Dec 12 1976
From The Space Library
12-20 December: "One of the most important ore-bearing structures in the world" might prove to be located in an Antarctica site known as the Enchanted Valley, the New York Times reported, when a U.S. Geological Survey party of six-including two women-had completed their study of the formation after an airlift to the site from the McMurdo Sound station. The body of rock in the Pensacola Mts., first reached by explorers in 1957 and first studied in the 1965-66 season, was a layered structure produced by eruptions from earth's interior and "strikingly similar" to productive formations elsewhere in the world, such as the Bushveld complex of S. Africa, the Stillwater formation of Montana, and the Sudbury region of Ontario. A Soviet party in the Shackleton Range to the northeast, a similar area, reported findings which the leader of the USES group, Dr. Arthur B. Ford, hoped to visit by air. Dr. Edward S. Grew of UCLA, who had spent the Antarctic winter at the Soviet Molodezhnaya base, had been working with the Russians from a temporary camp in the Lambert Glacier, near which "a mountain of iron" was reported recently.
Meanwhile, a Natl. Science Foundation project that aimed at drilling a hole through the Ross Ice Shelf was proceeding with the participation of 10 nations, seeking to explore the depths below the ice for data on the Antarctic bottom water, indirectly responsible for much of the world's oceanic food, and to learn whether the ice sheet might eventually slip into the sea, raising global sea levels by as much as 10 meters. Countries participating with the U.S. in the Ross Ice Shelf Project (RISP) were Australia, Britain, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Soviet Union, Switzerland, and West Germany. The NYT commented editorially that the Antarctic continent posed a number of scientific problems still unanswered in the age of space that had seen visits to and returns from the moon; close photographs of the moon and planets; and regular reports by man-made instruments on the surfaces of Mars and Venus. The RISP-an example of "continued, steady, quiet international cooperation" in Antarctic research-was "one of the great success stories of the post-1945 world," encountering temporary setbacks that would be overcome in time as were those of the space program, the NYT added. (NYT, 12 Dec 76, 1-1; 19 Dec 76, 26; 20 Dec 76, A-22)
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