The Bottom of the World

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 306, 17 March 1928, Page 26

The Bottom of the World

■HE earth’s most remote realm of mystery and silence, the great land mass about the South Pole, is to have its agelong secrets laid bare. What is at the South Pole? And what startling discoveries may come to light in that vast unknown continent in the midst of which the pole is located, a supposedly dead and barren area twice the size of the United States, where frost is king? Next summer Commander Richard E. Byrd and a group of American scientists, aviators and others will sail south hoping to find out.

Byrd himself plans to fly over the pole and to make other flights across and about this mysterious continent, and, with others of his expedition, will explore it as thoroughly as may be from the air, from aboard caterpillar tractors or by the use of sledges drawn by dog teams. In the immediate region of the pole, the airmen will look down on only snow and ice—a scene of sheer lifeless desolation such as one might imagine upon the face of the moon—and their planes will be tossed by the most violent and tumultuous winds that blow upon our planet. Amundsen and Scott, who reached the South Pole, and Shackleton, who almost made it, agree on this, writes J. Olin Howe, in “Popular Mechanics.” Amundsen was first to reach the pole—and not till as recently as 1910— travelling by dog sledge from a base on the Antarctic coast on its New Zealand side. Gales and blizzards of titanic force hampered him, but his journey to the pole and back was far less arduous than that of Scott, who a month later planted the British flag

i at the pole, only to perish on his reL turn trip.with three companions within l a hundred miles of his main base. What little we know now supports the idea that no life exists on the • Antarctic continent after one has left the coast a few miles behind. Yet, but for three explorers, the only visitors there have been whaling captains and other sailors, who have merely landed during the short summer, which corresponds to our winter. These have found the hardy penguin, an odd mam-mal-like bird which stays on through the winter and lays its eggs in the snow, exceedingly numerous. For a few short weeks certain species of gulls are there too, and the waters abound in seals and whales.- But soon all but the penguin are gone. In the Arctic there is a short, hot summer, when herds of elk graze upon green lands. I But is this mystic land at the southernmost tip of the world, the seventh continent upon its face, so nearly lifeless? Does death rule in Antarctica? Byrd thinks not, nor hesitates to say this. “Does it seem reasonable,” asks the man who first flew to the north pole and last summer winged his way to France with the first multi-engined plane to cross the Atlantic, “that lands which lor months of the year are swept by sunshine 24 hours a day should not somewhere support life? On the great plateaux there is only snow and ice; but somewhere in those tremendous areas there must be lowlands where temperatures rise sufficiently to permit vegetable and animal life—the latter very possibly as different from any we know as the penguin is different from birds of climes with which we are familiar.” Curious discoveries of James Murray, biologist with the Shackleton expedition, bear on Byrd’s theory of life in Antarctica. In -weeds in the bottom of lakes, in the ice itself, Murray found abundant microscopic life. Small bearlike animals, visible only when magnified hundreds of times, thread worms, infinitesimally small shrimp and other minute animals were found living happily in the centre of an ice cake. The scientist subjected these alternately to heat and cold and found them able to live in temperatures ranging from 40 below to many degrees above freezing. Byrd’s party may find fossil birds, animals or plants in rock formations in Antarctica to bear out the theory that it was once a connecting link between Australia-Ne-w Zealand and South America. America’s pouched animal, the opossum, akin to the sole mammal type of Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania, may have crossed . on this land bridge, which would account for the complete absence of this ;