Antarctic Basalt: An Antarctic Quest in the Days of Dog-sledge Travel

By Lewis Juckes

“By 1st February the unloading had been completed, and when the ice anchors had been recovered the ship drew slowly away from the ice edge. The dull weather could not suppress the thrill that pulsed through me – this was the real start of my adventure. Up till then I could at any time have turned back. It might have been embarrassing, inconvenient, or expensive, but it had been possible. Now there would be no more direct contact with the outside world until the ship returned for another brief week or so in a year’s time. There was no air link, established or even planned. Was any other workplace in the world as isolated? Even in the Antarctic, did any other base have so fleeting a relief? Together with my companions I was irrevocably committed.”

Lewis Juckes describes the many new experiences that lay ahead over the next two years, first while living in huts buried deep within the snow and then in the field with dog teams for transport and tents for accommodation. Thrills and rare sights were there, as well as scares and dangers – and tragedy within the close-knit group. This was Antarctica in the mid-1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805147602

Lewis Juckes

Lewis Juckes grew up in South Africa and graduated in Geology in 1963. Working for the British Antarctic Survey, he spent two years in the Antarctic mapping remote mountains by dog-sledge. After moving to the steel industry, he retired in 2000. He is married, with three children and six grandchildren, and lives in North Yorkshire.

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Chapter 1

Continental Drift

We heard the penguins long before we saw them. The four of us had been ski-walking for an hour across the featureless ice shelf, guided only by the stars in the moonless sky. There were no landmarks nor route markers but now we guessed it was probably time to turn towards the ice cliff to find the only snow ramp here that could take us safely down. At the top of the ramp our dark-adapted eyes got their first glimpse of the emperor penguin groups as several vague black zones on the sea ice below. During storms they famously pack into tight huddles to conserve heat but on this day, in the still air, several thousand were scattered over a wide area in clusters loose enough for us to walk freely among the birds.

The date was 7th June, more than five weeks since the sun had vanished beneath the horizon for the long polar night. On past form this was still a little early but the emperors just might have started laying. Could we see any with eggs? The fold of skin above the feet seemed pouched out on virtually every one, but then we saw the real thing. The bulge was much rounder, and the bird walked more clumsily as it shuffled on its heels to keep the precious cargo in place. The yearly miracle had begun.

An anomaly indeed, birds laying eggs with the temperature around them in the minus thirties Celsius, but they were perfectly evolved for this. I too was a bit of an anomaly; a geologist in a place several hundred miles from the nearest rock. What had brought me to this remote spot?

This Antarctic story begins in another southern region, in South Africa. There I grew up near the coastal city of Durban, where frost and snow were unknown, and in 1962 I was at the University of Natal as one of five students in the final year of the Honours Course in Geology.

Lester King, our Professor, returned from an overseas visit and summoned two of us to his office to tell us of an old pupil of his, Dr Raymond Adie, who now headed the geological section of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Adie had told him that there could be places in their programme for one or two geologists from South Africa and had asked King to see if he could find anyone suitable. So, King asked, could we two consider it and give him a reply in a few days?

We thanked him profusely and left the office. A few paces around the corner, as soon as we were out of earshot, my comrade doubled up with laughter.

Ridiculous, when there are proper jobs here with decent pay! We’ll have to find a good excuse to get out of this one.

I was deflated. Actually, I thought it was a good idea, I replied lamely. That was an understatement: in my view, it was everything I could have asked for.

The sector of the Antarctic claimed by Britain is dominated by the Antarctic Peninsula, where most geological work had been done up till then, but the sector extends far enough east to include part of East Antarctica. Grossly simplifying the geology of the Antarctic Peninsula, it is comparable with the Andes with its volcanic rocks and granite intrusions. East Antarctica, in contrast, was once part of the supercontinent of Gondwana until it was broken up by Continental Drift about a hundred million years ago. Other fragments of Gondwana became Southern Africa, India, Australia, and much of South America.

Now, in the early 1960s, BAS had a base at Halley Bay in East Antarctica. It was built on a floating ice shelf, with no rock exposed in that region, but it was known that there were mountains several hundred miles to the east in the Norwegian Antarctic territory of Dronning Maud Land. Only a few months before I heard of this, two men from Halley Bay had proved the feasibility of work there when they reached the nearest of the peaks for a brief visit with their dog sledge. My excitement rose when I checked on various maps and realised that reconstructions of Gondwana placed this part of Antarctica adjacent to the coast of Natal.

