatures. We did this throughout our whole traverse. Anyway, we had some crevasse problems within the first few hours of getting out of Ellsworth Station and these continued almost every day to the end of January when we came out. At first, airplanes would come out and give us some reconnaissance. This particularly helped one day when we were going around the east end of the Grand Chasm when Willy Summerall flew in a white-out and directed us right and left from the air because we had zero visibility as to the direction to go. We could see open crevasses and he would say, go one way, go the other way. We worked our way around these crevasses and then turned off toward Berkner Island and in so doing this route, we measured a deep trough that extends way inland for hundreds of kilometers under the Filchner Ice Shelf. This is now known as the Thiel Trough beneath the Ice Shelf. We named it the Crary Trough after Bert Crary, so on some maps, and it’s still known as the Crary Trough into the Weddell Sea. The Germans call it the Filchner Trough because the Filchner Expedition made the first bathymetric soundings of it in about 1912. But anyway, we followed this trough with zigzagging from Ellsworth, around the Grand Chasm, back to Berkner Island, and as we approached Berkner Island, we got into very heavy crevassing and continued through. We broke in and dropped a vehicle and sled in, got it out, continued on with Con Jaburg flying overhead giving us directions. We still broke into another crevasse. Damaged the vehicle, were delayed for many days. They flew out several times with supplies and parts from Ellsworth. One of the Navy men fell into a crevasse. We got him out safely.

34 BS: Was he on the traverse with you?

JB: No. He was just one of the aircrew.

BS: Oh, I see. He landed . . .

JB: And walked towards us and fell in. And we finally found or marked and dug into many snow bridge crevasses and marked them and found a route over to the edge of Berkner Island and then a route up on it and continued on South to the Dufek Massif. From the top of Berkner Island, we had radio communication with Ellsworth. I had cut my hand and went in for a few days to get it fixed and that's when I met Jim Lassiter who had just flown down with two C-47s to Antarctica to do some aerial photography. But in any case, the radio message from the top of Berkner Island to Ellsworth around Thanksgiving was the last communication from the traverse party to Ellsworth for many weeks.

(250)

We had a 7-1/2 watt Angry 9, ANGRC-9 transceiver that was the best that was furnished us at this time. I was flown back to the traverse in an Otter, and then we continued on south to the Dufek Massif where we spent a week doing very interesting geologic work and found a number of interesting things which I'll describe.

BS: When did you arrive at the Dufek?

JB: The 9th of December.

35 BS: You were the first party in there.

JB: Yes.

BS: OK.

JB: And as we approached them, we saw these very jagged peaks and as we looked at them with binoculars, I said, those must be igneous rocks because of the jaggedness of appearance, they looked like they were very erosion resistant. We had two geologists, better geologists than I on our party - Aughenbaugh and Walker - and they laughed at my presumption to say those were igneous rocks. As we got still closer, we could see flat layers which looked like sedimentary rock and of course, they knew they were right and I was wrong. And I thought I was. Aughenbaugh and I had made a bet for $3 as to whether they were igneous or sedimentary. Finally, when we got to the range, it turned out they were igneous. It was gabbro we were looking at. The Dufek layered massif intrusion as it later came to be known, also outcrops in the Forrestal Range to the east, which we didn't get to on that traverse.

But anyway, this was a very exciting feature. It's made up of about 175 million year old rocks which were intruded as a magma body about the time Africa was separating from Antarctica and about the same time as the dolerite sills that are exposed in the dry valleys in the McMurdo area were also intruded into the sedimentary rock there. We found dry valleys in the Dufek Massif. Very spectacular pinnacled peaks, very warm on the north side where it was protected from the wind. We found a melt water pond with algae growing in it. Brought samples back. We found soil that turned out not to have any organic material in it. It was mainly the result of mechanical weathering by freezing and thawing and no particular evidence of chemical weathering. We spent a week looking at the geology in this area which primarily was Aughenbaugh's doing,

36 although geology was not a part of the IGY program because of the mineral resources aspects, nor was topographic mapping. IGY was an international cooperative program and it was avoiding the issues of possible mineral resources or territorial claims. As it happened, on the flight Finn Ronne and Ed Thiel had made a few days before our traverse started, Ronne had dropped a claim marker. That is the last claim that the US dropped and the only one after the IGY had officially begun on July 1st, 1957.

BS: When did he drop that?

JB: Hold a second, I'll tell you the date.

BS: You know approximately what date?

JB: Deborah Shapley's got an error in her book because she got the date indirectly from Ronne and he was in error on the date. That's why I want to get the date exactly correct.

(300)

BS: You know she's Allen's niece.

JB: Yes. But the exact date of that flight was the 21st of October 1957. Not the 23rd of October as reported by Ronne, just to set this record straight. I have checked with three other people's diaries from the Ellsworth party and for sure it is that particular date, which is a moot point to anybody but an historian. Anyway, we spent this time on some of the small peaks doing geology and just for the fun of getting up on top of the mountains. It was the first rock I'd set foot on since leaving Punta Arenas, in South America, more than a year earlier. We also drove around the end through a beautiful

37 valley called Enchanted Valley by a USGS party, and then past Walker Peak and found a route that we could have gone on south to the South Pole. We were in the clear. Fuchs and his party were still having a lot of difficulty with crevasses getting up the . . . Recovery Glacier, and we were only 400 miles or so from the South Pole (we were at 83 degrees south anyway). If Ronne had had better relations with us, he and we would have loved to go to the South Pole. I'm sure that Crary and the science people would have thought that was a stunt, but in fact, it would have been great fun to do. We'd of beat Fuchs or Hillary to the South Pole.

BS: It would have been great to have beat them.

JB: Yes. But we, unfortunately, had no radio communication any more. The day we first arrived at the Dufek Massif, Lassiter flew out in an Air Force C-47 with Ronne. He had a 125 watt radio transceiver he was willing to let us take and use - a spare one that we could communicate with Ellsworth Station. Ronne refused to let us take this because he said Dufek might not like it, to let us take an Air Force radio. Actually, he did not want us to be able to communicate around Antarctica with other field parties and I think this was part of the continuation of the trouble we'd had all through the winter with radio communication. So we had no communication for several more weeks. He agreed with

Hugo and Ed Thiel, to meet at a point northwest of the Dufek Massif, about 250 miles away, a couple days before Christmas. But no one had ever flown over this area and we had no idea what was there - whether it was ice shelf or grounded ice. Turned out to be ice shelf, although we crossed some ice rises in the area getting up there. We went up there to the north crossing many crevasses in largely overcast weather (which we did not know we were crossing) and got there on the appointed date and waited for resupply.

(350)

38

Rodman, one of Lassiter's pilots, flew out one of the R4Ds (C-47s), and gave us a resupply a day or so after Christmas and then brought the radio. After that point, we had no trouble communicating with Ellsworth station, but we had gone from the time the traverse party first arrived around the summit of Berkner Island until a few days after Christmas, with no direct radio communication, even though Lassiter and Ronne had flown out and found us. And also one of the Otter flights had flown out and found us - the field party - two different times, near Berkner Island by following the tracks in the snow.

BS: So you had poor radios. If you had had a casualty, you would have had trouble

notifying.

JB: Yes, and that was probably the most serious thing Ronne did to us the whole year, not letting us take the radio. It was not his fault we had poor radios to start with, but when we had a good radio and he wouldn't let us use it under the, I would say rather flimsy excuse that Dufek wouldn't want us to have an Air Force radio, he was wrong. We continued on over the Ronne Ice Shelf. We had crossed the Henry Ice Rise. Again more crevasses every few days throughout this period which I won't go into details about. But we got up on top of Korff Island and saw a nunatak in the distance, which we named

Zumberge nunatak. Probably this was Haag Nunatak. Charles Swithenbank and I later figured this out. It was quite a long distance away, but we just barely could have seen it. Ronne and MacCarthy flew out on December 5 - a day or two before we got to the Dufek Massif. They flew out at quite a high elevation - probably 10,000 feet because they did fly those single engine Otters that high on occasion. They saw mountains to the west, they reported to us, as well as the Dufek Massif.

BS: Who was Ronne with?

39

JB: MacCarthy was the pilot. I'm wondering and I have wondered ever since if they saw the highest peaks of the Sentinel Mountains which were a very long ways off. In fact, no one had seen those to that point. So, ironically perhaps, this was the first discovery of the high peaks of the Sentinels. When Lincoln Ellsworth had made his historic flight in 1935, the highest peaks of the Sentinels, Mt. Vincent, and Mt. Tyree were clouded in and he did not see those. He only saw the low foothills at the north end. A few weeks later in early January 1958, Charles Bentley and Ned Ostenso, Mario Giavanetto, and Vern Anderson on their traverse out of Byrd station discovered the Sentinel Mountains for the first time, the high peaks, from the over-snow traverse. But I'm curious if in fact Ronne and MacCarthy had first seen them. We never saw any mountains from the surface. You can see a very great distance in Antarctica from high elevation in planes, and I have flown around west Antarctica out of Byrd Station and seen those high peaks from very long distances.

(400)

BS: Who's credited with discovering those?

JB: Well, I think Lincoln Ellsworth is credited for discovering them because they're continuous . . .the north end.

BS: He didn't see the Sentinels though.

JB: Well, he named them the Sentinels, but he didn't see the high Sentinels.

BS: He saw those . . .

40

JB: The north end of them.

BS: I know some pilots who said that they were the first in there.

JB: Well this was before . . . Anyway, here I'm speculating. This would have been in '57. Ned Ostenso told me he and Charlie were the first ones ever to have seen them in January 1958. They did not have an aerial reconnaissance for their traverse out of Byrd Station.

BS: Did you know Chief Riemer?

JB: No.

BS: He was one of the photographers who came down with you and went back, when you set up the station. And he later flew from the other side. Said they were the first over the Sentinels.

JB: Well they may have been the first that flew over them, because Bentley and Ostenso drove to the Sentinels and they did not have an aerial reconnaissance before that traverse began. They got there in early January, just a couple weeks after, a few weeks after Ronne and MacCarthy . . . and they think they are the first ones. Ronne never claimed to have seen those mountains, nor did he mention them in his book. Anyway, we finally reached the far point of our traverse on the northwest end of Korff Island and were running low on fuel and had to get back in range of the single engine Otters. We retraced our track going 124 miles in one 24 hour period and continued on for about a total of 148 miles which still may be some over the snow surface record for all I know. I don't claim that, particularly. Then finally we got back in range. They

41 couldn't find us in the single engine Otters easily and they made several flights looking for us because they didn't have radar. We had good communication by this time and gave them good positions, because our positions were always quite accurate. We had a WWV receiver radio to adjust our theodolite observations for our celestial navigation. Even though we couldn't communicate out, we could receive. So eventually they had to fly out in the Otter, land, take sun shots and compute their position and after one aborted flight, finally did find us and bring us fuel.

BS: Now this Korff Island. How do you spell that?

JB: K-o-r-f-f.

BS: K-o-r-f-f. From Sergei Korff?

JB: Yes. And Berkner and Korff were IGY leaders. Zumberge was not given to the nunatak we saw. His name was then reassigned to Cape Zumberge, which is in that area as well.

(450)

But it turned out the nunatak probably was Haag Nunatak. That was only figured out by Charles Swithenbank many years later.

BS: So, this was about what time of year?

