Antarctic Barrier

“ They rise almost without a break to a height of thirteen thousand feet. Between us and them is the Barrier to the south, and the sea to the north. Unless a blizzard is impending or blowing, they are clearly visible, a gigantic wall of snow and ice and rock, which bounds our view to the west, constantly varied by the ever-changing colour of the Antarctic. Beyond is the plateau. ”

“ No man of us could even guess what wonders might be revealed to us in our march south, and our imaginations took wings until a stumble in the snow or the sharp pangs of hunger brought back our attention to the needs of the immediate present.
Our anxiety, however, to learn what lay before us was as keen as it could be, and the long days of marching over the Barrier surface were saved from monotony by the continued appearance of land to the south-east. ”

“ This part of the Barrier is stagnant, but the main stream in front of us, unchecked by land, flows uninterruptedly northwards towards the Ross Sea. Only where the stream presses against the Bluff, White Island and, most important of all, Cape Crozier, and rubs itself against the nearly stationary ice upon which we were travelling, pressures and rendings take place, forming some nasty crevasses. It was intended to steer nearly east until this line was crossed some distance north of White Island, and then steer due south.
It is most difficult on a large snow surface to say whether it is flat. ”

“ Antarctic exploration had never attracted so much attention as that of the far north; partly because an almost impossible ice barrier a hundred feet high was known to extend across the southern ocean at about the parallel of the Antarctic Circle. In 1908, however, an English expedition under Lieutenant Shackleton managed to penetrate beyond this barrier in the region south of New Zealand and reached to within less than two hundred miles of the pole. ”

“ I allude to the shores of the Victoria Barrier, along whose coast the soundings examined were invariably charged with diatomaceous remains, constituting a bank which stretches 200 miles north from the base of Victoria Barrier, while the average depth of water above it is 300 fathoms, or 1,800 feet. Again, some of the antarctic species have been detected floating in the atmosphere which overhangs the wide ocean between Africa and America. ”

“ It is fronted by an undulating barrier, the van of a mighty ice-sheet that is being forced outward from the high interior of the Antarctic Continent and apparently is sweeping over low hills, plains, and shallow seas as the great Arctic ice-sheet once pressed over Northern Europe. The barrier surface, seen from the sea, is of a faint golden brown colour. It terminates usually in cliffs ranging from 10 to 300 ft. in height, but in a very few places sweeps down level with the sea. The cliffs are of dazzling whiteness, with wonderful blue shadows. ”

“ Evidently the Barrier surface varies remarkably, and the traveller must be prepared for either a very hard or a very soft surface, both of which he may encounter in the same day's march.
On the glacier we should have been glad to have had heavy Alpine boots with nails all round, but as the temperature is too cold to permit of the explorer wearing ordinary leather boots, some boot would have to be designed which was at once warm enough for the feel and strong enough to carry the nails. ”

“ We marched from eight o'clock in the morning until nine at night, with a short interval for lunch, and that first day out we covered twenty miles and arrived on the Great Ice Barrier at the close of our march. The Barrier in its bleak loneliness is probably the most desolate portion of the earth's surface, with the possible exception of the high plateau which forms the ice cap of the great Antarctic mountain ranges. Although only twenty miles from our winter quarters at Cape Evans, the temperature was 21 degrees lower, as we afterwards found by comparison. ”

“ This trap-door we are coming to you might take for a loose piece of boarding thrown out on the snow, but that is not the case: it is the way down into our home. You must stoop a bit when you go down into the Barrier. Everything is on a reduced scale here in the Polar regions; we can't afford to be extravagant. ”

“ The ascent from the sea-ice to the Barrier was fine, a perfectly even slope. When no more than a mile from the ship, we found a good site for the first dog-camp, and another mile to the south it was decided that the house was to stand, on the slope of a hill, where it would be least exposed to the strong south-easterly gales which might be expected from previous descriptions. Up on the Barrier all was absolutely still, and there was not a sign of life; indeed, what should anything live on? ”

“ The great ice barrier of Ross fills a vast bay 400 miles across, and at least 300 miles deep, with soundings of about 600 ft. There is no reason why other such barriers should not exist in other parts of the Antarctic regions as yet unknown. These barriers must be the sources of12 the enormous tabular icebergs which float northward in such vast numbers. Their height is about 200 ft., and their length from one or two to as much as twenty miles. ”

“ This must be the same land that we saw lose itself in the horizon in about 84oS., when we stood at a height of about 4,000 feet and looked out over the Barrier, during our ascent. We now have sufficient indications to enable us without hesitation to draw this land as continuous -- Carmen Land. The surface against the land is violently disturbed -- crevasses and pressure ridges, waves and valleys, in all directions. ”

“ On the whole the mules failed to adapt themselves to this life, and as such must at present be considered to be a failure for Antarctic work. Certainly those of our ponies which had the best chance to adapt themselves went farthest, such as Nobby and Jimmy Pigg, both of whom had experience of Barrier sledging before they started on the Polar Journey. ”

“ Good pulling to the sledge traveller means easy pulling. Away we went round Cape Armitage and eastwards. We knew that the Barrier edge was in front of us and also that the break-up of the sea-ice had left the face of it as a low perpendicular cliff. We had therefore to find a place where the snow had formed a drift. This we came right up against and met quite suddenly a very keen wind flowing, as it always does, from the cold Barrier down to the comparatively warm sea-ice. ”

“ West of Cape Bird are some small penguin rookeries, and high up on the ice slopes could be seen some grey granite boulders. These are erratics, brought by ice from the Western Mountains, and are evidence of a warmer past when the Barrier rose some two thousand feet higher than it does now, and stretched many hundreds of miles farther out to sea. But now the Antarctic is becoming colder, the deposition of snow is therefore farther north, and the formation of ice correspondingly less. ”

