Frozen in Time

AuthorHouse

Contents

Preface...................................................................xiAcknowledgments...........................................................xiiiChilean Antarctic Bases — 1961-2....................................xivDeception Island, South Shetland Islands — 1829.....................xvI Return to the Highlands.................................................1II The Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960...................................7III Preparations ... And Second Thoughts..................................23IV Destination: Santiago..................................................35V Punta Arenas, Chile: Gateway to Antarctica..............................45VI The Shrieking Sixties: Crossing the Drake Passage......................63VII Nature's Deception....................................................79VIII Base General Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme.............................89IX Unbridled Greed, Horrific Consequences.................................99X Death Stalks The Expedition.............................................115XI In Death's Grip........................................................155XII Rescued! But Who Can Be Trusted?......................................183XIII Return to Civilization...............................................201Epilogue..................................................................215

Chapter One

Susan instinctively stomped her foot into the car's floorboard, put her hands up in front of her face, and yelled at her husband, "Watch out! You're going to hit him!"

Ted Stone, off in his own world, steered hard-left, narrowly missing the man pedaling his racing cycle toward them on the right side of the roadway. "Dammit! Why wasn't he going with traffic ... on the other side of the road?" Ted pounded the steering wheel with his right hand and cursed again under his breath, berating himself for almost causing what could have been a fatal accident.

As they continued up the road, Ted reflexibly reached down and rubbed the ugly six-inch scar on his left leg. Even the passage of more than four decades had not erased the outward signs of the tragedy that befell him that fateful day in February, 1962 while he was working on the North Antarctic Peninsula.

The trees on either side of the road had grown significantly during the intervening years. Certainly the brush and hedges had been through countless cycles of death and replanting. But by squinting in the late afternoon sun, Ted was able to project back to a time when, as a graduate student, he made the trip daily from his apartment on Madison's Lake Monona to The Highlands west of the city.

The trip was easier this afternoon than it had been in those days. Then, his 1959 Saab 93F, with its 3-cylinder, 2-cycle engine, the type that required a quart of oil to be added to the gas tank at every fill-up, labored up South Highlands Avenue, its exhaust pipe spewing smoke and emitting the distinct putt-putt sound of a lawn mower. Today, their large rental car slid effortlessly past the back entrance of Brittingham House, former headquarters for the University's Geophysical and Polar Research Center and now home to the president of the University.

In his college days, the dilapidated carriage house at the bottom of the hill behind the mansion was occupied by one of Professor Robert Meyer's graduate students and his family. On weekends, the student's old black Volvo, always in need of a valve job, could be found parked in front of the garage with its hood up, the student's legs projecting from the engine compartment while his ever-present black Labrador lay watching from the dirt under a century-old oak.

Not this Saturday. The carriage house was in pristine condition while the grounds were impeccably groomed, the lush, blue-green grass close-cut by the University's maintenance staff. The trees were trimmed as well. Ted was not sure when the Center vacated the mansion and moved to the main campus in Madison. No matter. The estate, an elegant Georgian-style house built in 1916, had been restored to its former glory and currently was used for official and charitable community events hosted by the president.

The scene was one of total order and serenity, a place where life for him had once moved forward in increments of time measured by weeks that merged into months, and finally, into semesters that cumulated in the award of degrees. It was a place where he had taken life for granted, with the knowledge that tomorrow would be much like today, which, in turn, would be a lot like yesterday. Worries that there might be no 'tomorrow' never entered his mind, until that trip to the bottom of the world. At the least, he thought, no one here is dependent on someone else for survival.

"It's hard to believe that more than forty years have passed since we last were up here, isn't it?" Susan asked rhetorically, brushing stray hairs from her forehead and taking a sip from a small bottle of water.

Yes, thought Ted, only half-hearing what she had said. His mind still was thousands of miles away, in Antarctica, where he almost had lost his life decades earlier and where troubling questions surrounding events of the distant past still haunted him on many a sleepless night. "Huh? What did you say?"

"I said, it's hard to believe that more than forty years have passed!"

"I'm sorry. I was just thinking about the people we knew then ... the people I worked with at the Center ... the people I traveled with to Antarctica. Where are they now? What happened to them? And what really happened that austral summer on the Ice?"

Some of his colleagues, unfortunately, had died, including the man who was his first major professor, Professor George Woollard, the Professor George Woollard—world-renowned expert in gravimetry and determinations of the geoid. When Professor Woollard heard that Ted was heading to Antarctica to help a graduate student in the Department of Geology collect rock and fossil samples for that student's doctoral thesis, he insisted—the professor maintained that he used 'gentle persuasion'—Ted take a gravimeter with him. Because there were few gravity measurements at the end of the North Antarctic Peninsula, a new gravity network needed to be established there. The data were needed to assist the University in developing an accurate representation of the Earth's gravity field.

The trip to The Highlands this afternoon was simply for purposes of seeing how the area had changed and of rekindling old memories, a mere side trip following a visit with some of Susan's former classmates who still lived in Middleton. Now, having seen Brittingham House and with their curiosity satisfied, Ted and Susan drove back to Madison's Edgewater Hotel, saying little. His mind still was almost totally focused on the autumn of 1961 and the months leading up to his departure for the Frozen Continent.

The Brittingham Estate brought back a torrent of memories of the four University of Wisconsin scientists who traveled to one of the most desolate regions on Earth. Memories of the two graduate students in geology, Grant Morris, a Canadian, and David Green, who was born and raised in Iowa; their major professor, Ethan O'Mhaille, PhD, a recognized expert in clastic sedimentology and earth history; and Ted,...