Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
210
As a follow-up to Operation Highjump, the U.S. Navy staged Operation Windmill
(1947-1948), so-called by the press because of its heavy reliance on helicopters. Task Force
39 consisted of two icebreakers, Burton Island and Edisto, whose primary mission was to
secure ground control for the aerial photos of the previous year. The big ships pushed
through heavy pack and, when open water permitted, nudged deep in toward shore, de-
ploying the helicopters with crews who surveyed the terrain. The most successful activity
was along the Wilkes Coast, resulting in the production of a set of middle scale maps. The
icebreakers cruised down the Ross Sea to McMurdo Sound, lingered for a day visiting the
historical huts on Ross Island, then sailed east along the margin of the ice shelf to Little
America, without securing new ground control for any of the Transantarctic Mountains.
Setting the stage for postwar confrontation, Chile had matched Great Britain's claim
to the Antarctic Peninsula in 1940, and then Argentina followed suit in 1943. Both sub-
sequently sent forces to harass British bases on the peninsula. After the war, the United
States attempted to bring stability to the region, as well as to exclude the Soviet Union.
In 1948 it proposed an eight-way condominium for sovereignty in Antarctica, which in-
cluded the United States and the seven claimant nations, Argentina, Australia, Chile,
France, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Norway. The proposal was soundly rejected by
all of the claimants. Then Chile introduced a countermeasure, the Escudero Declaration,
proposing that all claims in the Antarctic should be frozen for five or ten years, for a cool-
ing oV period among the competing claimants, with all territories open to any expedition
and with scientific research the only activity. Before negotiations could resume, however,
the entire equation changed when the Soviet Union gave notice in 1950 that any further
discussions of sovereignty must include the Soviets, owing to the “discovery” of Antarc-
tica by Bellingshausen in 1820.
Over the next several years as the Cold War heated up, the United States grappled
with Antarctic policy issues: containment, exclusion, and whether or not finally to make
a formal claim. Meanwhile, a new force had been spawned in the postwar political en-
vironment. It grew quickly in strength and in reach and forever changed the politics of
Antarctica. This political force was science.
Great strides had been made during the war in the fields of atmospheric physics, com-
munications, and rocketry, with an international cast of elite physicists and engineers
now poised to take their research to new levels. In 1950, at a dinner party at the home of
James A. Van Allen, Lloyd V. Berkner proposed a Third International Polar Year (TIPY)
to be held in 1957-1958, twenty-five years after the Second International Polar Year and co-
inciding with a maximum of activity in the sunspot cycle. The importance of the poles to
the men in the room, who all studied some aspect of the upper atmosphere, was that the
Earth's magnetic lines converged there. The measurement of solar activity in the iono-
sphere along magnetic lines that come to ground in the polar regions would provide data
to test a model of Earth-sun interactions recently proposed by Sydney Chapman, the pre-
eminent British geophysicist at the time, and the guest of honor at the Van Allen dinner
pa r t y.
Berkner had been a radio technician on the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition (1929-
1933), and after returning had joined the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the
Carnegie Institute of Washington, where he directed studies in upper atmosphere geo-
