Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
He also judged people firmly by their dedication to the task in hand. To be part of his expeditions
meant abandoning any perceived status or sense of entitlement. His was an Edwardian value system.
Would you volunteer, were you willing, had you put in the necessary effort to prepare? (When I first
met Brian, years later, I had to lay down all my academic credentials before he would speak to me. He
wanted to know about my degree, my doctorate, how much research I had already done. When he was
finally satisfied that I deserved his time, he was promptly generous with it.)
Brian believed that a person's work should speak for itself, and he abhorred the notion of pushing
himself forward. Take the naming of geological features. In those early days of exploration in Sval-
bard, many researchers gaily named the places they discovered after themselves and their friends. To
immortalize themselves, they chose magnificent mountains, giant rivers of ice, great macho structures.
But although Brian would become the world's leading authority on Svalbard, you'll struggle to find
his name on the maps. Eventually, you may spot one small smudge, close to the summit of the ice cap,
bearing the name “Harlandisen”. Brian's students think this is hilarious. An isen is a rather nondescript
patch of ice, usually found between more interesting places. Even so, Brian is embarrassed by the ac-
colade. Ask him how the name came about, and he will blush faintly and mumble that the Norwegians
insisted.
Brian's students loved him. They followed his codes strictly and with loyalty. On his '49 exped-
ition he had brought along eleven students from Cambridge, split into different groups for maximum
efficiency. Several parties had already investigated the coastal regions, tooling along the fjord-ridden
coast in sixteen-foot open whaleboats, which Brian had christened
Faith
and
Hope
. The rest had taken
the largest boat, an eighteen-foot dory called
Charity
. (“It's a biblical reference,” Brian says. “You
know. 'Faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is charity.' ”) Brian had bought
Charity
for
seventeen pounds. She was a marvellous boat, big, wide and solid as a rock, with space enough for
a ton of equipment. She had borne the third party to an encampment at the tip of Billefjorden, in the
northwest of the main island. From there, Brian led a small party of four students, the “Northern Sur-
vey”, out into the unknown territory of Ny Friesland. The plan was simply to map the rocks and begin
to understand what was out there. Though these rocks came directly from the time of the Snowball,
Brian as yet knew little about them.
The first few days were good ones. In clear weather the party sledged and skied, measured angles,
surveyed the landscape, made sketches and took carefully numbered photographs. All around them,
the dark brown tips of mountains and rocky cliffs poked through skirts of ice. Snow dusted every dip
in the rocks. And flooding down every gully and alongside every cliff were Svalbard's great glaciers.
Glaciers are giant bodies of ice, with a texture like a strange combination of rock and river. They
are solid, like the ice cubes in a refrigerator, and form out of snow the way rock is made from soft mud
or sand. If mud falls consistently down on to a seafloor, its grains will eventually squeeze together and
solidify into rock. Snow does the same thing. Individual snow crystals are gorgeous works of six-sided
filigree. But if they pile up over time, these crystals begin to amalgamate. They squeeze up against one
another. Their delicate arms smash and break and weld together. They trap pockets of air, meld into a
hoary substance called firn, and then gradually solidify into hard, white ice. And then the ice begins to
move. Like water it flows downhill, but at a magisterial, glacial pace. Glaciers don't just fill valleys;
they create them. Flowing ice may be slow but it's inexorable, and a glacier can carve through solid
rock.
For polar travellers, glaciers make great highways; but they come with hazards, too. When ice
flows, it splits into deep fissures and cracks. Snow then drapes these crevasses, hiding them from the
unwary. Break through one of these snow bridges, and you will find yourself plunging into the cold
