Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
221
Figure S.18. harriet joins
the Vanda Swim Club,
January 1983.
The postscript to this story is that both the Vanda Swim Club and Vanda
Station (see Fig. S.15, page 214) slipped into history as the victims of global
warming. Every summer from the early 1970s, the onyx River had delivered more
meltwater to the lake than had ablated during the winter season. By the early
1990s it was clear that the station had only a few more seasons before it would
be flooded, and so New Zealand began the sad task of dismantling the buildings
and removing about ten tons of contaminated soil. By the end of the 1994-1995
season, not a trace remained of the base, which had for a quarter-century so
admirably served the scientists who studied this polar oasis.
Three parties subsequent to the IGY conclude this account of exploration of the
Transantarctic Mountains. In the second season of the IGY (1958-1959), a tractor train
of three tracked Sno-Cats, each pulling a sled, lumbered out of Byrd Station to conduct
geophysical and glaciological studies on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A similar party had
worked the previous season in a big loop out to the Ellsworth Mountains and back, set-
ting oV explosives to sound the bottom of the ice sheet, digging pits and taking cores of
the snow and ice, and surveying the ice sheet and the mountains. The routine was the