JB: OK, we got there in January and the ships came in on January 1st. The night of New Year's Eve, we were proceeding through crevassed areas to Korff Island. Ed and I were in

42 the second Sno-Cat and Paul was driving the first Sno-Cat. He said on the radio, "I'm looking directly down into an open crevasse. It is New Year's at this moment. Why don't you come over and we'll have a drink?" So we did. And after we had a drink, we continued on through the crevasses and got up on Korff Island easily. We tried to get on past it. We went down onto the ice shelf again, but again ran into more crevasses. Ronne was sending us messages that we had to return because the ships were coming in. MacDonald wanted to evacuate us by air. We stalled for a few days, but finally turned around and came back on that long stretch to get within range. And continued on towards Berkner Island. On the 17th of January, Captain MacDonald and Willy Summerall and two new crew coming in to replace us, flew out, picked us up. We had just a few hours for Newberg and Aughenbaugh to do some more surveying, get ice cores out of the deep pit, explain to our replacements how we had been doing. We left the Sno-Cats and all the gear, got on the ship and sailed away.

BS: These guys had never traversed?

JB: Nope.

BS: Who were they?

JB: Jock Pirrit was the leader.

BS: Jock?

JB: John Pirrit. P-i-r-r-i-t. And he wrote a book called, Across West Antarctica.

BS: Later on, he went over to Byrd Station.

43

JB: Byrd Station, yes, and he led the traverse. He wrote a book about that one from Ellsworth to Byrd. And Bob Goodwin was his assistant. Father Bradley and Tom Turcote were two seismologists. Bradley was a Jesuit seismologist who replaced Ed Thiel and Turcote replaced me.

BS: Curcott?

JB: T-u-r-c-o-t-e.

BS: Turcote. I write these names down to help run people down.

JB: And these are all in my book, by the way, the correct spellings.

BS: OK.

JB: And the dates are, when I've said "about" such a date, the exact dates are in my book and I would refer anyone to check there. (500)

BS: So, you flew out. You flew back to Ellsworth?

JB: Yes. Spent just a couple hours there. The Westwind had come down with the Wyandot again. They had an easy time getting through the pack ice this time. The reason for the great hurry getting out we later found when we were on the ship, was that the Russians were reported going into the Bellinghausen Sea and MacDonald was ordered to go in there ahead of them. So it was the Americans that got in there first. We didn't know

44 it, but they were even going to leave us and come back for us later. Maybe we'd have been stuck with a second winter. Fortunately, for our peace of mind, we were not aware of that.

BS: And so you had time enough to go in your room, grab your bags, and leave?

JB: Essentially, yes. We'd packed all our bags before we ever went on the traverse. So literally, that took no time at all and I think our friends had even loaded our stuff on the ship for us. So it was basically just to chat with the new people for an hour or two. You asked about our sleeping habits in the winter. We also got into some strange sleeping habits in the summer on this traverse. Our intention was to go for about 12 hours, stop, and then camp and then the next day do our glaciological, geophysical work, camp a second night, and then continue on. But because of the various incidents with the crevasses and also many vehicle breakdowns that I haven't described, we got delayed and finally we ended up in a 36 hour cycle where we would get up, eat a breakfast and do our station scientific work. Then after 12 hours of that, we'd eat another huge meal and then we'd drive for about 12 hours. By that time, we'd been up for 24 hours. Then we'd be exhausted and we'd sleep for 12 hours. And repeat the cycle, so we got in and out of phase with daylight.

BS: So you were all on the same cycle.

JB: About a 36 hour cycle.

BS: That's interesting.

JB: And we didn't seem to have any problems with it.

45

BS: How did you eat there?

JB: OK. Well, during the winter . . .

BS: I mean on the trail.

JB: Well, I'll just explain. We gained a lot of weight in the winter and we worked outdoors and then in the summer on the traverse, we lost a lot of weight - 20 or 30 pounds a piece.

(550)

We ate very well, partly because of the supplies that were sent down, but also because of our very close relations with the Navy men. For instance, I was in charge of the food and the cooking and planned the menus and arranged to get a 7 lb. beef tenderloin for every other day for the whole traverse from the Navy cook who turned out to be a good friend of ours. Every time a plane came out, he sent pastries and things. Turned out Finn Ronne had told him not to send any fresh bread or any pastries to us.

BS: That was good enough for him.

JB: We didn't know this, however, and we always got them whether or not he approved. It was only later that we heard that he had refused us. But anyway, we had plenty of good food. We had powdered soups. First time I'd ever encountered the soups that you could just pour hot water in and eat. We had Army 5-in-1 rations which, incidentally, each contained 5 packs of cigarettes as well. We ate luxuriously by comparison to previous

46 Antarctic expeditions, mainly because of the vacuum tube. That was the logistic control on our over-snow traverse program. Our seismic equipment was in five 50 lb. banks of amplifiers, 24 channels which with the recording camera weighed about 1,000 lbs. Then we had big 250 amp power batteries, a gravity meter. Because of this, we needed very heavy Sno-Cats and because one Sno-Cat couldn't go by itself, we had two or on the other traverses, three or four Sno-Cats. We only had two on the Filchner Ice Shelf traverse. A Sno-Cat can only get one mile per gallon, so that means we had 2 gallons per each mile of the traverse. So the amount of fuel we burned was far more weight than any amount of food we could eat which turned out to be a trivial weight. So we had huge supplies of food in terms of emergency or survival rations and so on. We had always at least another month of food in addition to dry emergency rations in addition to the food we took with us. So there was never any risk of food shortage. We had problems with crevasses, but we didn't have problems with food.

(600)

I was the main cook. I'd never cook breakfast so I could sleep in and cooked the other two meals a day. Hugo insisted we cook outdoors.

(End of Tape 1 - Side B) ______

(Begin Tape 2 - Side A)

(000)

47 BS: This is tape 2 of the oral interview with Dr. John Behrendt. Interview conducted by Brian

Shoemaker on behalf of the American Polar Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center on a grant from the National Science Foundation.

JB: Where were we?

BS: We talked about you getting ready to fly out and you grabbed your bags.

JB: We had no problems getting out of the ice pack. We came through Buenos Aires and then flew back to the United States. We were met at Andrews Air Force Base and taken to the National Academy of Sciences where we met for a whole day with the United States National Committee for the IGY. I don't know the names of everybody at this meeting, but Pembroke Hart was there as a staff person and Merle Tuve. I think there are records of this meeting. They wanted to know about our situation with Finn Ronne and the winter we had there and the scientific accomplishments of our field work, and so we spent a day . And Ed Thiel, Hugo Newberg, and John Brown, the senior discipline leaders, were the most credible in explaining this, but the rest of us put in our two cents worth in the course of this as well for this day. Then we separated and went our ways and many of the people I've never seen since.

BS: What, why was Finn appointed? He'd had trouble on expeditions before that, personal problems, and all of a sudden he's put in charge. Everybody knew about the problems he had in '46.

JB: He says in his book he was called to active duty and he accepted, but I think he certainly wanted to go in to explore what he had called Edith Ronne Land. That would be understandable. And in the Weddell Sea. I also think from the point of view of Dufek (this is my speculation), in the main program at the Ross Sea, South Pole, axis of Hallett, Little America, McMurdo, that they were quite happy to let Ronne go to the most isolated station, which Ellsworth was. There were no other planes

48 than Lassiter's (CIA) flight in. It was very difficult to fly into that area in contrast to the Ross Sea area. Even Wilkes Station was not as isolated as Ellsworth because of the heavy pack ice on the Weddell Sea. So, Ronne wanted to go there and lead that expedition. He wouldn't consider other than the single command. I don't know how he arranged it, but some people were expecting us to have difficulties, we later learned.

BS: Oh yeah. They let you . . . it was irresponsible on their part, from my aspect, because they knew how things would turn out with Ronne. He had a history of instability and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. It was just a personal thing he had; he couldn't handle people very well. But, they let him go anyway. It's amazing that Dufek knew about this, because he was there in '39 and then he was there at High Jump and he knew about Ronne coming out on the Ronne Expedition . The problems they had. IkeSchlossbach and lots of other guys talked about it, but still they allowed it to happen and maybe he was prevailed upon. On the other hand, Ronne had done such an outstanding job of discovery on his expedition that that might have been an overriding factor.

JB: And he certainly accomplished a lot, although all those early flying photography flights had great errors in positions. So, I wouldn't fault Ronne or his party for that; they discovered and took aerial photography in a number of areas on his Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition.

BS: Discovered the Ronne Ice Shelf and you know. . .

JB: Which they thought was Filchner Ice Shelf.

BS: And all that area. It was a great area of activity.

JB: Well, they discovered what they called Edith Ronne Land. Perhaps Ronne was over part of Berkner Island because they reported land at a high elevation. In fact, they didn't not fly into what is

49 now known as the Ronne Ice Shelf except along the ice front. We, by both the Wyandot traversing it across the front and also Ronne's flight knew that that part of it was an ice shelf (called Filchner Ice Shelf) and we knew the water was deeper than the ice shelf was thick, so we knew that it was floating ice shelf from our marine traverse.

(50)

Then we did our seismic traverse from Henry Ice Rise to Korff Island and the Dufek Massif to Henry Ice Rise. We determined that this area was ice shelf except for those ice rises above sea level west of Berkner Island. So then we determined on the first scientific paper we wrote that this was ice shelf, which we, in those days, called the Filchner Ice Shelf. And then later that was changed to the Ronne Ice Shelf.

BS: But they did a tremendous job of exploration on the Ronne Expedition. I'm going to interview

Charles Adams, Brigadier General Charles Adams. One of his pilots. Buddies. He lives downtown That's coming up after I get my income tax done. So what did you do after that? The IGY was over, for your part and . . .

JB: Well, I went back to Madison, Wisconsin. Ed Thiel and Ned Ostenso and I and Ed Robinson who had been on the Ross Ice Shelf traverse with Crary. In the meantime, Crary and Bentley and Giovinetto stayed on for another winter, so they wintered over two winters in a row. Ed was in charge, under George Woollard in Madison of what became the University of Wisconsin Geophysical and Polar Research Center. Then later Bentley and Giovinetto came back there as well. So we worked on data, wrote preliminary reports, and then the following season, I went back to the Weddell Sea on the Navy icebreaker Edisto to relieve the Americans at Ellsworth Station. The United States was turning it over to Argentina at that time. Ed Thiel and Ned Ostenso went down to the Ross Ice Shelf area.

50

BS: Which year was that?

JB: '58-'59 season.

BS: That was back to Ellsworth then.

JB: Yes. And Thiel and Ostenso went down and did the first airborne geophysical traverse, operating out of Little America and Byrd Station where they would land and make seismic reflection measurements. This was all before we could do radar ice thickness measurements. So they were making gravity and aeromagnetic and seismic measurements.

BS: That's Ostenso and . . .

JB: Thiel.

BS: And they were with you.

JB: No, not in 1958-59.

BS: Who went into Ellsworth with you?

JB: No one in 1958-59. Thiel, in 1956-58. And Ostenso was with Bentley at Byrd Station. But in Madison in 1956 were Ostenso and Hugh Bennett, who came from Little America, and Ed Robinson were on the original Ross Ice Shelf traverse. Thiel was in charge of us. He was the only one with a Ph.D. at that time. Ned and Hugh Bennett and Ed Robinson and I were still graduate students.

