Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Gilbert Dewart, PhD conducted on March 26, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

Transcription

1 Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Gilbert Dewart, PhD conducted on March 26, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Today is the 26th of March, I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with Dr. Gilbert Dewart about his experiences in Antarctica. Good afternoon, Dr. Dewart, and thanks so much for talking with me. Good afternoon, Dian. I'm happy to be here. DOB: Tell me briefly a little about your background. I'm interested in where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and in particular any threads that might suggest you would end up in a place like Antarctica. Well, I guess we could go back to the beginning. I grew up in New York City originally. My family was from both Pennsylvania, coal mining areas of Pennsylvania and coal mining areas of Kentucky, so we're kind of Appalachian people once removed. I simply remember from my earliest visits down to the mountain areas was my interest in the earth, in rocks. I remember when I was a little kid my grandfather, who was then a mine surveyor, took me down into a coal mine. And it was just a fantastic experience to be down there and to be looking at all this black, gleaming coal all around me and hear these guys working off in the distance, you know, strange sounds, and here we were underneath of a mountain. I think that's really what hooked me on trying to learn about the earth. In any event, I was sure I was going to be either a geologist or an engineer, something related to that line of work. And so I was very much interested in taking science courses and learning as much as I could about the earth, and I was very much interested in geography. Even when I was a little kid, I used to pore over atlases and look at maps of places. And I do remember Antarctica not that it caused me to want to go there, but I do remember that it's just simply the shape of that continent down at the bottom of the globe being intriguing to me. But there were other places, in fact New Zealand was very intriguing to me. There was something about the shape of those islands. And again it was kind of ironic that later I would spend so much time in New Zealand, when I was a child I was fascinated by this little funny- shaped island down there. In any event, I ended up in science and I attended MIT and got my bachelor's degree and my master's degree there in geophysics. As I say, when I first started my undergraduate work, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into engineering or into something that had to do with geology, and eventually I was directed towards geophysics, especially I was interested in seismology and the study of earthquakes.

2 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, And that's really how I got started, and I remained in that field, although eventually when I got to the Antarctic, I got moved over a little bit into the ice ages and glacial geology and so forth. But basically I remained a seismologist as far as my basic training was concerned. In any event, I worked on several projects as an undergraduate, and my graduate thesis had to do with seismology. And then I went in the Army after I had gotten my master's degree, and I ended up in actually these were the early days of ground-to-air missiles, and I ended up in anti-aircraft artillery, which was then shifting over into the missile field. DOB: When would that've been? This was in the mid-'50s. This was the Korean era and so I kind of overlapped the Korean War era, although I actually never left this country, but I did spend a lot of time down in the New Mexico desert testing missiles. So that was where I spent a lot of my Army time. I was in the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. I went in as a private and came out as a corporal, so I didn't make any great strides in a military career. In turned out later, interestingly enough, that the canyon where we were testing these anti-aircraft missiles in New Mexico was just about a mile from the atomic test site, and I didn't realize this until much later. I simply had the curiosity, where were we? Where was this canyon? I think I could find it on a topographic map, and I did, and it was just over the hill from the original Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was set off. Downwind from it, too, I might add. In any event, this was also kind of linked into my later career because I later got involved in seismic investigation of how to detect underground nuclear explosions. So again, some of the threads kind of run through my life like that. The things that eventually snowball and we look back and say, hey, there's a link back there. DOB: So how did you find out about opportunities in Antarctica? Yes, well this was while I was still in the Army, and I think I was probably getting the Transactions of the AGU, I think is probably where I saw it because I remember I was receiving that journal at that time. And there was simply an announcement. They needed people in certain fields to go to the Antarctic, and they said, "Get in touch with Albert P. Crary," and it was directed towards people with a background in geophysics. So I did, and he sent me an application form and I filled it out, and the first thing I knew I was accepted. It just went just like that. One thing led to another. But unfortunately I was still in the Army, and so I made a request for an early release. By that time the war was over and there wasn't any great presumable need for my