That was Adie’s reason for suggesting that a South African geologist would be useful, someone who would already be familiar with the rock types expected there. King’s reasons were more specific. The most compelling geological evidence for Continental Drift is seen in the southern continents, and particularly Southern Africa. As a result, many geologists from those regions not only accepted the theory but saw it as the only possible explanation for what they observed around them.

At that time, however, this theory was still rejected in North America and also by many in Europe. King, a leader in the battle to get wider acceptance of the idea, devoted much of his time to this task and was even managing to get papers on the subject published in Britain and the United States at a time when many Drift proponents found that their manuscripts were being automatically rejected by traditional journals.

In a paper a few years earlier he had laid down predictions based on the theory, suggesting that in Dronning Maud Land there would be similar rocks to those in the east of South Africa including a thinned version of the Karoo sediments, topped by basalt lava flows comparable to the Stormberg basalts of Jurassic age.¹ His triumph would be so much sweeter if it was one of his own graduates who brought back the confirming evidence.

In late 1962 I made contact with Dr Adie and it was arranged that I would be given a post in the Geology Department at Birmingham University until BAS conducted its annual interviews and made its selections. Just before I left, a postcard arrived from my ex-classmate telling of his job in a limestone quarry beside a cement works a thousand miles to the north. He was getting good money, probably more than the £60 per month that I had been promised, but I still felt that I had come off best.

In those days the BAS headquarters were in London but the various scientific disciplines were scattered across the country with little contact between them. Geology was based in Birmingham, and there I found myself amongst half a dozen earlier BAS geologists. Those who had been to the Antarctic with BAS were known as Fids, from the earlier name of the Survey (the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey), and BAS itself was often still referred to as FIDS.

Among these returnees I, and later the other new recruits too, picked up much Antarctic lore. Most was from the Antarctic Peninsula rather than from Halley Bay, with its very different conditions, but topics like dog-driving were universal. We also learnt to avoid the mispronunciations of base names that marked one as a newcomer – a Fidlet, or Babyfid. Two of the main traps here were Port Lockroy, which had the stress on the last syllable (an invented French surname)¹, and Stonington Island, which is pronounced Stonnington (from the seaport in Connecticut).

This BAS Geology Section was headed by Dr Ray Adie (no one dared address him as anything but Dr Adie). The way in which most of the geologists were motivated to write up their work as a BAS Scientific Report was by being allowed to submit a version of it as a thesis for a higher degree, meaning that in effect they were being paid to write their theses – an enviable position for any postgraduate.

For the official interviews later in the year there were said to be sixty applicants, and five of us were taken on. One of our first priorities was to buy cameras to use on the unique adventure that lay ahead, and we sent first our queries and then our orders to the Falkland Islands Company (FIC) by telegram. The replies from FIC gave us their prices for our selections and these made us aware of just how heavily consumer goods were being taxed in Britain at the time. My Minolta camera and accessories would cost £45 in Stanley, compared to £145 in Britain, and my Rolex Submariner watch £26 instead of £75. At the time we were being paid £50 per month (untaxed, as it was classed as a training allowance rather than a salary), so these savings made a major difference to what we could afford.

Starting from Britain, Antarctica was a long way away. Flying part of the way, to somewhere in South America, was feasible but relatively expensive and so this luxury was provided only for the permanent BAS staff and some of the more senior scientists. However, there would be ships carrying the annual supplies for the bases and so they also transported the majority of the Fids. At this time the Survey owned two vessels, the Royal Research Ship Shackleton and the RRS John Biscoe, and they chartered a third each season.

On 5th December the chartered Danish vessel Kista Dan sailed from Southampton with me among the twenty or so Fidlets on board. With the cost of the ship’s charter said to be £360 per day, at a time when the basic salary for two-year Fids was £550 per year, we were the last to leave and our stops along the way would be kept as short as possible.

The next day a notice appeared asking us to assemble on the stern deck at 4.30 p.m. for a fire and lifeboat drill, where the captain addressed us from the steps above.

