Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
60
of the Kukri Hills. The northern arm of the glacier appeared to drop away toward the
northeast, but as Ferrar rounded the corner to see what happened to it, a cloud rose up
from below, obscuring his view. Once again, the valley held its secret.
That afternoon the party broke camp and moved on down the glacier into granite
country, leaving the sandstone outcrops behind, and with them any hope of finding fos-
sils this trip. Four more days and two camps saw them oV the glacier, and pulling north
across New Harbour to the mouth of the valley to the north of the Ferrar Glacier drain-
age. The night of November 29, the party camped in the mouth of this valley.
Ferrar was looking for what happened to the northern branch of the glacier, lost
to clouds higher up. The mouth of the valley was bare rock, littered with boulders and
stones mainly of granite and gneiss. About two miles up, an imposing piedmont glacier
(now known as Commonwealth Glacier) flowed down the northern wall and spread al-
most entirely across the valley floor (see Fig. 2.9). A piedmont glacier is one whose ice
spreads across a relatively flat area from some source higher up. It can be broad like the
Wilson Piedmont Glacier (see Fig. 1.14), or small and defined like Commonwealth Gla-
cier, which assumes a particularly circular form and vertical walls rising more than fifty
feet. This is what blocked Ferrar's view up the bottom of the valley. It was frustrating.
Only the bare-rock higher elevations showed beyond. The question was, did the northern
branch of the glacier peter out somewhere up this valley, or did the valley head in a high
divide with the northern glacier stopped behind it? It felt like the valley should continue
through the mountains, like the adjacent outlet to the south, but the proof would be in
the observation. Ferrar did not have time to climb farther up that afternoon, but in the
morning he set out to skirt the southern end of Commonwealth Glacier. Just about the
time he reached the breach between the glacier and the southern wall of the valley, a thick
snow squall came down and obliterated the view once again, leaving the question hang-
ing, what was there?
The geological party worked its way back to the mouth of Blue Glacier, with Ferrar
suVering a case of snow-blindness that lost the group several days. On December 10 the
party started the thirty-mile crossing of McMurdo Sound, and after a strong showing in
the morning, pushed it on through, arriving at Discovery by 10:00 P.M. on the same day.
When Scott's western party escaped “Desolation Camp” on November 12, they headed
out onto the plateau, where for two and a half weeks of pulling, interspersed with storms,
they continued across the featureless plateau of white. Temperatures were markedly colder
and the air thinner than the party members had experienced the previous year on the ice
shelf. On the prearranged date of December 1, they turned back, having determined that
the ice sheet extended at least 150 miles to the west of the mountains, and at that distance
no western shore to Victoria Land was anywhere indicated.
Victorian images of geographical discovery typically portray the explorer in some
fantastic landscape, mountains rising from the mists, canyons disappearing into a dark
abyss, a jungle, deep and rich with detail. The Transantarctic Mountains are a fit set-
ting. In complete contrast, the exploration of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet evokes a scene
of starkness: a field of white, the horizon, and the sky. The explorer, not the landscape,
becomes the subject of the frame. Without landmarks to oVer distance, the horizon con-