51 BS: So here you are back in Ellsworth.

JB: Well, again we had very heavy ice conditions. And the Edisto was damaged and we cracked a lot of frames and we had a very terrible time getting into Ellsworth Station. Ironically, Finn Ronne, who wouldn't let us communicate with the Argentines at Belgrano Station through most of that winter, by this time, had established close relations with the Instituto Antarctica Argentina and he went down on the San Martin and they got into Ellsworth Station before we did. Most of the Americans, including all of the scientific party but one, decided to get out while the getting out was good and got out on the San Martin . So, we never saw the San Martin, nor did I ever see Finn Ronne again. We got into Ellsworth Station after, as I say, great ice difficulties. Some of the scientific work I was going to be doing couldn't be accomplished because of delays, but I did get into Littlewood Nunataks and collected geologic samples and put in a gravity base station. That turned out to be an important geologic observation. Turned out that it was very ancient rock over a billion years old at the Littlewood Nunataks.

BS: Littlewood Nunataks are where?

JB: Littlewood Nunataks are actually near Belgrano II station. And near Moltke Nunatak. We flew in a helicopter. I also flew over to Shackleton Station and Belgrano Station and put in a gravity base station. Shackleton, by this time, was abandoned by Fuchs. Perhaps that's the last time anyone was there, although I don't know that.

(100)

And then I spent a few hours at Belgrano I. We left one American, Floyd Johnson, with the Argentines at Ellsworth Station and went back to Buenos Aires. The Argentines did not get in the following year with their resupply ship because of the heavy ice and Floyd Johnson and the Argentine

52 scientific party had to spend two winters in a row there. And when they finally did get in the 1961 season, they removed all of their people and did not occupy that station any more. Eventually it broke off on an iceberg and Charles Swithenbank told me that one of the British Antarctic Survey people had seen it floating in the Weddell Sea - part of Ellsworth Station.

BS: Did you see those ones I put on the back of the Polar Times? 100 mile berg that broke off.

JB: That's the Grand Chasm. In 1986, the Grand Chasm, which I described earlier, got bigger and bigger and if you look at the satellite photographs, you can see it was much bigger in the early 1970s than it was in the 1963 declassified satellite intelligence photography images, which was still bigger than when we were there in 1957. Anyway, in '86, that iceberg broke off and became two icebergs. But, Ellsworth Station broke off into a smaller berg earlier than that, prior to 1986.

BS: OK. So you flew out there in a helo from the ship and then back to the ship?

JB: To where, Littlewood Nunataks?

BS: Littlewood Nunataks.

JB: Yes, that's right. And the ship took a radar bearing on the helicopter and we took a bearing on the Nunataks and in working this out, we managed to position the nunataks fairly accurately. There were four of them and we named . . . I named them. . . submitted the name Littlewood Nunataks after Bill Littlewood. And those were not - I don't think we could see those from the ship at the time. Anyway, maybe they can be seen from the sea, but not where we were. We flew out to find some nunataks because we knew Moltke Nunatak was there. Turned out that was not practical to land a helicopter because it was a near vertical cliff face.

53 BS: Is Moltke the German name?

JB: Yes. And then later the Argentines built a station near Littlewood Nunataks, which they now call Belgrano II.

BS: And they occupy it today.

JB: I believe to this day. This is in British and Argentine claimed area, so that's . . .

BS: And Chilean?

JB: Well I think Chilean claim doesn't extend that far. And Halley Bay Station which is still farther up the coast is in what the British call British Antarctic Territory. Whereas Patriot Hills area south of, near the Ellsworth Mountains are in the claim that Chile has, so the three overlap, but they're not exactly coincident.

BS: It is in all three?

JB: Yes.

BS: Thumbing their nose at one another. That's ridiculous. So, anyway, OK. So that was your second trip. And what did you do after that?

JB: Well, I spent a season back in . . . I was also doing gravity base station work around the United States for Woollard and around the world on all the continents, as a matter of fact. But then also writing my Ph.D. thesis and then in October, 1960, I went back leading a three-person party. We had a large University of Wisconsin group going to Antarctica that season. Ed Thiel and Ned Ostenso

54 stayed back in Madison sort of tending the store. Charlie Bentley led what became the Ellsworth- Highland Traverse. I led an airborne traverse out of Byrd Station doing aeromagnetic survey flights throughout west Antarctica and off to the South Pole and up to Hallet Station. I put in gravity base stations and made gravity ties to Hallet, South Pole, Byrd and out in the field camps around.

(150)

We landed and measured seismic ice thickness along the front of the Amundsen Sea near Pine Island Bay. Determined that that bedrock was way below sea level in that area.

BS: Oh really.

JB: And that's one of the areas that people consider the west Antarctic ice sheet could collapse into the Pine Island Bay. These data were lost for a large number of years because David Drewry, in compiling his 1983 Atlas, didn't include them and no one had done any radar ice sounding there. So it's only at a West Antarctic Ice Sheet meeting about two years ago that I pointed out that these seismic soundings existed in that area and now they're back in the data base, even though they're on the American Geographical Society map published in 1970 that I have on my wall.

BS: You led the over-snow traverse from Byrd to South Pole?

JB: No. There never was a scientific traverse from Byrd to the South Pole. However, that season, Forrest Dowling from the University of Wisconsin made gravity measurements on Major Havola's tractor traverse to deliver D8 Caterpillar tractors to the South Pole for use at the South Pole. That was the main objective. They went out with Walter Davis who had been mechanic at Ellsworth Station. He had wintered over at Byrd the winter of 1960 and was the mechanic on that traverse going on to

55 the South Pole. By this time, he was a chief petty officer and was very key to the operation of that traverse as well.

BS: What's his name again?

JB: Walter Davis. There were two Davis's at Ellsworth. Edward Davis the cook and Walter Davis the mechanic. Both were Seabees. Very competent people.

BS: But your traverse moved from where?

JB: Well, this airborne traverse we flew out of Byrd and would make landings.

BS: Over-snow airborne.

JB: It wasn't over snow (with Sno Cats). We would just land. We flew aeromagnetic profiles all over West Antarctica. We had an incident. We had a number of aircraft incidents that year. We did and other people did. For instance, we flew one flight and hit our wing on the Crary Mountains and didn't crash. . . dragged the magnetometer (towed behind the plane) off. Did four progressive stalls but did not crash. Another time we landed at Bentley's field party making gravity connection. The tail ski broke off. Another time, we took off with a heavy load for Bentley's traverse, resupply flight. I was going to do aeromagnetic profiles. The wings had ice on them because there was some light snow and after the JATO took off, we couldn't fly. We stalled out 6 feet above the runway, but didn't crash.

BS: And you flew all these flights out of Byrd?

JB: Yes.

56 BS: OK. How many were there?

JB: Oh many. I can't remember. Dozens or a couple dozen probably. I didn't make all of these magnetic flights. Dowling made one. Dick Wold made some. But I made most of them. Tom Laudon was the geologist with our party. Havola's traverse got stalled in crevasses about 60 miles from the South Pole so we flew out there. And so we flew off with another flight to Havola's Byrd to South Pole traverse tractor train. Took some Polaroid photos and dropped them to them so they could see - these were very large crevasses. The biggest crevasses I've ever seen not counting the Grand Chasm on the ice shelf which is a special case. But these were at least 100 feet wide, and had vertical sides so they certainly must have been more than one or two hundred feet deep.

BS: Explain what a magnetometer is.

JB: OK. A magnetometer measures the Earth's magnetic field and variations in the field due to geologic structures containing varying amounts of the mineral magnetite which cause magnetic anomalies. In West Antarctica there is a large amount of volcanic rocks at very shallow depths, beneath the ice sheet. We first observed these in this period. We did not have radar to measure the ice thickness, but we had the over-snow traverses of Bentley and others that had gone out of Byrd Station in the previous years, so we knew approximately how thick the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was.

(200)

We measured these magnetic anomalies from the air. We towed a sensor about 60 feet below the airplane on about 100-foot cable.

BS: That's the magnetometer.

57 JB: Well that's the sensor of the magnetometer. We had to get it away from the magnetic field of the airplane.

BS: But the equipment that read it, though, was in the aircraft.

JB: That's right. And nowadays, to install electronic equipment in an airplane is quite a legal as well as electronics operation, but I would put the magnetometer in any plane I could get access to. And we just pushed the bare ends of the wires into a socket and taped them down to 28 volts and away we'd go.

BS: Whatever worked.

JB: Whatever worked.

BS: Now you have to get view air permission and all that stuff and an engineering study has to be done.

JB: In 1963, this is an aside, '63-'64, two years later, I had two students, engineering students from Madison, go down, each with a magnetometer. They made flights of opportunity and collected data all over the Trans-Antarctic Mountains from the Dufek Massif to Hallet Station.

BS: Did you, in this season, go to Sky High? Did you fly in there or . . .

JB: No. This was another . . .

BS: Another. OK. I don't want to get ahead.

58 JB: We did make an aeromagnetic traverse, Bentley and I and some others, for his field party as a reconnaissance for the Ellsworth Highland Traverse. We took the magnetometer and flew out to the Jones Mountains and the Bellingshausen Sea and made a zigzag traverse on which I got the air-mag. This was approximately the route that he later covered on the snow. Came back from that flight, which was about 1900 miles - one of the longer flights in Antarctica - about 14 hours or so.

BS: In an R4D.

JB: Yes. And we had an internal, 500 gallon tank, in the cabin. So we could go. Well I ate a big dinner and went to bed that night and woke up with appendicitis. About that time, there was a 12 day radio black out which was the largest known in the world up to that time, mainly because there hadn't been instruments to record the intensity of the magnetic storms.

BS: Where were you when you got appendicitis?

JB: I was at Byrd Station. And there was no flying, so there was no evacuation, and there was no communication with McMurdo. So, basically, I was stuck. Although the physician was preparing to operate, I doubt that he had ever removed an appendix in his life. Fortunately, I hadn't given that much thought. They gave me a lot of penicillin and after three or four days, I got well, and continued

on with this summer's work. In fact, it was just two weeks later that we hit the wing on the mountain. So it was a rather eventful season.

BS: Wasn't the first appendicitis taken out in the Norwegian-British-Swedish one? No that was an

eye operation.

JB: But there'd been an appendectomy at the South Pole the previous winter. And the Navy, at that time, so I was informed by our physician at Byrd, rethought the idea of surgery as the best approach

59 for appendicitis in Antarctica and isolated circumstances and decided that treating it medically with antibiotics might be preferable. Fortunately for me, it was. So then I made these flights. The same plane we'd dented the wing on the mountain went out to the Horlick Mountains with Bill Long and crashed on landing, but the plane was repaired and flown out.

(250)

Dick Wold took off in a P2V - one of my people in my party - with a magnetometer, but the nose ski on the P2V wouldn't retract so for four hours they flew around burning off all the fuel and then landed. Fortunately the ski cocked down and they didn't crash. There were incidents like this all the time in those days. As I've been going over the journals of that year, I realized how safe things have become by this time. Certainly accidents still happen in Antarctica, but it was nothing at the rate that we just sort of took for granted in those days.

BS: That was in the '60s. We flew by the seat of the pants a lot. I don't think as many then as when the C-130 community brought down rules and regulations and NATOPS manuals. But we had old pilots who had been around since World War II. And they didn't believe in these books, you know. "If you find that's a good book to use, son, you go ahead and read it. If you need it to learn to fly," and off they went and flew. But it was overkill. When I got down there in the '80s, I wasn't very happy with VX-6, VXE-6. They were not the same squadron that I was in and they weren't aggressive at all.. Even though they had more capable aircraft with the C-130 and the Huey.

JB: The C-130s were down there, by the way, in 1960-61 season, so as a matter of fact, one of the ways we got a gravity tie out to and a little geologic reconnaissance - Tom Lauden, the geologist on my party, flew to McMurdo on a C-130 which was bringing in supplies directly into Byrd and South Pole at that time. New Byrd was being constructed then, by the way, if you want to talk about that.