3 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, services with the military at that stage, and so they let me out a couple of months early so I could make the deadline to prepare to go to the Antarctic. So that was really how I got involved in the IGY program. I heard about it. I was interested in it. I really hadn't made up my mind about what I was going to do in my career at that time. I'd been looking at some other possibilities. One of them, again it's kind of interesting in that one of the oil companies was working in Southeast Asia they were looking for oil in Indonesia and that kind of intrigued me a little bit. I was kind of interested in that part of the world and the tropics and so forth, and then at the last minute they decided they were going to shift to Libya, which at that time, of course, was a U.S. ally. In fact, I later did go through Libya on my way to various places. But all of a sudden I'd already spent two years in the desert in New Mexico, and the thought of going back to the desert again in North Africa wasn't all that appealing. And besides, there was something about Antarctica. There was something about the mystery of this continent, this strange place that nobody knew very much about, and this would be the first really big worldwide type of scientific investigation of this unknown continent, and that really drew me in. DOB: It didn't take you long to decide? Yes, I gave up the idea of a permanent career with an oil company, for example, for something I knew would just be a one-shot affair it would be over in a couple of years but I really couldn't resist it. I just had to go. DOB: Where did you get prepared and what did you do to get prepared to go and live in Antarctica and work there? Well, as I mentioned, I got out of the Army a little bit early, and I was sent to Southern California because the job I was enlisted for was to set up a seismograph station, and this would be the first of a network of permanent seismograph stations. Now there had been a few instances in which people had set up seismographs in the Antarctic previously, but these were for limited periods of time and just at single locations. Now we were going to have a network. The major bases being established by the major participants in the IGY would have seismograph stations there. Mine would be at a particular location and I would be I would establish it, I would set up the station, I would maintain it during the first year and then simply turn it over to somebody else, and then it would continue from then on so we would have continuous earthquake coverage of the Antarctic. Well, for this, there was a new type of seismograph had just been developed, and it was developed by Frank Press and Maurice Ewing Press at Caltech's seismological lab at the California Institute of Technology and Maurice Ewing at the Lamont-Doherty

4 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, Observatory at Columbia University. So this instrument was specially designed it was what we call a long-period instrument. It was designed specifically to pick up long waves from earthquakes, what we call surface waves, and they travel through the surface areas of the earth, and by analyzing them you can find out kind of what is the outer layering of the earth what is the structure of the outer part of the earth. This is one of the things we especially wanted to know about Antarctica. We wanted to know about its continental characteristics. So this was a natural place to put these instruments, and our particular station was located so that it was across the continent from a highly active seismic area, and so we could expect to get a lot of earthquakes that would send waves right across Antarctica to us. And since they would be covering that path, we could analyze the path they had covered, and this would give us some idea of the structure of Antarctica. Well, it turned out that this site was a place that at that time they called the Knox Coast, and so we thought it was going to be called Knox Station. It turned out it was later called Wilkes Station, and it really wasn't on the Knox Coast, but that was what we were first told. As I remember, some of the first packages that we addressed to be sent to the Antarctic or to be carried to the Antarctic had Knox written on them because nobody really knew where they were going. We didn't even know where our station was going to be at that stage, except that we knew it was on a certain sector of the Antarctic. So my station then would be the first seismograph station in this particular part of Antarctica, and it would be the beginning of a continuing recording of earthquakes in that area. And especially for this type of instrument, it would be recording particular types of waves that are especially useful in determining what is the structure of the earth the outer part of the earth. In other words, trying to find out to what extent is Antarctica really a continent. That was one of the big questions still at that time. Is this a bunch of islands? Is it a real continent like North America and Asia? Or is it something kind of in between? Is it just a great big pile of ice with a few islands under it? We didn't really know at that time. So this was kind of basic research, just trying to basically find out some very, very fundamental geological questions. DOB: So you knew before you went that that's where you would be going? Yes. As soon as I got out of the Army I went to Washington, D.C., and I saw Dr. Crary there and we talked over what the project is all about and what I would be expected to do and so forth. DOB: Were there counterpart stations then on the other side? Yes. There were other stations set up at other American bases, and other countries also had comparable instruments. Not the same ones. As far as I know we were the only ones that had the Press-Ewing instrument, but the Russians had a long-period instrument

5 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, also, for example, for the same type of research. So this was part of a network of stations that would give us coverage of the Antarctic for answering some basic questions. Not so much just for picking up earthquakes as for looking at it from a point of view of long-term geological research. DOB: I want to come back to that. But let me back up for just a minute. I'm interested in how you got there, to Antarctica, and what it was like. Were you on a ship or a plane? We went down by ship. DOB: Which one? It was the Northwind, and I remember it very well. I remember that day because I had to go to several different sites to talk to people who were involved in my program. The last one was, of course, at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and then I left from there now at that time my family was living in Northern California, so I was able to make a stop at home, say goodbye in San Francisco, and take off. In this case I was carrying quite a bit of material with me, and so I took a train I remember I took the Shasta Daylight I took a train from San Francisco up to Seattle, and that's where I boarded my ship. I met Carl Eklund, who was going to be the station leader at Wilkes Station which was the station when they finally decided on the name of it, and we boarded the Northwind in Seattle. That's a Coast Guard icebreaker which was just absolutely crammed and packed with people and equipment of all kinds. Now of course a lot of the equipment was going by cargo vessel, but even so they put just about everything they could on the Northwind also. And there were many people aboard, scientists and Navy people and just about anything they could get on the few ships that were going down there, so it was very, very cramped quarters. I remember I was in a triple-decker bunk just over the drive shaft of the screws of the vessel, and you could hear this grinding going on all the time all night long. You got used to it after a while, but it was very, very noisy. Very, very cramped, very, very noisy, very, very stuffy, very hard to get out. I was in the upper deck, so every time I woke up suddenly, I had to be careful I didn't bang my head against the overhead just a few inches above my head. DOB: So did it get noisier as you got farther south? Yes. It got worse and worse, yes. But again, I was used to military life by this time so this didn't bother me all that much. I was just coming out of the Army and I was used to cramped quarters. And in particular the work that I'd been doing did put me into small isolated stations where we had radar sites or missile firing installations or testing