If we start to sink, my men will launch lifeboats. You keep out of the way. If you want to do something, you throw these overboard. He waved a hand at the cylinders, each about the size of a 44-gallon drum, which contained the inflatable life rafts. And now, you will all join me for a drink?

He led the way back up the steps to his quarters and we followed eagerly. Did we really need to know any more?

Near the saloon was a notice board with a map of the Atlantic, and every day a pin would show our noon position as established by a sextant sighting of the sun when it was visible or the log that trailed behind the ship when it was not. Wallowing our way down the North Atlantic at a bare twelve knots, the Antarctic still seemed a very long way away.

In Montevideo we had a day or so for sightseeing and souvenir shopping, and then the subtropical summer of Uruguay faded rapidly as we sailed south to the Falkland Islands where the weather even in midsummer was cool and breezy at best.

The view of Stanley and its surroundings was as bleak as we had been told. First stop was the BAS office, for an advance on salary, and then we dispersed to the three stores that stocked cameras. All the items I had ordered were present and correct, so I now had a state-of-the-art single lens reflex camera plus wide angle and telephoto lenses, filters, and goodness knows what else.

There was also the BAS warehouse. Here we were given a complete set of clothing for indoor and outdoor use, for one or two years as appropriate, and two impressively large kitbags to hold it all. I was clearly not the only one to feel a thrill of anticipation as we packed away exotic-sounding items such as mukluks, two pairs, while the sight and feel of the fur-lined hoods on the sledging anoraks made us feel that we were explorers already.

South Georgia is an island of glaciers and fjords, and in one of the sheltered harbours here we met up with the Shackleton for some transfers of personnel and to pick up a dog team that was being moved from Hope Bay to Halley Bay. We had a permit to take a certain number of bull elephant seals for dog food, and we simply had to hope that the temperature would soon drop below zero and save the carcases from going off around us as we continued southward.

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1L C King, Necessity for Continental Drift, Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists , 1953, Vol. 37, No. 9 (September), 2163-2177; see pp 2170, 2174.

1Forty years later, during a visit to the BAS Headquarters in Cambridge, I heard it spoken as LOCK-roy and learnt that this had taken over as the modern pronunciation. If the spirit of Édouard Lockroy is watching the story of his Port from on high, he has my sympathy as a fellow inheritor of a non-phonetic surname. (Juckes, of Shropshire origin, is pronounced Jukes.)

Chapter 2

Halley Bay

The only feasible route into the Weddell Sea follows the eastern edge, entering at Kapp Norvegia, but even here it is far less welcoming than the Ross Sea on the other side of the Antarctic continent. There were brief delays for us at times, when the ever-shifting pack ice closed in and brought the ship to a halt for a while, but we were steadily approaching our destination. Our course had moved close enough to the coast for us to see the ice cliffs of the Brunt Ice Shelf, about ninety feet high and sheer wherever we could see them. This was the kind of place where we would be living, and in 1956 Halley Bay had been chosen as the site for a base because it was one of the rare locations offering easy access from sea level. Then, on the morning of 27th January 1964, we were there.

Rounding the headland, the sight of the bay was magical. There was a V-shaped indentation in the continuity of the ice cliffs, perhaps a mile wide between two prominent headlands. Farther in, it narrowed to a few hundred yards with a gentle snow slope leading down from the surface of the ice shelf to sea level, where a cluster of men was already waiting.

Before long we were busy with the unloading, and with continuous daylight there would be three shifts so that we could work around the clock. The Base had four Bombardier Muskeg tractors, or kegs for short; tracked vehicles which were painted a bold red. These now shuttled back and forth to the Base a mile or so to the east, pulling two or three of the heavy Maudheim sledges.

Batches of goods from the hold were hoisted by one of the ship’s derricks, swung above the deck and the rail, and lowered on to the ice beside the vessel. I was in the shore party that unloaded the cargo nets, and our position low down on the ice was not visible from the controls of the derrick. For a while one of the ship’s officers stood by the rail and watched the load going down, signalling to the derrick operator. Once a rhythm had been established he moved away, and we paid little attention to this at first. We had settled into different roles, and while someone else unhooked each full net as it arrived, I was the person who then stepped up with the empty one and hooked it on. Soon I realised that the derrick man was switching from lowering to hoisting at a slightly earlier stage each time. Once or twice we tried shouting but even if the operator could hear us he understood no English. I tried to allow for it, taking more care with my timing and then reaching higher and higher to get the net on the hook.