60 So, he flew to McMurdo and then an R4D flew out to the Jones Mountains and the University of Minnesota field party headed by Cam Craddock. This was Bob Rutford's first trip to Antarctica.

BS: When was that?

JB: 1960-61 season. Art Ford was down there then. His first trip. Bill Long had been down there before on a traverse and he was leading the Ohio State party into the Horlicks, so these were geologic field parties operating out of Byrd at the same time. But they took several Hercules round-trip flights from McMurdo out to the Jones Mountains. So Laudon flew to McMurdo on a Herc, got on the flights up to the Jones Mountains, made a gravity tie and then flew back to Byrd station with the R4D from the Jones Mountains at Camp Minnesota which was established. Craddock's party did geologic mapping there for several weeks.

BS: Now this was all in '61, right?

JB: '60-'61. Deepfreeze '61. By chance, a very heavy snow accumulation area. A tent collapsed. A frame tent. Rutford, in digging it up, got his teeth knocked out. His front teeth broken out, when a frame of the tent hit him in the mouth and he had to wait a few more days before they could bring the whole field party out to Byrd Station. Those were my first encounters with Rutford. He had been, had previous experience in Greenland, but this was his first Antarctic trip- he was a grad student then at Minnesota under Campbell Craddock. So then, other things of that particular season - Sir Charles Wright was out there. He had gone with Scott to the top of the Beardmore Glacier.

(300)

Anyway, I spent several months getting to know him a little bit at Byrd. He was making radio noise measurements on antennas from the Pacific Naval Laboratory in Canada and was a very

61 interesting person to discuss these things with. Also he had a lot of the Scott anecdotes. Then at the end of the season, in February, after we had finished our scientific work at Byrd, we flew back to McMurdo and I made several gravity base connections to the South Pole which were my first times to the South Pole. We were looking at changes in the gravity at the South Pole. But, I had the privilege of flying up the Beardmore Glacier with Sir Charles Wright who, when we got up to the Pole and back in 7 hours, commented that it had taken them months and their party hadn't even made it back. He had gone to the top of the Beardmore with Scott. So, it was an interesting experience to make that trip with him.

BS: You're back in McMurdo, gravity measurements, South Pole.

JB: On to the South Pole.

BS: OK. First time. Did you go home after that?

JB: I went back to New Zealand, spent a few days, then continued on with the gravity meter. Went around the world. Went across to Australia on a military flight. We had these Chief of Naval Operations signed travel orders which carried a lot of clout in those days and got a military flight over to Sydney. And then I flew commercially across to Perth and then to Johannesburg and then up to

Salisbury and Khartoum and Rome and London. Spent a week putting in gravity base stations in Europe and then flew home. Then I went in to see the doctor and said, "I'd like my appendix out," at the University of Wisconsin hospital. He said, "Oh, what makes you think you need that?" And I explained my appendicitis in Antarctica and they agreed to take it out, which they did. Then a few weeks later, I was on a canoe trip with one of the Antarctic people from the University of Wisconsin, Oscar Strickholm, who drowned on this canoe trip. And upon that same trip, I popped a cartilage in my knee and so a few a weeks after my appendectomy, I had to have a cartilage removed from my right knee. By this time, I also took my Ph.D. exam, completed my degree.

62

BS: Which year was this?

JB: This was now 1961. And then I prepared to go back to Antarctica again. I did go mountain climbing again. My knee obviously was in good enough shape for that which convinced the Navy, and the fact that my appendix was now removed, that I could pass the physical again. So I went back and led the Antarctic Peninsula Traverse.

BS: When did you go into . . . is this when you went into Sky High?

JB: Yes, that's right.

BS: Now this was Antarctic . . . led

JB: It was called the Antarctic Peninsula traverse. And so I went out to Byrd Station. We had had long weather delays in November and didn't get out to Camp Minnesota where Bentley had left his vehicles the previous season.

BS: Where was that?

(350)

JB: At Bellingshausen Sea coast and Jones Mountains. So we had 6 Herc flights bringing new Sno- Cats, diesel powered Tucker Sno-Cats, out to the Jones Mountains, at Camp Minnesota, where Craddock and Rutford and those people had worked the previous season. But, again, there were all these airplane incidents. Craddock's party flew out to the Sentinel Mountains, John Anderson, Tom Bastian, and Rutford on the same plane we dented the wing on, 219, and had also crashed on landing

63 with Bill Long the previous year in the Horlick Mountains. It crashed permanently and is still sitting out there in the Ellsworth Mountains. Fortunately, no one was hurt. And that is now the type section of the Crash Site Quartzite - a geologic formation in the sedimentary rocks.

BS: Which aircraft's that?

JB: An R4D8 - I've got the number written in my journal, but the last three digits were 219, which was what we called them at the time. Then we kept making flights out into the bad weather from Byrd to get out to either Camp Sky High, which was going to be put in, or to the Jones Mountains Camp so we could do the weather reconnaissance for the Hercules flights to come out from McMurdo. And at one point, a prop feathering motor on the R4D wasn't operating, and one of the Navy crewmen thought this was unsafe to fly. The pilot - a good friend of mine, Bob Farrington, kicked him off the crew and said, "We'll replace you with someone who will fly." And we kept flying those flights out there, turnarounds, because there was no weather reconnaissance satellites or anything else. No field parties in the area yet that season.

While we were at Byrd Station getting ready to go, trying to get out to Camp Minnesota, Ed Thiel had been down there doing a flight from - magnetometer flight - from McMurdo to Vostok to Wilkes Station and in taking off from Wilkes Station, the P2V they were in crashed on take off and he and 4 others were killed. Phil Smith, who was at McMurdo, sent me a message to Byrd Station

about this which was a very depressing start. So, I had had two deaths in the previous few months of close friends in accidents. So eventually, at the end of November, we got out there, the 6 Herc flights came in, and we began our Antarctic Peninsula traverse.

BS: That's 1961.

JB: '61-'62 season, Deepfreeze '62.

64

BS: So that would have been November, '61.

JB: Yeah. Prior to that, we had made a reconnaissance flight from Byrd Station into the area we were going and into the area east of Sky High, and here my path crossed with Finn Ronne again. We were getting into the area where his flights had gone from the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition that Lassiter and Adams and these people had been making with Ronne in 1946-48. But there were big errors in navigation. As much as . . . more than 100 kilometers. So we didn't find mountains where there were supposed to be mountains. Found other mountains where we didn't anticipate them. We did find, ultimately, the mountains that Ronne had seen on that expedition.

So anyway, we finally put in our over-snow traverse from the Jones Mountains about the end of November and we had very bad storms for a month. Katabatic winds, no crevasses, but we'd go a few days, have a storm, and wait a few days. We were also carrying our fuel, by this time, in four 500-gallon rubber tires formed in a rologon trailer. This worked very well except the model 743 Sno- Cats were not strong enough to pull the rollitrailer without damaging them.

(400)

The very big 843 Sno-Cats that Crary had taken the previous season from McMurdo to the South

Pole and that Ed Robinson used the next season from the South Pole were big enough to carry a rolling fuel transporter, but not the smaller ones.

BS: So you couldn't take them with you.

JB: We did. We took them the whole season. We kept tearing out differentials frequently . . . we must have gone through 8 or so differentials in the course of that traverse. So, in the month of December, we had very bad weather going along north of the Bellingshausen Sea in the high ridge

65 that continues on toward the Antarctic Peninsula. We finally descended down toward George VI Sound which Ronne and Eklund had explored in 1939-40. We didn't get down to sea level. We measured the ice thickness - very thick way below sea level, on that. Then continued on south to where, by this time, Camp Sky High had been put in. It was originally thought to be higher, but actually it's quite a low elevation, only 450 meters and a very heavy snow accumulation area. A lot of overcast weather in that area. We got there just before New Years. Floyd Johnson, who had wintered over two winters at Ellsworth Station was there with Barnes and other people - Kaywood and Neil Brice was there. Small party in a Jamesway Hut. We spent some days doing scientific work in that area - seismic work - and the people from Byrd flew out in R4Ds again and brought us some fuel. We did a reconnaissance off to the east.

When we saw one of these unexplored previously unseen mountain ranges east of Camp Sky High, we named that the Thiel Mountains.

(450)

As it turned out, they had already named another range the Thiel Mountains east of the Horlick Mountains, that being a more prominent range, where Ed Thiel had actually worked. The mountains that we either did or didn't discover, but anyway mapped at that time, are now known as the Behrendt Mountains. It's possible that Ronne photographed those on his flight, one of his flights. I'm not going to debate the point. Anyway, they were not located where his mountains were; various mountain ranges that he showed on the maps were mislocated. He named the Sweeney Mountains and the Latady Mountains and other mountains to the east. We spent the month of January, then, continuing our traverse off into that area. We had very foggy, not very cold weather. By now, we'd lost so much time, we just continued on in the fog, driving with a compass. Fortunately, we were not encountering crevasses although there was one incident when we got to the Sky High Nunataks - the only name that we proposed that stuck, ironically. We named it after Camp Sky High as opposed to people at the various other Nunataks. We named some after people at the Barnes Nunatak and the Johnson

66 Nunatak and Shimizu Nunatak. Those names were used by the Bureau of Geographic Names, but they assigned them to other peaks. To complicate the confusion, we built cairns on those peaks and put the names that we'd given them in the field on those peaks so now there are two sets of those names floating around.

BS: That's good information.

JB: But, Sky High did stick because we did not name it after a person, I think.

BS: That was Mount? Camp?

JB: No, Sky High Nunataks. Camp ceased to exist. Eights Station later was built in that area, but the name Sky High is preserved on the Sky High Nunataks. Well, when we were working in the Sky High Nunataks, there were some crevasses right there and the USGS topographic engineer in our party walked off carrying his theodolite to do some surveying. I remember getting irate at him considering the hazards of walking off toward open crevasses. Heretofore we had not had any crevasse accidents. And none of these people had any experience with crevasses, even though we had experienced Antarctic people on the over-snow traverse. Parks, who had been with Bentley's traverse previously, and Hiro Shimizu - they had not had crevasse problems that year.

BS: Who's Hiro Shimizu?

(500)

JB: Hiro Shimizu the Japanese glaciologist that wintered over the previous winter at Byrd and went on both my traverse and Bentley's traverse on the previous season. He became a very good friend of mine. But, anyway, I chewed out Merrick for going unprotected off to the crevasses and I think the

67 rest of the party thought I was being a little over reactive. So we continued on our traverse, and uneventfully, fortunately, drove up on nunataks, did geology, did quite a bit of geology, measured gravity and seismic reflection measurements of the ice thickness. We made a several hundred mile loop east of Camp Sky High and as we were approaching the Behrendt Mountains (which we thought were the Thiel Mountains), this is very confusing to anyone because all these names are applied to various places - what are now known as the Behrendt Mountains - we had received a report from a resupply flight. They came out and gave us a resupply at our farthest point on that traverse. I calculated considering the fuel came out from Byrd Station to Sky High and from McMurdo to Sky High and then from there to us, it took 7 gallons of fuel, delivered to McMurdo, to bring us one gallon of fuel at our farthest resupply point. We were about 1600 miles out from McMurdo at this point.

BS: Two gallons of fuel to deliver a gallon at South Pole. And we had to deliver 200,000 gallons a

year there.

JB: Yeah, and this had to be delivered to Byrd and then it had to be delivered from Byrd to Sky High and then they had to come from Sky High and refuel. There were some C-124 air drops of fuel at Sky High, by the way. They were still using the Air Force C-124s.