6 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, facilities. So this was not too different from what I had been doing for the last few years. I wasn't looking forward to any particular problems of spending a lot of time in an isolated place with a few people that you had to learn how to get used to. I don't know whether that had anything to do with my being chosen or not. To what extent my background counted of course I did have a background in geophysics. I was used to this type of life. Maybe that's how I got chosen, because I have no idea of what the criteria were that caused me to be chosen for the expedition. DOB: Were you aware of psychological testing going on? Yes. DOB: Did you have some? Yes, we certainly did. DOB: Well, tell me about the ocean as you got farther and farther south on an icebreaker over the screws. Well, of course you've got to remember, an icebreaker is not built for stability on the open ocean, and it's kind of a bathtub-shaped vessel. A couple of days after we came out through the Straits of Juan de Fuca up in Puget Sound into the North Pacific, we hit our first big storm a big North Pacific storm and it rocked and it rolled from side to side. Now I had never spent any significant time at sea before that at all. So this was again really my first introduction to being on a vessel at sea for any length of time, and I got used to it very fast. At first I felt a little bit uneasy, but I never really got sick. And after a while, it became just a part of life. And in fact I remember actually enjoying it after a while, you know, kind of being rocked rocked in the cradle of the deep, as they say. It lulled me to sleep at night. In fact [laughs] I wish I could sleep as easily these days as I could then. DOB: Well, what happens when you wake up and look at icebergs and then you have to start breaking that ice? Well, yes. Of course we headed south across the equator where we had a great big ceremony, you know, for first-timers. And then we got to New Zealand, spent a little time in New Zealand, and picked up some Australians who we were going to be taking south for transfer to another vessel to be taken to their station. So we had an even larger, and jollier crew I might add, once we left New Zealand, and then we started heading south.

7 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, And again, all this was totally new to me. The tropical Pacific was new to me, New Zealand was new to me, but again New Zealand was a little archipelago that I'd had my eyes on since I was a child, and yet just by chance, I didn't plan it that way, but here I was in New Zealand, and it was a great thrill to be on these islands. I used to have fantasies about them. I would have imaginary people living in New Zealand when I was a little kid, and here I was myself really there. It was just a pinch me, you know, type of thing. So anyway, then we started heading south. Then we hit the Antarctic Convergence and we started seeing lots of life lots of life on the ocean. And then we hit the ice. And again, this was totally new to me. I'd never seen sea ice before, and I'd never seen icebergs before, and it was just fantastic. Just amazing to see these things that you'd seen pictures of or you've read about and to actually be there to see them. And then you started seeing penguins and started seeing the various sea birds. Of course we were followed by albatrosses across the Pacific, but now we saw the skuas and the snow petrels and all these fantastically beautiful birds, and we started seeing whales. Once in a while we'd see whales surfacing and so on, and then the seals. Of course I'm not a biologist, I'm a hard rock type of person, but this was just so amazing. I can still remember to this day, I remember the first time seeing that iceblink over in the distance beyond the horizon and see the reflection off of the ice, and then everybody comes up to the bow of the ship and looks over, and then you see the ice coming into view. It's just a revelation. It's just fantastic. DOB: What does it look like, this ice? Well, white. The dark blue water and then the white ice on top of it and the light blue sky overhead. And it's just so fantastically beautiful and pure, and no sign of humanity we are the only living things around there that are human you know, the only human beings. Here's this huge human-made machine, this clanking icebreaker breaking through it, but it's completely surrounded by nature on all sides for thousands of miles. And just that idea of isolation, of being in this totally new place, was amazing. And as I say, it was one of the most revelatory and exciting episodes in my life. DOB: Where did you go first? Well, we went into the Ross Sea, and one of the things we had to do, we had to go to McMurdo Sound and pick up some equipment there. And then we were going to take part in the establishment of another base, Hallett Station, near Cape Hallett, near Cape Adare near the entrance to the Ross Sea. Well, it turned out that we had some problems in the ice, and we got caught in a big storm and the Northwind suffered some damage. So we went back to McMurdo Sound, we had another trip back to McMurdo Sound, and there we were transferred to the Glacier, the U.S. Navy icebreaker Glacier, which was a