Something had to give, and it happened as I reached up to head-height to flip the loops of the net over the already-rising hook. They caught the hook, but so did the rope on one arm of the makeshift glove harness I had just constructed. I was less than a second from being hoisted by the neck with a loop of thin rope or, in plain English, about to be hanged.

Trying to unhook the loop or to slip off my harness or mitt could well have jammed or snagged. Seeing no sure way to avoid being hoisted I decided that it would be by the hands rather than the neck, so I leapt up and grabbed the hook which was now almost out of reach. My colleagues watched in alarm as I rose up the side of the ship, and when my head showed above the rail the derrick man began to swear in Danish. From the few English words in it I realised that he thought I was playing some game, and the angry Danish continued to flow over the side from out of sight as he lowered me back on to the ice. An officer came out to see what the fuss was and remonstrated with me while we all tried to explain. At least after that the operator gave us an extra second or so for unhooking and hooking, but the incident should have been a warning. That was not the only flaw in the overall system.

Among the last items to be unloaded were the steel roof beams for the new hut that we were to erect. These were some of the heaviest items, around two hundred pounds each, and they would come over in a small bundle looped together with a wire strop around the middle. They were not fastened other than by the natural tightening of a slipping loop, although that seemed adequate. A load had been deposited on the ice, and we were laboriously disentangling these items that took several of us just to heave them across to the Maudheims. That was when we heard an unsettling sound above us – rasping, until suddenly cut short with a twang.

We looked up to see a couple of the huge beams dangling directly above us, Damocles-style, and not balancing horizontally as they were normally sent. It was obvious what had happened. The operator, while waiting for us to clear the last load, had hoisted the next lot from the hold and parked it directly above us. The strop had not been perfectly central and the beams had begun to slip imperceptibly. This caused them to tilt, and then slip faster, until they took off and slipped rapidly through the wire loop. The beams were of several different designs and we were just lucky that these ones had flanges on the end that snagged the loop, and that the jerk had not snapped the strop. Had they been the flangeless beams, they would have slipped out of the loop and straight on to us; there would surely have been broken bones if nothing worse.

Our angry shouts brought no response so someone climbed aboard to tell the operator not to park loads above us. There was the usual problem – he spoke no English, or at least not when we had complaints to make. An officer was summoned and he passed the message on although both he and the operator made it clear that they thought we were making a lot of fuss over what was a reasonable operating procedure. From then on we kept a very wary eye upwards at all times.

Most of the time I was in the shore gang beside the boat, so at the end of one shift I hitched a lift on a keg to get my first view of the Base. With loaded Maudheims strung behind, we chugged up the snow slope out of the bay and on to the level surface of the ice shelf. It was as flat and featureless as I had been told, apart from the countless tractor tracks all heading eastward. In the distance I could see some small structures but nothing identifiable. We took about ten minutes to get there, by which time I could see that there was in fact surprisingly little to see. Most prominent were several masts carrying wires that were probably aerials, a flagpole, a skeletal tower with some meteorological instruments, and various cargo items lying where they had been dumped.

The driver, Alan Etchells, pointed to a dark line on the snow to the north and explained that it was the dump where most of the cargo was being taken. Those few cases offloaded here were just urgent or perishable items. What, I asked, about the huts?

Al pointed to what looked like a large crate on the snow. That’s the main shaft, he told me, before roaring off to the distant cargo dump.

On earlier expeditions with huts on ice shelves, people had great problems with doors becoming blocked in the short term by the drifts after high winds and in the long term by the rising snow level. Halley Bay was an established base and by now they had worked out that the solution to blocked doors was simply not to use a door, or at least not at the surface. A vertical shaft with a horizontal entrance, looking a bit like a square-sided well with a ladder vanishing down it, attracted far less drift; the main ones at Halley Bay were not even covered with a hatch.

Here at Halley Bay I knew that in addition to several small outlying buildings for the work of individual departments there were two accommodation huts. How was I to reach these places? I made for the main shaft, and in the days to come I would learn that it was the by far the most commonly used access to the two living huts. Right now, it was a mystery for me to explore.