BS: In '61.

JB: Yes. '61-'62. So, anyway, this flight going back sent us a rather cryptic message saying, "Crevasses," and they gave us an approximate latitude and longitude. And I sent a message back, since I knew these were near the Behrendt Mountains whether they were close to the mountains or far off from the mountains? I got no answer. We did have good radio communication, by the way, on this whole traverse. We had an Angry 19 radio. Over 100 watts. So, we were three days away from this particular area and we continued through the Sweeney Mountains, collecting samples and doing

68 our geophysical work. I was a little nervous about these reported crevasses. But it was still three days away, and then it was two days away, and finally, it was the next day. And it was a bright, clear, sunny day and I was driving the lead vehicle.

(550)

We traveled separately for leapfrog altimetry purposes; one vehicle went 4 miles ahead of the other two. We had radio contact. We'd stop every 4 miles and put a flag in and measure simultaneously with two magnetometers 4 miles apart and also four pairs of altimeters so we could correct for magnetic changes and altimeter pressure changes. We also made gravity measurements as I described them earlier on the Filchner Ice Shelf traverse. Anyway, we were continuing on to go around the end of the Behrendt Mountains and suddenly I felt a lurch backwards. We had dropped into a crevasse. Fortunately, not too . . . well, fairly severely, but no one was hurt and the vehicle wasn't damaged. The front end of our rolling fuel transporter and the rear end of our Sno-Cat were in the crevasse, so I radioed back to the other people. They came up and reported that we had broken through several crevasses that we hadn't dropped into with the fuel transporter. And by this time, everybody really had gotten religion about the crevasses. They brought both other vehicles up, having left their loads and drove very carefully in our tracks and with winches and A-frames and steel cables, managed to get them out with careful maneuvering. But the rest of the party that had been very, sort of irritated that I had been upset for scolding this one man for walking near the crevasses earlier, now by this time, were true believers as they saw these holes in the trail and these deep 70 or 80 foot deep crevasses around.

So then we backtracked. Picked up our loads and then made a wide sweep around the Behrendt Mountains and then safely got out of the crevasses and continued. We also had to work around crevasses to get out of the Jones Mountains. Backtrack to the beginning of this traverse. . . we had a Polaroid camera I had used the previous year to drop photographs to the Byrd-South Pole tractor train, so we tried it the same way. Flew around the Jones Mountains and taking pictures.

69

BS: This was coming back now?

(600)

JB: No, I’m now backtracking to the beginning of this traverse, back at the end of November. And we saw crevasses, but we also saw what appeared to be a crevasse-free way. So, in reasonably good visibility weather, we drove out from the Jones Mountains. I used these Polaroid pictures as sort of a map that we had taken from the air. And we flew out, drove out, and got around them OK. So those were the only crevasse incidents of that particular traverse.

(End of Tape 2 - Side A) ______

(Begin Tape 2 - Side B)

(000)

JB: So we got around the crevasses at the end of the Behrendt Mountains, put in another major

station, and then headed for Camp Sky High at the end of the season. I wanted to make another dogleg over to the Ellsworth Mountains, because no one had measured the ice thickness in that area at the north end of the Sentinel Range, but everybody in my field party wanted to finish and Phil Smith at McMurdo was sending messages saying we should come home. The field party didn't want to go on for another few days, so we headed for Camp Sky High in a gathering blizzard. The camp people came out looking for us. Fortunately, our navigation was extremely accurate in those Sno-Cats. We used tank compasses and odometers and we had no drift. We'd weave back and forth, but for instance, we found an accumulation stake that we intended to aim for across the previous traverse

70 track earlier in a white out. We came right up to Camp Sky High in a white out. It was only when we got within 50 or 100 feet could we see the station because of the storm that was coming. So, Sno-Cat navigation was easily much more accurate than flying in those days, before satellite navigation for airplanes. So, then we packed up our gear and the people at Camp Sky High packed up their gear and they brought a Herc out. We took off with 36 JATO in the Herc carrying all our rock samples and ice cores and all the data from Camp Sky High and flew into Byrd Station - New Byrd Station by this time. They'd moved 6 miles to the east and built a new station the previous two seasons. And stopped for lunch and flew on to McMurdo.

BS: Who was the captain, the plane commander of the Herc?

JB: I don't recall. But they flew out from McMurdo and then refueled at Byrd. Picked up an injured. .

BS: Used all 36 JATO?

JB: Yep.

BS: At once?

JB: Yep. Because it was very soft, deep snow, and we had a very heavy load and the . . .

BS: Wasn't Nick Dickerson?

JB: I just don't know. And I later told this in 1978 to the CO of VXE-6 and he didn't even know at that time that they had ever used JATO on Hercs, although, as you are aware, they had had some accidents with JATO bottles getting loose on Hercs.

71 BS: Those were newer pilots. The old pilots didn't.

JB: OK. Well, anyway.

BS: That's interesting because they were the old seaplane guys, and that's what they developed them for. And these guys were the first flyers down there. Then the guys they trained to use, just before they came, and those were the ones that had all the problems.

JB: Well, I understand . . . this is an aside, but the New York Air National Guard is using JATOs again on the Hercs they're flying down there now. A few people flying the last season had mentioned . . .

BS: Well, it's obvious that we could have built a better system, you know. We had problems mainly because we wanted to jettison once we went to the solid mass and we stopped having problems. We were still nervous. We only used them in an emergency. Of course, we had more powerful Hercs. They've got more powerful Hercs. The Air Guard. Anyway . . . so you went home. And that was about . . . when did you go home?

JB: Well, February, 1962 . . . I also had just gotten married. I forgot to mention that. I had gotten married the day before I left Madison for this traverse. But I also brought my wife to California and missed the flight going to New Zealand, a military flight. So I had to wait another week on my honeymoon and no one ever believed I didn't do it deliberately.

BS: What'd you do? When did you go back next?

JB: Well, I went to work for the US Geological Survey in 1964 and worked in the Rocky Mountains. Became a father. One reason I left the University of Wisconsin and went to the USGS was because I

72 wanted to get out of going to Antarctica. I wanted to settle down and raise a family and low and behold, they wanted me to lead a party in Antarctica again in 1965 with the US Geological Survey. So I . . .

BS: Was that from here?

JB: Yes, from Denver. I was in Denver. So, in 1965-66 season, I led the geophysical part of a major field camp operation, the first that this had been done with helicopters and Hercs and R4Ds.. .

(50)

BS: This was '64-'65?

JB: '65-'66 season. Dwight Schmidt and Art Ford were the geologists in charge of this. We had 40 supporting Herc flights and an Army helicopter detachment. We went out to the Pensacola Mountains, had a camp in the Neptune Range, and did aeromagnetic surveys of the entire Pensacola Mountains, including the Dufek Massif. Did gravity! I had three gravity meters down there and had the geologists and the topographic engineers in our geophysical party using the gravity meters. We figured that anyone could read a gravity meter if you trained them carefully. Weight was usually the problem of people in helos. I only spent about a month down there myself and left Laurent Meister, a Stanford graduate student, doing the seismic reflection work from helicopters. He flew away from the Pensacola Mountains in the helicopters and landed and made measurements of ice thickness such as we had been done on the airborne traverse with the R4D8s earlier, but doing it with a helicopter this time. Same seismic system. An R4D8 with another geophysicist, same one I'd had working down there in '63-'64 season, Dick Wanous and he flew the aeromagnetic survey with another USGS person. So it was a very major field operation. The kind that became the prototype for many other subsequent field camps.

73

BS: Was there aircraft support?

JB: That's right. Well over . . .

BS: Who were your pilots? Did you know them?

JB: No, it was an Army . . .

BS: Oh, Army helo guys.

JB: Yeah, it was in Hueys. And these guys had flown in Viet Nam. And so that worked very successfully. We got a large amount of data, geology, topographic mapping data, put in control for previous photography done by Lassiter for CIA back in the IGY period. Those were compiled into maps and the topographic engineers would go on the tops of the peaks and survey in positions and also take gravity readings. So that turned out to be a very successful field season. I went back in 1965 on this t rip, but only spent the month there. I went back to New Zealand then flew off to Hong Kong and Bangkok. I wanted to stop in Saigon. I was flying commercial and I was going to meet my wife in Cairo, but she didn't think I should stop in Saigon. It was built up for the Viet Nam now. They were still flying commercial Pan Am flights into Saigon then, so I flew over it, saw the lights of DaNang I recall as I flew into Bangkok. Spent a week in Thailand vacationing and then flew on across to Saudi Arabia to Cairo. Spent a vacation in the Middle East and then came back to Denver. I had met my wife in Cairo. So, then I continued on in Denver, working up these data. Then I didn't go to Antarctica for quite a while. BS: So you were with USGS.

74 JB: Yes. With USGS. Then in 1968, I went off to Liberia for two years and worked on aeromagnetic survey and a USAID sponsored project that the USGS was working with the Liberian Geological Survey.

BS: Family go with you?

JB: Yes. Had another son by that time - two sons. Kurt born in '64 and Marc in '67. And did gravity work and marine seismic work and we had a contract there on magnetic survey and made geologic maps. It was a very fruitful scientific time and also a very interesting - quite a contrast to Antarctica to spend two years in West Africa. I continued going back to West Africa for several years after that. Went on several marine cruises off Liberia. Came back to Denver in 1970, continued working on the Antarctic work in the Pensacola Mountains.

BS: 1970? That's trip 6?

JB: What?

BS: This is another trip?

JB: No. No. Came back from West Africa, but also worked on Liberian data and also Colorado gravity map and also continued to work on the Antarctic data.

(100)

I wrote a professional paper on the Pensacola Mountains work and several scientific reports. We had already scientific reports earlier, but continued doing more on various Antarctic data sets and on the Liberian work. In 1971, I went back to Africa on a marine cruise off Liberia with the USGS. In 1972,

75 I moved to Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, where I became Chief of the Atlantic Gulf of Mexico Branch of Marine Geology. First, just as geologist in charge of the Wood's Hole office and then, as the program expanded, for four years on the entire Atlantic Gulf of Mexico area and I was there until 1977. About this time, the question of Antarctic petroleum resources had come up. You want to talk about that? I'll very briefly summarize. I was at Wood's Hole from '72 to '77. Came back to Denver. By this time, I got into advising the State Department on petroleum mineral resources. I got on US Antarctic Treaty Meeting delegations in '77. Went back to Antarctica working with Dave Drewry in 1978. We flew aeromag on the West Antarctic ice sheet over the Dufek Massif in the '78 season, then I went down with the Lee in 1984, doing seismic work with USGS in the Ross Sea and '84-'85 season with the German Federal Institute for Natural Resources and Geosciences (BGR).We did aeromagnetic survey over the Ross Sea and in Northern Victoria Land. And then in '88-'89, I went down with a German-US seismic expedition in the Ross Sea again. And then in '90-'91, I went down doing some airborne magnetic work with the Americans over the West Antarctic ice sheet. This was the beginning of that program. I was also working with the Germans on aeromag over the Ross Ice Shelf. In '90-'91, I was down for aeromag and '91-'92, for aeromag and then '95 more aeromag, working in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A lot of these times, I only spent short periods in Antarctica. And we can talk about the results from some of this in more detail. Also, during the same period, I did 22 different Antarctic Treaty delegation trips to various places in the world. I also got into a lot of advising the Department of Interior and State Department, scientific advice on Antarctica during the period leading up to the Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty. I retired from the USGS in 1995 and went to work for the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado where I am now a Fellow and have been since 1996. I continue to work on the Antarctic with NSF support.