8 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, larger icebreaker. And we went with the Arneb, the attack cargo vessel, then to Cape Hallett and helped to establish that station. DOB: It must be a little scary to be on a ship that's been damaged in a storm. Yes indeed. It was very interesting and I remember it was kind of a joke because we did have some journalists aboard, and they were sending back some very alarming Titanic stories, we called them, about icebergs about to crush us and so on. But it was dramatic and it was interesting. Here we were held in the grip of the ice with an iceberg heading for us and this type of thing. But it came out okay. As I say, we got out of there, but the vessel did need repairs so we had to go back. But this enabled us to go to McMurdo twice and had a chance to stop and see some of the old huts of course now they've been preserved as historical sites, but they were in very dilapidated condition at that time the huts of the old explorers from the heroic age, the Scott and Shackleton huts. So we got a chance to visit those and we went down to Scott Base and met Sir Edmund Hillary, for example. So this was interesting. We met the Brits and the New Zealanders and all these different people that were down at McMurdo at that time. So that was also very interesting and very exciting. DOB: This would've been in late 1956? Yes. We were down there during the summer of ' Of course we were there to get it ready for the IGY, which would start in the middle of 1957 and carry over to the end of So we had to get everything done. We had to be on the ice, establish our station, be ready to start our scientific programs by the middle of the next year. So we were getting afraid. Now this was kind of delaying us a little bit with this moving back and forth and having to help set up Hallett and so forth, and of course we had no idea what we'd encounter when we got over to our sector you know, how long it would take us to get in. We already had our baptism by ice, and I remember we were quite concerned about the time factor and getting our program started on time. DOB: And how tough was it? Did you run into trouble over on the Knox Coast? It turned out we did, yes indeed. Once we got over there, we started heading in to the coast, and we called this now this name has recurred several times, and I'm sure everybody uses it when they encounter a lot of icebergs, but we called it iceberg alley. And we went down this lane surrounded by icebergs, and we made several sorties or several attempts to get in to our area, the Windmill Islands, this little group of islands and little rocky peninsulas jutting out from Wilkes Land from this area that Charles Wilkes had passed back in the 1840s with the American exploring expedition. So we were heading for this old landfall you know, this was American turf down there. This is where the Americans had been before, albeit a long time before, and the Russians were

9 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, not very far away from us, of course. They were over at Mirnyy. Only a couple hundred miles away the Russians were setting up their major base. In any event, one of the things that surprised us when we got there was the Russians had already been there ahead of us. They had stopped by briefly and had left a little note in a bottle type of thing on the shore. But in any event, just getting there was very, very difficult. Later when I talked to the Russians about it, they had had the same problem. They had a lot of iceberg and sea ice problems. But again, we had this big powerful Glacier icebreaker, and we made several attempts. We got into ice we simply couldn't penetrate or at least not in any reasonable amount of time, so we went around and came back and tried another approach. So we made several attempts to get in, and we finally got through. But again, it was very, very thick ice and a lot of icebergs. And we were starting to get worried, not that we were in any particular danger so much, but that we were going to be late, that we were going to be delayed getting in there, if we got in at all. We didn't know if we could even get in at all. DOB: Well, in fact the site was not chosen until very late in January. Offloading began on February 1, according to the reports, and construction was completed and the base dedicated and the ships left by the 16th of February, just hardly more than two weeks. Yes. Obviously it was completed officially, but there was an awful lot to be done still after that. Things were laid down on the beachhead, and we were shifting stuff around for a long time after that. DOB: Well, tell me about those But the buildings were constructed and the Seabees did a marvelous job. The mobile battalion going in there did a fantastic job of getting those things done in a short period of time. DOB: What was your responsibility during those hectic few weeks? Well, probably common laborer. First of all, we had to get the station set up, and we had to be ready for the winter and we had to be dug in. So I couldn't really start on establishing my seismograph station until the base got completed. So we had to pitch in, you know, it was an all-hands type of operation, and whatever we could do, the civilian scientists who were working there, to facilitate and speed up that operation was really necessary. But as I say, it went by very, very fast and they did such a good job and they did it so fast and everybody worked together on it, that we did get to work on our scientific projects very, very soon. So it really was remarkable that we got that thing going.