The visible portion was four feet square and lined with plywood, with a ladder leading into the depths; mounted above it all was a pulley and rope. Like Alice in Wonderland I could see what was necessary next – so down the ladder I went. Twenty feet or so down I felt that I was getting warmer, metaphorically, as I stood beside a corner of the wooden walls of a hut.

As my eyes adjusted I could see an ice tunnel, about eight feet in diameter, leading me to a door with a huge handle of the double-acting type that actually forces the door open by an inch as well as releasing the catch. I hesitated before opening it – what if it was not the living quarters, but some laboratory with equipment that shouldn’t be disturbed? A generator shed with dangerous machinery, perhaps? Gingerly I opened it and found myself in an open space that I later learnt to call the linkpiece. To my relief someone came past at that point, and I followed him along a corridor to the dining room where smoko was still on the table. (Smoko, a snack-break mid-morning or mid-afternoon, did not imply any more smoking than the high level that went on at all other times.)

Dudley Jehan, the Base Leader for the coming year, was there and he wanted to show me where I would be sleeping. As I followed him he explained that most people slept in bunkrooms in the upper hut, where we now were. This year the numbers had risen to thirty and so he had created more accommodation by partitioning off sections of the loft in the IGY hut. Back we went to the linkpiece and out through a door opposite the one that had brought me in. Dudley led the way down a narrower tunnel floored with hard, slippery ice, a row of skis lining the wall on our left while on the other side were wooden boxes crusted with frost. Even in a place as mundane as a corridor beside a hut I couldn’t help slowing down to take in all these new sights. I had never touched skis before; would I have a pair? How easily would I learn to use them? Dudley looked around and paused for me to catch up.

The skis are numbered – there’s a list in the lounge and you can see which are yours. We leave them here so that they’re cold and ready to use. The boxes are food for immediate use. That hatch near the corner opens into the pantry, beside the kitchen, so that the cook can get easy access.

At the next corner the tunnel continued away from the hut and immediately reached a sloping Dexion¹ ladder – or should one call it a steep staircase? At the bottom was a door to another hut, and I chased after Dudley into the central corridor which ran the length of the building. Next came a short vertical ladder into what he briefly pointed out as the goodies loft. Goodies seemed to consist mainly of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, as far as I could see. The beams of the roof marked the loft into natural divisions, each high enough for standing room in a generous central zone, and we passed through several sections before coming to a partition which made a dead end.

This section was the Geology office, with a few boxes and papers there belonging to Dick Worsfold, the geologist who was out in the mountains for the summer. The plan was that I could use the right-hand side as a bunkroom, leaving a reduced office on the left. There were two disadvantages: it would be farther to go for meals or to the lounge, and there was no bed. I would either have to construct one or sleep on the floor. On the plus side, being a loft it was likely to be warmer than other areas. Also, I would have it to myself – the main bunkrooms slept two each. Overall, it seemed an excellent arrangement, but for the present all my kit was still on the ship and I had to hitch a lift back there with a tractor for a night’s sleep before my next shift.

By 1st February the unloading had been completed, and when the ice anchors had been recovered the ship drew slowly away from the ice edge. The dull weather could not suppress the thrill that pulsed through me – this was the real start of my adventure. Up till then I could at any time have turned back. It might have been embarrassing, inconvenient, or expensive, but it had been possible. Now there would be no more direct contact with the outside world until the ship returned for another brief week or so in a year’s time. There was no air link, established or even planned. Was any other workplace in the world as isolated? Even in the Antarctic, did any other base have so fleeting a relief? Together with my companions I was irrevocably committed.

The next day, Dudley called a brief meeting to set out the work programme for the next few months and to give us some essential information. Two major projects would dominate our activities: sorting the newly arrived cargo and then building a new hut.

Then came an item that surprised me: even for a base with thirty people, BAS did not provide laundry facilities. Thus Dudley had ordered a washing machine from Stanley as a private purchase. There already was one, also bought privately but in a poor state after a year or two of heavy use. We now had a newer model and also the luxury of a separate spin drier. The proposal was that we contributed thirty shillings each, unless there was anyone who didn’t want to use it during the next year. This would cover two thirds of the cost, the remaining third to be chipped in by all on Base the next year. All agreed – although if they ever did collect the second instalment, I must have been away in the field at the time.