“ Either they may be large pieces broken away from the Great Ice Barrier which hems in the Southern Continent, or they may have detached themselves from some great glaciers, which glaciers “calve” periodically, on account of their resistless forward movement down the ravines they create towards the sea. Most Antarctic bergs are flat-topped, lacking those fantastic pinnacles that are usually associated with bergs; but many of them are enormous masses, several square miles in extent and weighing millions of tons. Not that the bigger fellows are the more picturesque, they are only awe-inspiring. ”

“ By noon on January 25 I found that any hopes I had of a clear run were vain, and the prospect of reaching King Edward VII Land grew remoter every ensuing hour. Indeed it seemed impossible to reach the land, and the shortness of coal, the leaky condition of the ship, and the necessity of landing all our stores and putting up the hut before the vessel left us, made the situation an extremely anxious one. I had not expected to find Barrier Inlet gone, and, at the same time, the way to King Edward VII Land absolutely blocked by ice, though the latter condition was not unusual. ”

“ Commander Wild’s intention was to enter the Antarctic ice without any delay, by reason of the lateness of the season. Pushing to the eastward, and then striking south through the pack ice, he wished to reach the Great Ice Barrier, and, having reached it, to turn westward and comprehensively map out the whole coastline in the direction of Coats Land, so long as the ice remained loose enough to permit of an escape before the winter frosts solidified the whole mass. ”

“ The Barrier is moving against this land at a rate which is sometimes not much less than a mile in a year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up: there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves of the sea are like a ploughed field. These are worst at Cape Crozier itself, but they extend all along the southern slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the land, and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes is apparent at Corner Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in the crevasses we used to find and the occasional ridges we had to cross. ”

“ There can be little doubt, I think, that this Nordenskjold Ice Barrier is afloat.
On the following day we were naturally anxious to be sure of our exact position on the chart, in view of the fact that we had come to the end of the barrier some eighteen miles quicker than the chart had led us to anticipate. Accordingly, Mawson worked up his meridian altitude, while I plotted out the angular distances- 198 - he had found respectively for Mount Erebus, Mount Lister and Mount Melbourne. ”

“ At noon, in lat. 77° 46′ S., long. 187° E., we got soundings with two hundred and eighty fathoms, greenish mud and clay. The top of the barrier at the time was distinctly visible from the deck, just rising above the horizon. We now made all sail to a light breeze from the north-east directly towards it; the loose ice became closer as we proceeded to the southward, and at a quarter past nine stopped our further progress. We were about ten or twelve miles from the barrier, but the whole of the intervening space was filled with packed heavy ice ”

“ Sir James Ross, in his most successful South Pole Expedition, during the years 1839-43, sailed over some of this land, and confirmed the rest. The Antarctic, as well as the Arctic honors he secured for England, by turning a corner of the land, and sailing far southward, along an impenetrable icy barrier, to the latitude of seventy-eight degrees, nine minutes. It is an elevated continent, with many lofty ranges. ”

“ But there's precious little shirking in Barrier sledging: a week finds most of us out.
There are many questions which ought to be studied. The effect upon men of going from heat to cold, such as Bowers coming to us from the Persian Gulf: or vice versa of Simpson returning from the Antarctic to India; differences of dry and damp cold; what is a comfortable temperature in the Antarctic and what is it compared to a comfortable temperature in England, the question of women in these temperatures...? The man with the nerves goes farthest. What is the ratio between nervous and physical energy? ”

“ As regards land work in the Antarctic Regions, this can be undertaken more satisfactorily after we have obtained a more definite idea of the confines of the Great Southern Ocean around Antarctica. At present there is too much hazy conjecture, and we find what one believes to be part of Antarctica itself another declares to be an island. But the land work has begun, and to the keen landsman there is no reason why it should not be going ahead. ”

“ The work of the Challenger, Valdivia, Gauss and Scotia in the South Atlantic and South Indian Oceans has given us a clue to the possible connections between Africa, South America and Antarctica, and now it is of great interest and importance to get more soundings to the south of Australia and New Zealand, to show more exactly what the conformation of the floor of the ocean is in those longitudes. That is one of the most important investigations for future Antarctic exploring ships to carry out. ”

“ It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. ”

“ Jeorling; we have been going these many years between Australia on the east and America on the west; from Hobart Town to the Kerguelens, to Tristan d’Acunha, to the Falklands, only taking time anywhere to sell our cargo, and sometimes dipping down into the Antarctic Sea. Under these circumstances, you understand, a passenger might be troublesome, and besides, who would care to embark on the Halbrane? she does not like to flout the breezes, and goes wherever the wind drives her. ”

“ Shackleton hanging round the doors of rich men! Scott writing begging letters for months together! Is the country not ashamed?
Modern civilized States should make up their minds to the endowment of research, which includes exploration; and as all States benefit alike by the scientific side of it there is plenty of scope for international arrangement, especially in a region where the mere grabbing of territory is meaningless, and no Foreign Office can trace the frontier between King Edward's Plateau and King Haakon's. The Antarctic continent is still mostly unexplored ”

“ Next day, after landing the magistrate’s dog, which had somehow been left aboard, we steamed along the coast towards Royal Bay, where the German Antarctic Expedition of 1892-3 had wintered, and here, shortly after 2 p.m., we dropped anchor quite close to a great glacier that was rotten with crevasses. Great masses of ice kept constantly tumbling down with a continual rumbling, and as they entered the water they sent out waves towards us like the wash of a giant ship proceeding at full speed. The whole bay was covered with growlers and smaller fragments of ice. ”