10 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, DOB: Well, Wilkes Station is located in one of the few places in Antarctica that's actually outside the Antarctic Circle. Yes. DOB: And I believe Wilkes Station is just about on it. Yes. The station itself is just outside of the circle. Right. DOB: And photographs indicate that even in winter there was relatively little snow there, and in the summertime there's bare ground and open water, temperatures were fairly warm, about -24 to about 41 or so, no crevasses anywhere nearby. It sounds like it might've been a fairly cushy spot in Antarctica to have a polar adventure. And my question is, was it? And what were the primary natural hazards at Wilkes? It was a pretty nice place if you didn't go looking for trouble, but unfortunately our job was to look for trouble, so we went to find the crevasses. It was an easy walk up the ramp to the ice sheet behind the station, except that during the wintertime the very fact that the ice did melt meant that there were deep gullies, and some of these gullies were flowing underneath of the snow cover. So whereas we didn't have crevasses there, you could find yourself falling down into a snow gully and be carried off by the raging torrent. So that was one of the things we had to look out for. Another thing was that we did have very violent storms that would come up very strong blizzards. Again, we were subject to the usual drainage winds, the katabatic winds which come down off the continent. But also, since we were on the shore, we were subject to cyclonic storms coming along the coast, and these would bring very strong blizzard conditions and sometimes some of the most fantastic drops in pressure. Now I hadn't had all that much experience in meteorology, although I had had some exposure to it, but some of the people there who had worked under fairly extreme weather conditions before like Rudi Honkala had worked on top of Mt. Washington, a notorious place in New England for very, very severe weather showed me after one of our blizzards the barometric pressure, the barograph record, and it showed a vertical drop. In other words, the pressure would be going along and all of a sudden the bottom would drop out from under the pressure when the storm arrived. But you could see it. You could see it coming. You'd see all the snow coming up, just rising up over the ice cap, and then you could see it coming towards you and coming towards you, and then it would hit you at about eighty miles an hour, and all of a sudden everything would be covered by blowing snow. So we did have very, very strong winds, but then again, if you look at the average winds there, they certainly don't compare with places like Commonwealth Bay further along the

11 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, coast, Home of the Blizzard-type places, where you get constant winds. wind did come, it was very, very strong. But when the So we'd get periods of beautiful, dry, warm days, very, very still, and then a big storm would come up, and we would just be immersed in snow. And then we'd get great big drifts you know, we had put the buildings in, and again, we really didn't know what type of conditions we would get there, and it turned out that we wished we had put in some tunnels between the buildings, because it turned out that the drifts would form in just the wrong places, in other words just the places where they would block passage from one building to another. So we didn't get very much of a fall of snow there, but we'd get all this snow blown down from the interior, and it would pretty well cover the base, mainly because the base acted as a block to the winds and so that's where it would be deposited. So we did have quite a bit of snow shoveling. We would be digging out for quite a long time after every one of these blizzards. DOB: How often did you get them? Well, during the wintertime, every few weeks we'd have a major storm coming in. But again, as I say, on the average we'd have an awful lot of very calm days, extremely calm days, and then a storm would come in and you'd have blowing snow, and then we'd come out and then we'd have to spend a couple of days digging ourselves out. DOB: Did you ever get caught away from safety during such a storm? Well, very early, safety was emphasized. And of course here we had our station scientific leader, Carl Eklund, who had been in the Antarctic before. He'd been down there with Byrd during the 1940 expedition, and he was well aware of these types of conditions. So we had lifelines set up, and we did have ropes connecting the buildings, and we had an outer perimeter so that if you wandered out there, you would know you were getting out into a dangerous area. So that was pretty well laid out. We had the lifelines out there, and you couldn't very well miss what was the outer limits of the base. And then again, when the spring came we weren't in a position to be able to put in any tunnels before that but eventually we did get around to putting in kind of little breezeways you might say, or blizzardways, between the buildings. DOB: Why weren't those tunnels built in the first place? Did you run out of time? Well, again, yes, we were in a tremendous rush and it didn't seem to be a major problem at that time. We just had a lot of other things on our mind as far as that goes. We didn't realize that we'd have a bunch of snow put between the buildings that we'd have to get rid of.