Photo 1. Kista Dan in Halley Bay, January 1964. This ramp in the high ice cliffs of the ice shelf allowed tractors to haul the unloaded goods to the Base which was a mile inland.

Photo 2. Overall view of the Base area, probably January 1966. Taken from the meteorological tower, facing roughly south-west. Upper left is the office block, built early 1964 and now almost completely buried in the snow. The skeletal towers to the right of it carry aerial feeders to the rhombic aerials. The main shaft into the main hut is just in front of the Muskeg tractor, upper centre, and the tripod, middle right, is for lowering goods down the kitchen shaft. The well-travelled route to the upper right leads to the bay. Photo by Munro Sievwright.

Photo 3. Digging out buried stores, probably February 1964. Raising a dump to the surface was a regular task. The tall pole in the background is the flagpole, and the shorter ones support aerials. The clean new clothing shows that these men had only just arrived. Photo by Munro Sievwright.

Photo 4. Roof timbers damaged by burial of the huts, May 1964. The huts distorted as the snow around them compacted unevenly, as shown by this beam in the goodies loft of the IGY hut. For two years my bed was under similar timbers, a few yards along.

Photo 5. Crushed chimney above the IGY hut, May 1964. As the warmth of the hut melts a cavity above the roof, the weight of the snow above keeps driving downward. Behind Phil Cotton is a water-clear equivalent of a stalagmite – call it an icymite?

Photo 6. The Dexion ladder, linking the two main huts. Dai Wild heads upward to the living hut, while the IGY hut is below.

Photo 7. The goodies loft, February 1964. Goodies consisted mainly of cigarettes and pipe tobacco.

Photo 8. In the kitchen, 1964. One of the cooks, Andy Champness, takes a break. The silvery, heavy-duty tin opener fastened to the worktop behind him came in for much use. Photo by Mike Turner.

Photo 9. Mealtime in the dining room, 1965. Members of the gash team served at mealtimes, in this case Jerry Wright in yellow sweater. Photo by Munro Sievwright.

Photo 10. Smoko in the dining room, 1965. This was self-service, mid-morning and afternoon. Jeremy Bailey, standing in checked sweater, John Wilson, looking over his shoulder on the left, and Dai Wild, to the right of John, all lost their lives in a crevasse accident.

Photo 11. Table set for party night, June 1965. Party night was a time to wear suits and ties. The cooks have done well to keep some grapefruit in reasonable condition until midwinter. Photo by Tony Baker.

Photo 12. Penguin egg for sandwiches, June 1964. We had a film show on Saturday nights and after parties. Sandwiches were sometimes made for the interval, and boiled penguin eggs were a popular filling in the brief period when they were available.

Photo 13. Lounge fireplace, 1965. A typical evening scene, as people relaxed after dinner. Warming feet on the stove was popular but we would soon smell burning rubber. In the background is the record player and collection of vinyl LPs. The red tin can on the record cabinet is probably one of the many drip-cans.

Photo 14. Our film projector, 1964. Ian Buckler stands in the dining room, preparing to project the film through a hatch in the wall and into the lounge.

Photo 15. Kista, our cat, 1965. Brian Armstrong was one of those in the feeding rota for her. The warmth of the surround to the lounge fire made it one of her favourite places.

Photo 16. In the darkroom, 1965. Photography was a popular hobby; here Brian Armstrong is printing photographs. Photo by Tony Baker.

There were several lists that we had to check. The most immediate of these was the gash rota, and this introduced the newcomers to one of the new words of the local dialect. Gash, an established naval term, had many uses here but all with the same theme. Used for an item, it could mean something like surplus, worn-out or unusable. Concerning people, gash duties were housekeeping chores like sweeping and mopping floors, serving at meals, washing up, and filling the water tanks. These would be done by the gash team for that day, which consisted of the gash-men, and we would say that they were on gash. A gash hand meant a General Assistant, and there were several people with that job title at other bases but none at Halley Bay in 1964.

The first task on Monday was to bring in the remaining perishable items. This, I soon found, meant mainly liquor. Most people had bought cases of this or that from the Chief Steward before the boat departed, and these were now lowered down the kitchen shaft and hoisted into the goodies loft. The route to my bunkroom became a narrow corridor between the stacks of cases rising to the roof.

