2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

Science in the Antarctic
Stan Evans
On 22 November 1955 I embarked on
MV Tottan, a Norwegian sealer of 500
tons, at Southampton Dock. She was
chartered by the Royal Society to take an
Advance Party of ten men to the Antarctic to
find a suitable location and to build a base hut
for the British contribution to the
International Geophysical Year 1957-8 (IGY).
It was the second exploratory expedition
mounted by the society in its three-hundredyear
history. The first was Captain Cook: the
Transit of Venus Expedition of 1768.
Our prime task was to build the Base Hut
for the Main Party who would follow a year
later but it was thought desirable for a
meteorologist and a physicist to start
scientific work to be included in with the
Advance Party, if only to get a measure of the
conditions. The leader was David Dalgliesh,
Surgeon Commander RN.
My PhD work, at Jodrell Bank, had been in
the radar detection of meteors entering the
Earth’s atmosphere: the properties of the
meteors and the properties of the atmosphere
where the meteor burns up, at about 100 km
height. In just three weeks I had to familiarise
myself with two specialist instruments.
The all-sky camera takes regular
photographs of the aurora (e.g. 10 sec
exposures at 1 min intervals) during the
hours of darkness.
The Dobson spectrophotometer compares
the strength of certain lines in the spectrum
of sunlight; some are absorbed by ozone,
some are not, and from their relative
strengths one computes the total amount of
ozone in the atmosphere at that time and
place. In 1955 Dobson instruments were in
operation at a number of observing stations
in Europe and scattered over the northern
hemisphere, including one in Spitzbergen at
77°N, but only one in the whole southern
hemisphere, at Christchurch N.Z.
MEMOIR I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 37
To mark the centenary of Scott’s death, Stan Evans (Fellow 1976, Emeritus
Fellow 1996), remembers his own voyage to Antarctica 57 years ago . . .
With occasional engine breakdowns in the
doldrums of mid-Atlantic, we finally berthed
in the spectacular bay at Rio de Janeiro in mid
December. Amongst other stores, several
carcasses of sheep, a pig, and sides of beef
were purchased, to be slung in the rigging
(until they could be deep frozen) to provide
us with fresh meat in the winter. Thankfully
there were no engine breakdowns in the
much stormier waters ahead and it was
Christmas Eve when we reached the harbour
at Grytviken, South Georgia, a full month
since leaving England.
Shackleton’s Endurance expedition of 1915
revealed that there is a general circulation of
the pack ice in a clockwise direction around
the Weddell Sea, leaving more fragmented ice
and occasional open water leads along the
eastern shoreline. Therefore we approached
the Weddell Sea from the vicinity of Kap
Norvegia, hugging the eastern coastline.
Only one ship had passed this way since 1915:
the Argentinian ice breaker General San Martin
in the summer of 1954-5, just one year ahead
of us. Tottan was not an ice breaker but our
captain, Lief Jacobsen, had one man huddled
in the crow’s nest at 70ft above the waterline,