12 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, DOB: Did you have a winter night at Wilkes? Well, it's right on the edge. It's right on the circle, so you get one day of the year in which the sun comes right down to the horizon and then circles all the way around. And then in the middle of winter, you have one day of the year in which it just pokes up above the horizon and then goes back down again, and then you don't see it for twenty-three-and-a-half hours. So we were at that place where you have one white night and one long night essentially at that astronomical location. But it did get very, very dark. Now again, we didn't have the long months of total darkness that you get at some of the further south stations in the interior. Of course one thing about the Antarctic that softens the impact of the darkness a little bit is that because of your location, of course you have these months and months of darkness, or near darkness as in our case, but also the sun is not very far away. It's just behind the curve of the earth, so you get long twilights and that tends to make up for it. You don't see the sun, but it doesn't get totally black. So this alleviates it a little bit. But again, as I would say, we didn't have the severe situation of the light deficit type of psychological situation perhaps that you would at stations where you were underground or under snow throughout much of the year. In fact I seldom missed a day in which I didn't go outside. I used to go out and run with some of the dogs. We had a dog team there, and a couple of my favorites there was one dog or a couple of them that were my favorites and we would just go out and run, just for exercise, run around the base. And I'd run along and the dog and I would just go out there and run for a couple of miles and come back again. And as I say, unless there was a blizzard going on, even in the middle of winter there was enough twilight if the sun wasn't up. I probably wouldn't have time to do it when the sun was actually up, but there was enough twilight to be able to run around the base in that kind of half darkness. DOB: Carl Eklund, the scientific leader at Wilkes, wrote that "From the beginning," and this is a quote, "our men claimed Wilkes as the number one station in Antarctica." Do you agree with that statement? And to what do you attribute the overall truth of it, if you do? Well, I would hate to make any invidious comparisons. I'm sure everybody thought that their station was the number one station. I do know that we had very high morale. It was a very congenial group of people, and the individuals got along for the most part on an individual basis pretty well, and the civilians vis-a-vis the Navy people in general got along very well.

13 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, And as I say, I think morale was high. Partly this was due to Carl Eklund himself. He was a very good leader. He was a very easygoing, lenient kind of guy who, when a decision really had to be made and the law had to be laid down, he didn't hesitate to do it. But he was a type of person who would give you a lot of leeway and didn't try to interfere in the projects. His goal was to make sure that all the science was done and that was what he was there to facilitate. He would get rid of any obstructions or make things as easy for the scientists as possible. He was there as the scientific leader, and he wanted to see that the science was done, and he would do anything that was necessary to help our programs along. And that's what we were there for, obviously, to carry out our projects, to get the program under way, to make sure that it worked. And we knew we could count on him, and we knew that we could count on the Navy people to support us because they were very well versed in what their goal was, which was to help us out, to get our program off the ground and keep things going. And there were no real fights again, I can't speak for other stations, but as far as personality problems are concerned, when you have a very small group which is held together in a very small area, obviously there can be interpersonal friction. And again, maybe we were simply fortunate in the sense that we didn't have any major problems. Of course, obviously you have the occasional bit of ill temper or friction between individuals sometimes occurs, but it was something we got over very easily. In other words there were no grudges. There were no long-term feuds or grudges or anything of that nature. So aside from, as I say, the usual type of thing you would expect when you have a group of people pressed together under those circumstances for a long period of time, I would say that maybe we were fortunate in that the personalities involved were those of people who were able to deal with this situation and maybe head off any problems. They were very aware people. Everybody who was at the station, really, they were savvy people, let's say. They were with it. They understood that there would be trying times, and I think everybody made an effort to get along. And it wasn't any great problem to get along, because for the most part they were very congenial people. DOB: There were no cultural differences between the Navy people and the civilians? No, I didn't find that at all. In fact, I found that there was quite a bit of bonding across the Navy/civilian lines there, and people would become very good friends regardless of what their organizational background was. So again, as I say, this may simply have been that we were fortunate in that we had just the right personalities there that they were able to make it together. DOB: Eklund said that you were good housekeepers. maintained at a high standard. Is that true? He said housekeeping was shared and

14 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, [Laughs] Well, I don't know. Again, I'm kind of a natural slob myself. I'm not the best housekeeper, but again, probably coming out of the Army and being forced to be something of a housekeeper, this was not too much of a problem for me. And I remember I used to get into kind of mock contests with the Navy. I was Army, you know, or just out of the Army and they were Navy guys, you know, and we would kid around about that quite a bit, but it was all done in good fun. And I say, we enjoyed the repartee between Army and Navy, for example. But as far as other people, of course people came from various backgrounds from quite different backgrounds but I think they caught the spirit of kind of maintaining things. For some people it was a totally new experience of being in an isolated site like that and having to live with other people, but everybody kind of caught the spirit of it very well, and we realized that after all, we were isolated. We had to make it there together until the ships arrived, and we had to be very, very careful that nothing went wrong. And we were well aware of that, and again, Carl kept us aware of that. He had plenty of old Antarctic explorer stories to tell us about things that had happened and gone wrong in the past. Again, this is one of the values of having a man like him there in that he did have this experience, and he was a man of pretty good breadth of vision and able to get along with people pretty well. So this was helpful, too, in having somebody who could remind you of things that can go wrong and how you really have to keep a pretty tight ship under those conditions. DOB: Can you give an example of his stories about what could go wrong? Well, he told us about the Byrd expedition which he had been on, and how sometimes people would lose their mittens, their gloves, and things like this if they weren't careful. It's very easy for example, suppose you're doing something that requires very careful hand work and it's very, very cold out there and blowing, and you take off your gloves. Now of course we had special arrangements for having your gloves attached to your parka, for example. But still and all, it's very easy to take something like that, throw them down, start working on something and get carried away and then look around and it's gone. Okay. So there you are and you have no mittens you have no gloves. Of course you can always plunge them into your parka, but then that becomes difficult if you have to climb on something and so forth. So it's a good idea to always keep track of all your accoutrements that you need to keep yourself alive and healthy in the Antarctic. And again, he mentioned cases like this where people were severely embarrassed, let's say, by not having all of their gear handy when they needed it. So we'd watch things like that. He kept us aware of things like that and to make sure you're well dressed when you go out. Make sure you hold onto everything you're going to need when you go out. And as I say, he reiterated that over and over again.