BS: You continue today.

76 JB: Yes.

BS: What work did you do on the Treaty?

JB: Well, I was an advisor, scientific advisor to the State Department on this. So, I went to the Treaty meetings and I was involved in things related to, first of all, the CRAMRA, which was a Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities. I worked on the negotiation of that and particularly in working groups related to the resources and environmental hazards. Then after CRAMRA, I'd continued working on environmental issues related to data release of scientific data and to especially protected areas and environmental aspects of the Annexes to the Protocol.

BS: You do that today, still?

JB: No, I haven't been doing any of that since I left the USGS.

(150)

BS: OK, well, with that, here, the intent is for John and I to get together at a later date and go through - he's had a total of 12 expeditions and we've covered five in detail. Aeromagnetic survey is the fifth one.

JB: That was the fifth trip, yeah.

BS: OK. So we've got 7 more to cover in some more detail and probably reflect back on what we've forgotten.

JB: Yes.

77

BS: In previous ones, particularly you were going to talk about Lassiter and the CIA work and we both forgot about that. So, the intent is for us to return to this at a later date and hopefully sooner than later.

This is the 14th of March and Dr. Behrendt is continuing on with his work in the Antarctic. We had just finished talking about his trip number 5 down there which was the aeromagnetic survey in the Pensacola Mountains. Dr. Behrendt.

JB: Yes, well I get out of order here, but in 1963-64, I had a grant from the National Science Foundation to do aeromagnetic surveys over the Trans-Antarctic mountains, so I sent two students, electrical engineers with two magnetometers, and they used airplanes in the same way I've been describing previously, working from Cape Hallet area in the north and down past the Beardmore glacier, all the way to the Pensacola Mountains and the Dufek Massif and the Forrestal Range. And got widely spaced profiles from the west Antarctic side, to the east Antarctic side and across the front of the range. It was quite a successful program on a very widely ranged spacing of lines.

BS: And where were you at this time?

JB: I was at Madison then. This was . . .

BS: Madison, at the University of Wisconsin.

JB: Yes, and I was a Research Associate, Post Doctor Fellowship sort of work at that time. That's before I went to the USGS which, as I said, this interjection is out of order.

BS: OK. And then you went on your aeromagnetic survey.

78

JB: '65-'66 which was seismic and gravity and helicopters and aeromagnetic with R4Ds.

BS: And then your next trip.

JB: We discussed that. I did other things for a number of years. My next trip was in 1978, when I worked with David Drewry who was at Scott Polar Research Institute and Ed Jankowski. We had a radar ice sounder and magnetometer and a US ski-equipped LC-130 - the geophysical Herc with a tail boom with the magnetometer. We flew in the Pensacola Mountains, more specifically in the Forrestal Range and the Dufek Massif and over Berkner Island. The flights were out of McMurdo. This was just too far away to get many hours over the range. We only had three hours flying in our target area when we were actually in a 12-hour flight out of McMurdo, including refueling at the South Pole.

BS: These were aeromagnetic surveys?

JB: And radar ice thickness measurements. By that time, we had inertial navigation. We were flying very low. Fortunately no crashes, but we were flying about 15 meters, 50 feet over the highest peaks or over the ice sheet to get the penetration over the thickest ice. Although I went back to the United States, the Drewry party continued collecting data over the West Antarctic ice sheet and I worked with them on the interpretation of that data. We published a number of papers.

BS: Did you get involved with the interpretation of the work he did in 1967,'68, '69 when they did the grid of the radio. . .

JB: Well, yes, but this was the grid with the aeromag which was the first time we did the aeromag and so Jankowski was a grad student at Cambridge University. He came to work with me on the magnetic part of the interpretation and we wrote several papers on that.

79

BS: OK. And this was the summer of '78-'79?

(200)

JB: Yes. Then in 1984, in January-March of 1984, in other words, the '83-'84 season, we had a cruise with the USGS ship S.P. Lee, in fact, that's where I met you at McMurdo. I came down at the beginning of that trip with a DV, Bruce Hanshaw, and we took the usual tour around as you may recall. But then, I joined the Lee, which had completed one leg working off Wilkes Land and we worked in the Ross Sea until March and collected multi-channel seismic reflection data. This was to study the structure of the sedimentary rocks in the basins on the Ross Sea Continental Shelf. Although it was pure research, the reason for the US and other countries collecting so many data was the oil price jump in 1973 and the discovery of hydrocarbons by the Glomar Challenger in 1973 as well-drilling in the Ross Sea. Now these turned out to be biogenic hydrocarbons. No evidence of oil, but that triggered a large interest in petroleum resources in Antarctica and mineral resources such as possible platinum group metals in the Dufek Massif.

BS: Tell me about the platinum group metals in the Dufek Massif.

JB: Well, none have ever been found. It's just that that's the type of intrusion that would be drilled thoroughly if it were in Montana or some closer at hand area.

BS: Is it related to the Transvaal?

JB: Well, it was considered related in type to the Bushfeld complex in Africa. Not directly connected. That's about a billion years old and the Dufek is only 175 million years old.

80 BS: Kimberlite?

JB: .No, no that's nothing to do with Kimberlite. That's diamonds. And there's no known Kimberlite in Antarctica. But anyway, it was . . . this led, over several years, to negotiations of a minerals regime for Antarctica which I participated in as part of the US delegation which led to the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities which was nicknamed CRAMRA. These negotiations started in 1977. I was just leaving my position in Wood's Hole and went to that meeting in London in October or September of 1977. And continued through many meetings up until 1981, when this convention was signed. However, it was never ratified and not entered into force. It was basically renamed the Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty, the claims parts which were the most serious part of the negotiation, were removed. The most difficult parts of the negotiations of CRAMRA were removed and the prohibition on mineral resource activities other than scientific research was inserted into the environmental protocol, but the wording of the two, otherwise, is quite similar.

BS: Let me ask the question on your geomagnetic surveys on the S.P. Lee.

JB: Well, they were seismic reflection primarily. And also. . .

BS: Seismic reflection?

JB: Yes.

BS: What were the instruments you used on the ship?

JB: Well, we had a suite of instruments. Various kinds of acoustic instruments, a multi-channel seismic streamer, a 24 channel system and an air gun array, oh we got into the upper mantle say 15 to

81 20 kilometers deep, both vertical and large offset with sonobuoys. But we also had a magnetic gradiometer, a magnetometer, 3-1/2 kilohertz high resolution profiling, and . . .

BS: OK. And so that was ship borne and what were the results of that?

(250)

JB: Well, we defined the Victoria Land Basin and volcanic rocks penetrating the sedimentary section in the Victoria Land Basin. The following season, '84-'85, I worked with the German-Antarctic North Victoria Land Expedition with US support and we had two German Dornier 228 aircraft and flew aeromagnetic surveys over northern Victoria Land and over the area covered by the S.P Lee cruise the previous year. That is, over the Ross Sea Continental Shelf, including the central basin and the Victoria Land basin.

BS: Who were the pilots with the Germans?

JB: I don't remember their names right off hand except one of them was named Hemple and his plane, the Polar III was shot down in Morocco after completing the survey on the way back from Antarctica. Hemple and the air crew were killed.

BS: He was an ace in World War II, multi-ace and a test pilot.

JB: Noooo, I think this guy was too young for World War II.

BS: The guy who was with him . . . the old guy was with him too. He was killed.

82 JB: There were three people killed, but they weren't that old. I don't think they could have been World War II. I would check that. He was probably in his forties, I would say, when he was killed. The other two were younger.

BS: Hoecker was the old guy that was shot down. He was one of the older guys that was shot down.

The one I met at South Pole flew the planes in.

JB: Hemple was the head guy for the program, but I seriously doubt he was flying 30 years earlier. 40 years earlier. The head of the Alfred Wegner Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, was also named Hemple.

BS: Yeah. Maybe I'm wrong on that. Anyway, yeah, he was shot down.

JB: He had a young daughter, about a 20 year old daughter, so his prospective son-in-law was also killed on the plane with him and was part of the crew. A guy in his 20s. So, I don't think Hemple was beyond 50.

BS: Yeah. That's a shame. So, how did you get linked up with the Germans to do this? Was it part of a broader program or . . . ?

JB: Well, I'd been, partly through meeting people in the Antarctic Treaty meetings - Franz Tessensohn and Detlef Damaske and that led to other people and partly through working with Karl Heinz at BGR. We worked off the east coast of the United States -I arranged multi-channel seismic surveys done cooperatively in the United States Continental Shelf and worked with the Germans who had also collected data in the Weddell Sea. I wasn't on that cruise. We worked a joint USGS-German Geological Survey - the BGR, or Bundesanstatt vor Gewissenschaften und Rohstoffe in Hanover and I worked continuously with them up to the present.

83

BS: OK. Let me ask some questions on the Environmental Protocol, in your opinion. There's an expiration date of 2048.

JB: No. . .

BS: Not an expiration date, but the treaty can be revisited then.

JB: No. No, the way that it worked was pretty clearly defined. Nothing can be revisited until that date, on the mineral resource aspects.

BS: That's correct.

JB: In other words, it will not, necessarily or probably, be revisited. But, it cannot be before then.

BS: That's correct. Similar to the one of Article 12 in the original treaty.

JB: On which nothing happened on the anniversary of that, as a matter of fact. People celebrated that the treaty was 30 years old, because I was at that meeting.

BS: I remember that. However, they did, 10 years before that, declare a moratorium on minerals research.

JB: That was part of the negotiation of CRAMRA. That was a moratorium until such time as the minerals treaty entered into force and then the minerals treaty never did enter into force. And so the Environmental Protocol superseded that.

84 (300)

BS: OK. I understand.

JB: It also changed the Specially Protected Area definitions and put Annexes in for various environmental issues and is expandable in the future for other issues. Someone has proposed a tourism annex. I doubt that that will happen. The US position has always been that Environmental Protocol itself is adequate to cover any activities, including tourism.

BS: How do other countries feel about tourism?

JB: Some people all over are concerned about environmental effects of tourism and I think the tourist expeditions, as you know well, are quite conscientious and also the tour operators in living up to the obligations of the treaty and the Environmental Protocol. So there's a concern about environmental problems with it, but there is not any attempt to stop it or anything. Just the nature of the treaty and the Environmental Protocol - the country from which a ship sails is partly responsible for the source of that expedition such as when an American tourist, adventure tourist plane flew from somewhere in South America one time, there was concern that that country from which the plane took off had also some responsibility for the plane. It's a muddled effort and there's concern right now in the latest

Antarctic Treaty that non-Treaty member flagships that are operating in the treaty area for various reasons, fishing or tourism, the treaty passed a resolution urging them to abide by the rules of the Treaty, even though they are not legally obligated to since they're not a member of the Treaty.

BS: I don't know of any Treaty nations, or any ships that are going down that are not flag treaty.

JB: Well, I think, for instance, as I recollect, the JOIDES Resolution scientific drilling ship, which was in the United States, has a Panamanian or Liberian flag, for instance. And I think there are other

85 ships. That wasn't applying to that research ship, but other ships that are operating in the treaty area from countries. Pakistan, for instance, had a cruise. Also, I think that ship, flags of convenience on ships from treaty nations is what I'm getting at. And I think that's where the concern is. Many ships operating out of US ports fly flags of convenience.

BS: I understand that.

JB: And so, therefore, legally . . .

BS: The only one I know is possibly the Marco Polo.

JB: But these are the tourist ships. But I'm not sure that there are any tourist . . . well, I don't know which ships these are.

BS: The fishing ships are pirating fish down there though. There's some pirating.

