Dr. John Behrendt 14 March 2000 Brian Shoemaker Interviewer (Begin Tape 1 - Side A) (000) 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. (50) 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. 4 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. (100) 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.