15 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, DOB: Let's talk about your work as a seismologist. You've mentioned a little bit about that, but I'm well, just tell me about your seismology work in the IGY context and in particular how it meshed with the overall IGY goals. Well, one thing to remember about the IGY is that a lot of it was oriented toward space. In other words, outer space or the atmosphere. Atmospheric sciences, space sciences. Remember on the base there we had meteorologists, we had upper atmospheric physicists looking at the ionosphere, we had an aurora observer to look at the aurora australis, the southern lights. So a lot of the geophysics that was part of the geophysical year was atmospheric physics and space physics. But I was doing solid earth physics, and we did have glaciology going on, looking at the glaciers, trying to understand the glaciers, and actually, organizationally, I was with the glaciology group. But I was there to set up a seismograph station to record earthquakes and especially record certain types of waves generated by earthquakes that are of use in determining the structure of the earth. So my first task, of course, was to go out there and install my station. I had three instruments which had to be aligned properly, essentially orthogonally, that is, at right angles to each other, so I had to have the help of a surveyor. I had to line them up. I had to know precisely which way was north and which way was east, and I had a vertical instrument. And so putting these instruments in, leveling them, making them level, bolting them down I had rock bolts that I put them in to secure them I found good secure rock and that's one thing we had there, at least. One of the problems, of course, in the interior is if you're going to put in a seismograph station, it's going to be on ice, and the ice is always shifting. I didn't have to worry about that. I was on good solid rock. But I did have to make sure my rock was planed off so it was perfectly level. So there was quite a bit of adjusting and bolting down and securing the instruments. And then I had to have an instrument shelter, and I had to set up a recording device and make sure that it wouldn't be environmentally affected. Remember, we would get buffeted by very strong winds, and so everything we put up there had to be wind-proof. And not only that, as I mentioned, and this I didn't realize to be a problem this is one of the things that I didn't anticipate was these fantastic changes in atmospheric pressure, and they would affect my instruments. The pressure changes would disturb the instruments so that I could see when they occurred. I could tell the meteorologist exactly when this storm arrived just as well as they could with their barograph, because it would show up on my instruments because the change in pressure would cause the instruments to move off scale. So I could see when the storm started. Well fortunately they didn't move off scale enough to give me a problem with my readings, but it certainly was visible, and this was something I attempted to remedy. I had to put in a little bit of countering on the instruments to take that into account.

16 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, Another thing I didn't realize was that I would have something else set up that I had encountered when I was doing some of my research previously when I was working as a graduate student. I was kind of working indirectly for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and one of the things I was doing there was looking at various types of seismic oscillations including those which occur along the shoreline, what we call a seiche. That is a standing wave that is set up in an enclosed body of water. Well, we had a lot of enclosed bodies of water right nearby. The Windmill Islands is just a complex of little islands and bays and peninsulas and so forth, and it turns out we got a lot of little standing waves set up in these inlets and that put a lot of noise into my recordings. In fact, so much it was so interesting that later on going beyond the original research that we were doing on the long waves coming across the Antarctic from earthquakes I also got involved in a project to make use of the noise and see what that would tell us. You know, make use of everything on the records. But anyway that's another story. Trying to make a virtue of a necessity because there wasn't much we could do about this noise except to realize that it was going to be there and something you had to deal with. So there were a lot of technical problems, in other words. It turned out to be a very noisy site because it was near the ocean, because we did have the storms, even though it was on good solid bedrock. Also, of course, there would be station noise which I avoided by having my little instrument shelter far away from the rest of the base. [End Side A, Tape 1] [Begin Side B, Tape 1] So I set up my seismograph instrument shelter quite a distance from the base so I could avoid at least all that human-made noise and commotion, which again was a little bit of a problem when I had to go out and service it during one of the blizzards. So again, I laid out a lifeline out there and so forth. I was able to get the operation under way by the deadline, and we were recording earthquakes pretty soon. DOB: Are earthquakes common in Antarctica? Actually up until the IGY, of course, there really hadn't been a worldwide network of seismograph stations, so we didn't really know how seismic Antarctica would be except that it was known there hadn't been any large earthquakes down there. Large earthquakes that would've been recorded worldwide simply didn't exist down there, but we didn't know if there'd be relatively small earthquakes. One of the things we found was that Antarctica was essentially what we would call aseismic, that is, there are very few earthquakes there. That is what you might expect. Most of the continent is pretty solid block of shield area, core continental area that has

