Part III: Antarctica and Academe - Scott Polar Research Institute

low rounded dome rising out of the shelf. Dave later calculated that we'd met a 35
knot headwind from west south west, which slowed us down and pushed us north.
The first shelf we came to turned out to be not the main Larsen Ice Shelf but a
large iceberg about 75 miles long, which broke off from the shelf about five years ago
and had been tracked by Charles Swithinbank on the satellite photos! Behind it
floated thick fast ice and then the shelf proper. The scene was perfectly lovely with
mountains to north and south, the glaciers falling smoothly to the flat shelf, but with
crevassed icefalls in places. The gradual slopes produced subtle changes of light and
shadow, with glare ice in places reflecting the surface pattern. The mountains
themselves cast deep purple shadows, as we were still flying into the sun. But as we
passed over them and looked back they shone brilliantly. Dave quickly decided
where we were and picked out South Eland Mountains, near us to the north, and
further away the Eternity Range - Faith, Hope and Charity - looking mysterious and
beautiful. There was cloud to the south, but the peak of Mount Andrew Jackson
(13,750 ft, now thought to be only c.11,000 ft) was just visible. We flew along the
edge of the cloud over the Palmer Land Plateau - a vast expanse of ice, with isolated
nunataks poking through it. George VI Sound came into view and the mountains
lining it on each side - on the far side Alexander Island, rather faint in the distant
haze. Low cloud patches added to the beauty of the scene, creating a dappled pattern
of shadows chasing across the ice. Our course took us down the Ryder Glacier,
which is heavily crevassed, with the Battersby Mountains to the south of us.
So we flew on down to the Sound, which is about 15 miles wide at that point, flat
ice shelf with an undulating surface, the hollows filled with pools of melt-water that
had frozen and were a lovely caerulean blue - oriented here in lines running northsouth.
The mountains to the east of the sound are granitic and craggy, those to the
west are of sedimentary rock - slates and mudstones in very conspicuous layered
bands, and beautiful in their way. They bear many fossil shells, Belemnites, ferns
and other plants. The vistas to north and south along the Sound from the centre are
magnificent.
And so we touched down at Fossil Bluff at 9 pm (8 o’clock local time) after a flight
lasting 6 hrs 45 mins (that was 11/4 hrs longer than estimated, due to the head winds.
The runway was on a sloping sea ice slope under the Bluffs and Andy Jameson (BC)
and Clive Jackman, a metman from Adelaide Base helping out for a few weeks, were
there to greet us. We tied the plane down to two parked muskegs and went down to
the base by skiddoo. It was set on a scree spur of the moraine, right under the
mountains, about 20 ft above the surface of the Sound. The base hut was only 28 ft x
12 ft, with kitchen, bunks, radio and met office all in one. Very similar in size to my
original base hut at Signy Island where I lived and worked during l948-50. At the
Bluff they also had a sledging store, workshop and generator shed tacked on, each
very small. Straggling up the slope behind are the 'bog' tent, a store hut and a
garage, the last flown in and erected earlier that season. Strewn around on the scree
were the stores, food, sledging rations, skidoo spares, sledges and spare runners,
tents, paint and so on. These had to be stored in the open because there was no space
under cover. Further behind was a retreating glacier with ice 'penitentes' and the
fossil-strewn slopes of the Pyramid, a small rock peak. We were made welcome and
had supper. Then we all listened to the weather reports from Adelaide, our next
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