Next, our work party began by sorting dumps. These, we were to learn, were the basic way of storing bulk materials. They were laid out in lines from north to south (across the prevailing wind), and a quarter of a mile or so away from the Base in a generally upwind direction. The principle was that anything left on the surface would soon become buried, whatever we did, so the best thing was to minimise the depth of burial by keeping them well away from other structures such as huts, shafts and vehicles. A flag at each end of the line allowed them to be found even when they were buried and the surface had smoothed over.

This led to the practice of raising a dump, something that was usually done several times per year. If left for a full year, as was done with a few rarely-used dumps, the boxes would be several feet down which meant an awful lot of digging. Whatever the depth, we would work our way along the dump, digging the boxes out and placing them on the surface in a new line a few paces upwind and with new marker flags.

First to be tackled on this day was the general dump that had just been offloaded in random order. Starting at one end, we dug free each of the half-covered boxes, hauled them to the surface and turned them to make the code number visible. They would then be identified and claimed by the appropriate department, who would either move them to a hut or to a separate dump for that class of item.

As we worked on the dumps, we began to appreciate that there was more to the scenery around us than the blank white horizon that was our first impression. To the west, the tops of passing icebergs were often visible above the level of the ice shelf as they drifted southward. A few had run aground on local high areas of the seabed, and we began to recognise these as semipermanent features of our landscape. From what we heard, they seemed to last several years before breaking up or working loose and moving on. The exact proportion of each berg visible from the surface of the ice shelf at any time depended in part on the state of the air and the degree of refraction. On days when the weather was cold and still, bergs that were normally invisible could rise eerily into view and later subside back below the edge of the ice shelf a mile away.

A dip in the snowy horizon to the west showed where Halley Bay was; a couple of miles to the south, but completely out of sight, was the similar but smaller Emperor Bay where a penguin colony was known to gather each winter. The tip of the headland between the two bays had the rather alarming name of Penguin Leap; near to it was a metal reflector on a stand, for calibrating the wind-finding radar.

A few miles to the north of Halley Bay there were three more clefts in the ice shelf, known as the Chippantodd Creeks or Chips for short. (The name came from the nicknames of two of the first people to visit the place.) These inlets were much smaller than Halley or Emperor Bays, with steeper slopes, and thus less useful as links between the sea ice and the surface of the ice shelf.

The next visible feature to the north-east from the Base was a break in the level surface of the ice shelf itself, a low angular ridge some six or seven miles away. The official name for this feature was the MacDonald Ice Rumples but we knew it as the Gin Bottle, the popular explanation being that it looked like a bottle on its side. This marked a rise in the seabed, where the ice shelf was grounded, and because of the surrounding crevasses we were warned not to travel there unless it was a well-arranged excursion.

With so many references here and later to crevasses, it’s worth a brief digression on their general nature. Ice can flow, slowly, forming glaciers or ice sheets as it moves downhill. Where some obstacle distorts it more abruptly (such as a rise in the rock surface, deep below) it cannot flow fast enough to match this and so it breaks, forming a crevasse. The crevasse is then carried along, with the flowing ice, and from time to time there can be further movement of the fracture with sudden widening or narrowing. In between bursts of movement, windblown snow starts to adhere to the sides at the top, forming a cornice (like an overhanging shelf). Before long, cornices will meet in the middle and the crevasse will have a bridge. Depending on factors such as age and recent weather, bridges can be thick or thin, solid or precarious. Warm weather can soften the snow so that they sag and are easily seen; after a blow, the drift will often have smoothed them off to complete invisibility. Snow can fall into a crevasse, either windblown if it is open or when a bridge collapses because of warm weather or the movement of the glacier, and this can form a bridge part-way down. In the event of an accident such bridges can break the fall but they will be of unknown strength and there is always the danger that they too might suddenly collapse.

When examined closely, the attachment of the bridge to the wall of the crevasse often seemed quite patchy, giving a line of weakness that we called an edge-crack. Sometimes these seemed astonishingly flimsy, bearing in mind that they were all that held up the weight of a substantial bridge.

Fractures less than about a foot in width are likely to be called cracks. Although someone on foot could step into one and break a leg, or