17 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, not been deformed significantly for a very, very long time geologically. West Antarctica shows a little more structure, more recent geological activity, and there is a very active arc leading up toward South America the Scotia Arc up there where you have volcanos and earthquakes and so forth. But much of the continent proper is pretty stable, and it turned out to be that way seismically. Now we did get some what we started calling cryoseisms, or cold quakes, and this presumably had to do with movement of the ice. Maybe the calving of an iceberg or a sudden slip of a glacier, the opening of a crevasse on a glacier, things of this nature which don't make very large earthquakes but are certainly interesting, and they represent the vibrational activity going on. Now my instruments, as I mentioned, were not so much designed for actually picking up earthquakes, especially small ones. They addressed a part of the seismic spectrum that's very, very long, and very small short-period earthquakes probably wouldn't be picked up by these instruments. In other words that was not their purpose. Their main purpose was quite different. But nevertheless we did pick up moderate-sized earthquakes that were occurring in the ocean or not too far from Antarctica. So my instrumentation would not have picked up relatively small earthquakes a considerable distance away, say in the middle of the Antarctic continent. But it would've picked up anything fairly large on the Antarctic continent, and that we simply didn't do. We didn't find any large earthquakes there, and as the years have gone by, we found that this is indeed true. There are a few earthquakes down there, but again it's a pretty quiet place. It's pretty much quiescent as you might expect. As I say, it's a relatively stable part of the earth's crust. DOB: What did you learn about the earth's crust? Well, what we did learn was mainly from picking up distant earthquakes, very large distant earthquakes. For example, I had a very large earthquake in Chile that occurred while I was there. And this earthquake's waves came right down across the ocean between South America and Antarctica and across pretty much the breadth of the Antarctic continent down to where we were. And when we went back and analyzed this, this gave us a very good picture of the crustal structure coming right across pretty much a profile of the continent. It gave us the idea, we can kind of say, in a sense from a geological point of view that Charles Wilkes, who gave his name to our station, really outlined the continent. In other words, other people had seen Antarctica before he got there, but he sailed along it for a long enough distance to say hey, this is a big chunk of land this is probably a continent. And we kind of could say the same thing. When Frank Press and I looked over these records and looked at what we had, we could kind of say the same thing that in a sense that hey, this is really a continent. It's really thick crust. It's really thick

18 Gilbert Dewart Interview, March 26, continental crust all the way across, or practically all the way across, and so what we've got here is it's a real continent. And one of the big questions about Antarctica was how continental is it? Is it a real, big, thick continent like the other continents, and the answer was yes to that. And that was one of the first things Press and I did when I got back was we wrote a joint paper laying these findings out. DOB: How much of that was postulated before? Well, it was a guess before. People probably thought that well, it's probably true that this is what it was. I think probably most people would have guessed what our results would be, but we didn't know for sure. DOB: How much have we learned since the IGY about that question of the continent, or did you pretty much create the map at that time? Well, at least we we didn't fill in all the details. We had several sections across the continent as a result of these long-period wave traverses, in a sense. Now, of course, we know much more because we've done a lot more, not only making use of these what we call teleseismic or distance seismic types of studies, but also of course there's been a lot of work on the ground now. And we've actually been able to do deep seismic sounding and finding where the base of the crust is in Antarctica. So we have a much more detailed picture today than we had at that time. As I say, at that time we just had the general outline that this is indeed a continent. Now we have a very detailed picture of just where the edges of it are, how thick it is, and so forth. So we know a lot more obviously today than we did then, but we gave the general outline at that time. DOB: So nothing that has been learned since has contradicted what you No, it just kind of filled in the details. DOB: Did you make use of explosives? I know other seismologists out in the field were blasting holes all the time. Did you? Yes, we did. But again, that was my own private project. It was not something that I had been called upon to do, but I decided to do it anyway because we did have plenty of explosives around and I did have some experience with explosives. And the Navy was very eager to do something like that, and so we did it. So I set up some very large blasts up on the ice cap. Again, my particular equipment was not designed to do really this type of thing. So it was kind of iffy that we would get any results out of this, or very significant results, but it was worth doing it was worth trying.