Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
155
enter the ice shelf. At first, large swells rose and fell, perceptible only when two of the sled
teams disappeared from view. A few narrow crevasses signaled the edge of the field, and
for a while the going wasn't bad. The blue ice made it diYcult for the men to maneuver
the sleds and for the dogs to gain traction, and merely knowing where the crevasses were
did not always mean that the party could avoid crossing them. The deeper into the field
they plunged, the more hazardous the obstacles became. At the worst the men let the
dogs pull the sledges ahead and were towed along behind by ropes. Bridges dropped re-
peatedly at the men's heels but never quite took them down.
A route slightly to the east would have avoided the problem, but the mountains were
such a single focus that by the time the men realized their position, it seemed too great a
risk to retrace their steps. The unknown that lay ahead at least oVered hope that the situ-
ation would improve. When they finally began to come out the far side of the crevasse
field, they stopped on the first snow surface large enough to tie the dogs and set up camp,
less than a mile from the nearest outcropping of rock. The meters on the sleds recorded
an incredible forty miles that day, twenty of which had been in the thicket of crevasses.
The next morning Gould awoke before the rest of the party, drawn to the rocks as
though the Sirens were singing there. Quietly he dressed, put on skis, and alone started
for the nearest exposure. The glacier surface here was snow covered, concealing the cre-
vasses that lay in his path. Within a few hundred yards a bridge collapsed beneath him.
He pitched forward, catching himself by the arms at the edge of the crevasse. A desperate
struggle brought him over the lip to safety. Shaken by such a near miss, Gould sheepishly
retraced his tracks to camp and quietly crawled back into his bag, where he waited for the
others to rouse.
From the reports of the geologists who preceded him, Gould knew the geology of
the Transantarctic Mountains as far as Beardmore Glacier, a basement of old igneous and
metamorphic rocks, covered by the Beacon sedimentary rocks intruded by sills of dol-
erite. From the approach, the mountains looked as if they fit this pattern. What Gould
wanted most to do was find a fossil, something that would tell him the age of the rocks,
and link its story to those stories of other synchronous sequences scattered around the
world. Shackleton's samples of Cambrian Archaeocyatha from the Beardmore Glacier area
actually were from the basement in rock that was unmetamorphosed, but from the looks
of it, the basement rocks in this region were too metamorphosed to contain fossils. The
Beacon sequence had until then produced two sets of fossils: the fish plates discovered in
the lower layers of the section dating from the Devonian, and the Glossopteris plants from
higher in the section, representing the Permian. A great deal of geologic time was unac-
counted for between these two fossil levels. Plus, beds above potentially could have fossils
younger than the Permian. Would the layers on the slopes of Mount Fridtjof Nansen hold
this gift of time for Gould?
Mount Fridtjof Nansen towers at the apex of a triangle whose sides are Liv and Axel
Heiberg Glaciers (see Fig. 5.6). The Liv empties northward, the Axel Heiberg to the east,
and the rangefront strikes northwest-southeast between the glaciers. Gould figured that
Liv Glacier would give ready access to the slopes of Mount Fridtjof Nansen, so after
breakfast he, Thorne, and O'Brien strapped on crampons and started up its eastern side.
When the others saw the tracks that led into the open crevasse, they guessed that they