JB: Yes. There is. Particularly of the Antarctic bonefish. It's also illegal. Fishing is allowed under the Convention on Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

BS: What is the legal fishing that's allowed.

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JB: I can't tell you this in detail, but about 1980 or '81, the CAMMLR, the Convention on Management of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, I haven't got the acronym exactly - it allows for fishing and reporting of how much fish are caught and every year there's a meeting to determine whether sustainable yields are being exceeded. And this isn't known very well. Krill was the main

86 concern, originally, but I think fin fish are the more profitable. Chilean sea bass that you're likely to get in your store are probably pirated fish from within the Antarctic Treaty area.

BS: Could be. Pirating a lot of areas including the Bering Sea in between the Russian and American

sectors, which is an international sector. It's raped. It's sterile.

JB: So's Georges Bank, pretty well.

BS: Somali's pirate British SAS patrol there. They go aboard and they take the guys in to Somalia

and they threaten to cut their hands off for stealing. And they pay 1000. It's a worldwide problem that extends into Antarctica. OK, you're at trip 7, 1984-85 German expedition.

JB: Yes. That was Ganovex 4.

BS: Ganovex 4. OK.

JB: Then in 1988-89, I worked again with a German US group. We used the Polar Queen .We worked doing large offset seismic profiles in the Victoria Land Basin in the Ross Sea and several areas measuring crustal thickness. We had an on-shore, off-shore experiment with seismographs on land and marine air guns shooting from the ship and ocean bottom seismographs. And there were Americans, Germans and I had a Canadian on my group on that one.

BS: What is an ocean bottom seismograph?

JB: It's basically a three-component seismograph you set on the bottom of the ocean. Now, with modern navigation and acoustic release techniques, you can go back to the same place and tell it to

87 come back and get the data. Although we did have some problems with releases with these particular instruments, we acquired a good amount of data. And Germans from the University of Hamburg, also, deployed ocean bottom seismographs.

BS: OBS?

JB: On the bottom. You put them down, then you go and shoot down in a straight line for several hundred kilometers and then you go back and retrieve the instruments.

BS: And they're listening instruments, basically?

JB: Yes.

BS: OK. I understand. Now, the marine air guns. How do they work?

JB: Well, basically compressed air released suddenly makes an explosion sound in the water and this is the standard method that geophysical contractors or scientific research groups like the USGS and the German Geological Survey and the Oceanographic institutions in the United States and elsewhere use.

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People had experimented with explosions, I mean chemical explosives, and Vibraseis in the water and so on, but air guns seem to be the most reliable.

BS: You mentioned a lot of sea-going expeditions. How was the preponderance of sea-going expeditions to study the off-shore in the Antarctic compare with say the IGY?

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JB: Oh, much more now. In the IGY, there was relatively little oceanographic or marine work done. I mentioned Bill Littlewood who was an oceanographer with the Naval Oceanographic Office. He and others were taking oceanographic bathymetric salinity temperature depth and dredging from icebreakers, but that was the only oceanographic work done in the IGY. Then for a number of years later, the USS Eltanin operated around Antarctica collecting single channel seismic reflection data and various other oceanographic biological and marine, physical oceanographic data for a number of years. And then, in 1973, or about that period of time, the Glomar Challenger went down and drilled holes on several sites as I mentioned earlier. That's how we know that Antarctica was glaciated as long ago as 25 million years or so.

BS: What year was Glomar Challenger down there?

JB: It was down in the Ross Sea in '73, but it drilled several sites around Antarctica, near the Peninsula and other areas. And many countries started collecting data - seismic reflection data - after 1973, so in a few years, in about 15 years, about 130,000 kilometers of marine modern, more or less, state of the art multi-channel seismic reflection data were collected in the ice free areas all around Antarctica on the continental slope and shelf by a number of countries - Brazil, Japan, Germany, USSR, Russia, S. Korea, Italy is still quite active in this, France, Poland, a large number. I'm not sure that I've included them all.

BS: Any indications of oil-bearing strata?

JB: Strata. Presumably . . .

BS: Any oil-bearing layers.

89 JB: Well, no, the Japanese National Oil Company said they were looking for oil. But as far as drilling for oil, this hasn't been done. And the drilling that has been done has been for stratagraphic purposes. Now, since the adoption of the Environmental Protocol, in fact, since the negotiation of it, which I believe was signed in 1991, there was a great drop-off in marine multi-channel reflection surveys. Some has been done up by the predominantly the Institute of Geophysics in Italy.

BS: Why have Italians continued to do it?

JB: They are very active in Antarctica. For research. And they're working with various other countries and are taking the lead in interpretation and publication of seismic reflection results almost more than anybody else. The US Geological Survey has cut out all it's Antarctic and Arctic research in the last 5 years or so.

BS: Where does one - it says in Article 7 of the protocol - draw the line between research and exploration as far as minerals go?

JB: Scientific data are released. I suppose it would be drilling holes on structures looking for petroleum. You probably could even legally do that for research. But I don't think anyone has. Generally, the safety regulations for the ocean drilling program that's presently going on or the Cape

Roberts drilling program are strict. They're very careful to drill off any structure that might cause a blowout or get any contamination. An environmental impact assessment was done for the Cape Roberts Drilling Program under the Treaty. A Comprehensive Environmental Assessment was made. This was circulated and essentially the drilling could not be done until the Antarctic Treaty nations allowed it to be done. And that's true of the ocean drilling program, which is drilling down there in this last year in various places.

BS: Who's drilling on that?

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JB: The United States, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Australia - I can't remember all the countries. I'm not involved with it particularly. But it's multi-national.

BS: OK, I've got for asides, the kind of questions that you raised as you were talking here. You were on the Polar Queen in 1988 - 1989. Who owns the Polar Queen? Denmark?

JB: It's a Norwegian crewed ship. I guess Ryber Company owned it at that time. And that's the sister ship of the Polar Duke, but the Polar Queen was originally the same size as the Polar Duke, then it was cut in half and extended. So it could carry many more passengers. It can take helicopters and so we had 50 some scientists going down on it. But most of them went ashore for the land geophysics and the geologic program.

BS: Did I hear right that the Brazilians purchased it?

JB: Possibly. I know the Germans are not using it. This year's expedition is not using the Polar Queen.. Part of the problem is the ships' names change.

BS: I think the Brazilians did because I saw that they renamed it and I had a Norwegian with me, said that looks like the Polar Queen. That's why I asked you, tied up in ______. It's obviously an older oceanographic ship.

JB: For instance, the ship that the Germans used for several years was purchased or being used by the Italians now for the Trieste Institute - OGS - Observatorio Geofisico Sperimentale in Trieste.

BS: OK. '88-'89. When was your next trip?

91 JB: '90-'91 and I was involved in two programs. That was the beginning of the Corridor Aerogeophysics of the Southeast Ross Transact Zone working with Don Blankenship.

BS: What's the name of that again?

JB: CASERTS - Corridor Aerogeophysics of the Southeast Ross Transact Zone. We had a twin engine Otter operating from field camp. That particular year was just the first test part of that program which has been running since that time quite successfully. Also, I worked with the German Dornier program again. We had two Dorniers - 228s - and operating out of McMurdo over the Ross Ice Shelf. And then, also, they continued in northern Victoria Land and I had two USGS people, Carol Finn and Anne McCafferty, working with them.

BS: So that was a follow-on to the earlier . . .

JB: Yeah. And the Germans have been continuing these surveys with the Italians. Not with me or the Americans so much, using helicopters primarily, over the land. And they're gradually filling in North Victoria Land surveys. I've been working since that time with this twin engine Otter operation out of a remote field camp with very accurate GPS navigation and with Don Blankenship and Robin Bell and Carol Finn.

BS: That's later than this?

JB: Well, it's continuously every year since that time.

BS: Oh, every year since . . .

JB: 1991.

92 BS: So, 1991 to the present.

JB: Yes, but it's changed and the people working on it and so on. Now it's a facility run for the National Science Foundation by the Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research, which is Lamont- Dougherty Earth Observatory and the University of Texas with small participation by the US Geological Survey. Principal investigators put in proposals and the SOAR facility will fly laser surface altimetry measurements, airborne gravity, radar ice fix measurements and aeromagnetic measurements.

BS: What's SOAR stand for?

JB: Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research. And it's essentially completing or scheduled through it's second five-year deployment and is up for renewal.

BS: And you worked with this or advised?

JB: Yes. I'm now working with data that they collected. I'm not particularly working in the operation of it. I went back . . .

BS: You went back to the Ice after '91?

JB: Yes, I did. I went down in '91-'92 briefly working with it.

(End of Tape 2 - Side B) ______

(Begin Tape 3 - Side A)

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BS: This is the third John Behrendt tape and it's the 14th of March 2000. Why don't we just start with that expedition over again?

JB: All right. I went down in 1990-91 season and there that was the first field season of the CASERTZ as I explained. More of a test season. I did not stay out in the field with them. I had to get up to the Antarctic Treaty meeting in Vina del Mar, Chile. There was a long delay in getting airplanes down there that year. But I was in Antarctica briefly at the beginning of that program. Then I went down in '91-'92 and spent a short period of time out at the CASERTZ camp when they were working. That's when the survey found the active volcano beneath the ice that received a lot of publicity. And we had a paper published in Nature with Don Blankenship the senior author on that, with the rest of us in the program co-authors.

That group continued to collect data and moving more into the divide area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, I went down in the '94-'95 season which was my last trip to Antarctica and was out there briefly and spent time at McMurdo and got to the South Pole and saw the changes. In fact, I've been to South Pole a number of times and have taken a lot of pictures of the changes in South Pole from 1961 through 1995 when some of the newest construction of the type that will be going in with the new South Pole Station - the Astronomical observatory and the solar heated summer dormitory, which are replacing the dome station, which replaced the old IGY buildings built right on the snow surface back in 1956.

BS: OK. 1994-95, you saw the new facilities being built. They're still not finished.

JB: Well they weren't even being started. There was the astronomical observatory and one solar heated dormitory, but I think that's the type of construction. . . the new. . .

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BS: Stilts.

JB: Yes.

BS: That makes sense.

JB: Yeah. Yeah.

BS: It's surprising that we did the dome after, you know in Greenland we'd been putting stuff on stilts for a long time.

JB: And the Germans at Gondwana Station, for instance, and at other stations had used stilts.

BS: Works good. OK. What were you doing there? What was your purpose that season? '94-'95.

JB: That was working with SOAR - Aerogeophysical surveys over the divide area of the west Antarctic Ice Sheet. And those results will be used, among other things, for selection of a drilling site for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet core which is called the WAIS core. And I interpreted some of those aeromagnetic data. They indicate a large caldera structure beneath the divide of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I have been looking at the relation of the volcanic rocks that are erupted or are injected into the ice, but not exposed above the ice and how they are essentially removed by the ice as it moves along. These are just debris such as erupts under the Iceland ice sheet. Since 1995, I've been continuing to work on interpretation of these data and write papers. Also, in 1997-98, a survey was flown with the Germans and a USGS participation and Ohio State participation, - a draped helicopters survey over the Butcher Ridge Igneous Complex. This is an area we got a profile over in the 1990-91 season and found a high amplitude magnetic anomaly suggesting

95 a buried intrusion like the Dufek intrusion. So this survey was flown and I now have a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on the interpretation of it. That's what I'm working on at present as well as the data over the west Antarctic Ice Sheet.

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BS: This is like the Dufek Massif but it's . . .

JB: Smaller.

BS: Smaller. You have an NSF grant,

JB: Working on that.

