Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
193
them lean and tall against its own massiveness. Each of us felt a sense of elation as
he took in that panorama of mountains, glistening snow domes, glaciers and skies.
There was a serenity and peace on the land. . . . Soft blues and greens merged into the
dazzling whiteness of snow above, and purple lines told of fissures and grottoes. . . .
Sweeping around the northern base of our mountain from the east was a tributary
glacier. From our lofty perch the broken waves of ice and crevasses appeared like
ripples on the smooth waters of a slowly moving river.
Figure 6.12. Earth's land's
end, a stark landscape of
ice, rock, wind, and the
mind. Mount Howe marks
the horizon to the left of
the image. Mount Wilber
is the black rectangle
directly above the figure.
To the right of Mount Wil-
ber is a broad icefall. To
the right of that, Mount
Weaver silhouettes its
eastern ridgeline, climbed
on December 10, 1933, by
Blackburn, Paine, and Rus-
sell to the pointed summit.
At the summit of Mount Weaver the men built a cairn, placing their names in a cocoa
tin. Beside it they lunched on pemmican and chocolate, lingered a while longer. But the
sweet music that had lured them into the unknown had stopped. On the way back they
would have to pay the piper—in the tender of geology with triangulations and samples of
rock.
Section measurement is a tedious business, determining the thickness of a unit of
stratum, describing its characteristics, collecting a representative sample, then doing it
all again, and again, until the section is completed. Under Antarctic conditions team-
work is essential for eYcient collection of such data. Blackburn measured thicknesses,
dictated descriptions that Paine wrote down, and chose the samples that Russell labeled