BS: That's what you're doing at the present.

JB: That and continuing the interpretations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

BS: OK. Let me ask you a couple questions to - not going back. They're over a long period. You've been working on the negotiations of the Antarctic Treaty. How many treaty meetings have you been to?

JB: Twenty-two.

BS: You've been to 22 international meetings.

JB: Yeah. That was between 1977 and 1995.

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BS: Were you State Department representative?

JB: No. I was Department of Interior or USGS Scientific Advisor to the State Department, but a member of the delegation. But as a Scientific Advisor.

BS: Know Tucker Scully?

JB: Yes.

BS: What was Tucker Scully's role?

JB: Well, originally he was, back in 1977, he was a member of the delegation. You can check with him on exactly what his position was. That's when I first met him at the London meeting . . . The Ninth Consultative Meeting. It was the first Consultative Meeting where minerals were being discussed and he was a member of the delegation. He was a Foreign Service Officer attached to the Treaty delegation at that time and over the years, he assumed more responsibilities and eventually became the actual or, in some cases, de facto head of delegation. In the meetings in Madrid where the Environmental Protocol was finally signed, I went to one of those meetings - there were three - Buff

Bohlen was the Assistant Secretary of State for OES at that time and he was Head of the delegation.

BS: Buff Boling?

JB: Buff Bohlen. I think that was his title, Assistant Secretary for Oceans, Environment and Science.

BS: What date was that?

97 JB: Well, that was in the '90-'91 period, including the meeting in Vina del Mar, Chile, and the Madrid meeting.

BS: He signed the Protocol.

JB: Initialed it, yes. He initialed it, actually, and the signing is done in the capitals of the various countries by some higher official. In effect, someone acting for the president. Probably the Secretary of State.

BS: It wasn't ratified 'til '98. So, you attended these 22 meetings.

JB: Yes. After the Environmental Protocol was signed, I attended meetings in Germany and in Korea and in Venice. There was a Venice meeting in '92. I’m trying to keep track of all these . . They were coming every year.

BS: Are you still the geological advisor?

JB: No. I'm not, because I'm not with the US Geological Survey any more.

BS: Do you have to be a member of the government to go to these?

JB: No. Only, let's put it this way, I would go if the State Department chose to pay my way. They are a very limited budget. When I went, the USGS paid my way.

BS: I see.

98 JB: Most of those periods of time, NSF . . . for instance all throughout the minerals negotiations, NSF was only sparsely represented, mostly but not always. I think later. . . various agencies, NOAA was there, Marine Mammals Commission, and there was usually an environmental delegate and an American Petroleum Institute person. But after the price of oil dropped about 1985, they stopped sending him and at the time of the final negotiations for Environmental Protocol, the petroleum industry and the American Mining Industry weren't even interested in Antarctica anymore.

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The Interior Department during the Bush Administration tried to be interested in the mining, but the American Mining Congress wasn't particularly interested. Nothing has ever been discovered would be an ore in the United States. Any investment capital required for petroleum if it were in Antarctica would be about double oil shale, so there is very little interest in mineral resources.

BS: The general feeling of the meetings that Rutford and Elliott and I went to ____ by the American

Mining Congress that there was probably no future mining going to be taking place in Antarctica at all.

JB: Yeah. I think that's so.

BS: But petroleum is a different matter.

JB: Yeah. But also, no one is particularly interested in petroleum at this time, so it's not very hard to . . . it was mainly the Interior Department that was holding off on the prohibition on mineral resource activities other than research that includes petroleum resources. It was Interior, not the President or the State Department and US was the holdout for a couple years on that. Finally, Bush made the decision to sign it in 1991.

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BS: In your long career, conducting research in the field in Antarctica, how is research changed.

Certainly, you know, we're doing more things remotely, from airborne surveys to . . .

JB: There are probably a higher number of researchers and grantees and scientists going to Antarctica. They're much more constrained to the McMurdo dry valleys area and the South Pole in that axis and then at Palmer Station where there's marine research and marine biological research Antarctic program in that area. And the ship, the Nathaniel Palmer, research that's done off of that. But there's less field research now. There is field research that's being done in West Antarctica, mainly operating out of McMurdo. Not around in the Weddell Sea area or over in the Wilkes Station area. All the areas we were operating in the IGY and I think a large amount of this is because the political incentives to do this have diminished. The Cold War is over. United States is still keeping a station active in the South Pole and the main reason for McMurdo is the logistic support of the South Pole. And I think if there were no science at all, they would still keep the South Pole Station open and McMurdo. However, I don't think that's very likely. I think there are plenty of scientists who want to go to Antarctica, and would always be putting in proposals to work out of those areas as well as Palmer Station. It keeps being reiterated every 10 or 15 years that it's the US position to keep South Pole Station and a station in the Peninsula area and therefore, the station at McMurdo, which is required to support the South Pole Station.

BS: More oceanographic research now?

JB: I haven't sailed on it, but I understand The Nathaniel Palmer is a very good research ship. It is much easier to work on than the icebreakers, including the Glacier and the Polar Class icebreakers, which are not really set up for research. Palmer is one of the world-class Antarctic research ships.

BS: How about Gould? Have you heard much about it?

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JB: I haven't heard much about it. It's mission is a little different. It's more to work out of Palmer Station, more supporting marine biological research, I understand, but I . . . it isn't ice strengthened to the point of the Palmer, so it can't go in the Weddell Sea in the winter time like the Palmer did, for instance.

BS: So, you think that the Nathaniel Palmer is a better research platform than the Coast Guard

icebreakers.

JB: Oh, very much so and not because of the ship capabilities, but because of the set up of laboratories and . . .

BS: Icebreakers have other missions.

JB: Yeah.

BS: How about the flying today compared to the . . . flying support of field parties as compared to

the early years.

JB: Well, it took a long time to convince NSF that for geophysical work, you want to use the smallest possible airplanes or helicopters in the area of your surveying, whatever the objective is and then use the Hercs to support these small airplanes, or helicopters, as the case may be for geological field parties. We did this first in the Pensacola Mountains in 1965-66 season, but then there was the attempt in the late '70s to instrument a Herc for geophysics. That's very expensive and it never worked very well. It was canceled after a few years.

BS: A whole bunch of small planes is better than one large plane.

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JB: Well, we don't have the money in the program for more than one small plane for geophysical work and not even for the entire season. All the instrumentation has to be put on and taken off every year, which is rather unusual for airborne survey aircraft, which are normally instrumented and kept running as much as possible.

BS: These are Ken Borek Air?

JB: Yes. Another twin Otter operates in Antarctica for the US program, but that's mainly to carry geologists or other field parties around to deploy instruments. There's a lot more remote sensing. The automatic geophysical observatories apparently are working quite satisfactorily. I have not worked with those data, but they can be put out with a Herc, or probably with a twin Otter, I'm not sure if a twin Otter can carry one, and then the data are stored and can be picked up a year later or transmitted to a satellite. There's some pretty impressive research going on right now such as the balloon research, astronomical research at the South Pole. I think it's a much more versatile research program than it was in the earlier days. But, I think it operates out of that McMurdo-South Pole axis of support.

BS: It's much more versatile, but it's localized in McMurdo.

JB: Unless you can launch a balloon that'll go all around Antarctica.

BS: They can do that - Top Hat.

JB: That's what I'm saying. For the ships, the research ships like the Palmer.

BS: What about NOAA's presence down there? How much do they do now?

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JB: I'm not sure that they're doing much now.

BS: _____ for a while under Ned Ostenso.

JB: Well, it was . . . yeah, but it was probably related to monitoring activities . . . Tom Laughlin was instrumental in getting some of that through from NOAA. But I don't think they have a major program. There may be NOAA people assigned, like USGS people and other agencies, NASA people, to the other programs. The USGS ship doesn't go down there any more. In fact, the USGS doesn't have a ship any more. They only made one cruise down there in 1984.

BS: OK, last question, unless you can think of something else to cover. Long career again. Reflecting back. High point, low point, things done differently?

JB: Not particularly. I think going down on the IGY was difficult and somewhat dangerous, although we understood that when we went down. Larry Gould told us that if any of us fell in a crevasse, we would be in much better shape in 500 years than any of the rest of us. He told us that at the Davisville orientation in November, October 1956. And he loved Antarctica and we learned to love it. We were innocents on the ice when we went down there and we learned.

BS: Would you do it all over again?

JB: Yes. I didn't spend my whole career during these years working on Antarctica. As I said earlier, I worked in Africa, Rocky Mountains, Western US, gravity base station connections all over the world as a student, marine geophysics off the continental margin in the United States. Also, I've worked in the Great Lakes doing deep crustal seismic work. Worked on Charleston earthquake research. So I've been doing this as well as the Antarctic things and I think I've had a good mix of the type of research

103 I've done. I kind of regret I haven't spent more time in the Arctic. I worked in Alaska in 1955 and 1956 and got up there a few times. I mentioned I got up on Ice Station Charlie briefly, but since that time, I've not been to Alaska and I just haven't had time. Not that I haven't had the wish or the desire.

BS: I appreciate all that. I had a question I was going to ask you and now I forget. Oh, you've written a book.

JB: Yes. Innocents on the Ice - A Memoir of Antarctic Exploration, 1957

BS: The book's called "Innocents on the Ice" and you just used that term again. You were using

Mark Twain 's "Innocents Abroad" as a model on that? What period is that?

JB: That covers the 1956-1958 period, but also I comment on my reflections over the last 40 years throughout the book and compare it with things as recently as 1995 at McMurdo.

BS: I began to read it last night and I saw where you did that up front. OK, are you thinking of another book?

JB: Yes, I'm working on one right now.

BS: Got a title for it?

JB: Oh, a working title - to pick a title is a lot of effort and you have to work with a publisher to get a good title. So my working title is just Over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but mainly comprising the work and flying and over-snow traverse we did in '60-'61 and '61-'62, and that period of my life. It'll again be in a memoir form.

104 BS: OK. What advice to you have for anyone going to the Ice today?

JB: Someone once said, and I use that in my book, you can only go to the Antarctica the first time, once. This isn't original with me, but it's a good line. So keep a diary, keep a journal. My sons have traveled the world and have not kept journals and I wish they had because in 30 or 40 years, they would like to be able to go back to those. It's the prime source of information. It's the closest to the actual truth you can get when you go back and try and remember what happened 40 years ago. I've talked to people at Ellsworth during the 1956-58 period who have very faulty memories of some of the things. They tell the story so many times, but without the actual data book, in effect, a journal. . . you can't go back and check 'on this day, there was a flight, etc.'

BS: Well, that's good. Now tell me, do you plan to go back?

JB: Oh yes. I intend to go back.

BS: Do you . . . what kind of _____ policy on grants do they have? Is there an age cut-off anymore?

JB: No. There never has been to my knowledge.

BS: Well, there was. They tried to cut off Emery Friedman.

JB: But that wasn't because of age. I mean, not the grant. There may have been another reason; possibly he couldn't pass the physical exam or something.

BS: I'm glad they don't. They used to emphasize that with our doctor. He had a . . .

JB: You're talking about medical.

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BS: Yeah. He had a . . .

JB: Yeah. There may be a medical reason for me or anyone else. Yeah. But as far as putting in a proposal. I intend to put in a proposal for cooperative research, more aeromagnetic work with the Germans this June.

BS: Good. So you're not done.

JB: No.

BS: Just starting. Career's just getting going. OK. Well that's it. I think it's one of the better interviews. You've got your act together.

(End of Tape 3 - Side A)

END OF INTERVIEW

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