Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Robert B. Thomson, OBE conducted on April 27, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

Transcription

1 Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Robert B. Thomson, OBE conducted on April 27, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Today is the 27th of April, I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with Robert Thomson about his experiences in Antarctica over many years. Yes, over twenty-five years... thirty years in fact. DOB: Good morning and thanks for talking with me. It's my pleasure. Thank you. DOB: I'd like you to start, Bob, by telling me briefly a little bit about your background. I would be interested in where you grew up and where you went to school and what you decided to do with your life, and anything from all of that that would suggest you'd end up in a place and with an interest like Antarctica. Well, I went to a small school in New Zealand, a country school and so forth, and then to high school and a technical school in New Plymouth which I used to have to cycle ten miles in and ten miles out each day for a number of years. Then I got involved in servicing electronic radio equipment, and that led me then into getting to understand more about the physics of radio propagation and so forth. I continued these studies and in 1953 sat for and passed the examinations to become a "Registered Radio Electronics Serviceman" and "Electrician." Then I saw an advertisement for a radio operator and electronics person for Campbell Island. That was in So I applied for that job and then went through a very extensive training course in upper atmosphere physics and so forth that the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research made available to me. And so the next thing I'm on Campbell Island where I stayed for over one year. During that time I made the first contacts with many people in the Antarctic through visiting ships. The picket ships and icebreakers and so forth would often call into Campbell Island. Also many of them were passing close by, they didn't call in, we'd have a conversation with them and so forth, and that got me even more interested in the Antarctic because the sort of work that I was doing on Campbell Island, because that was IGY, was very similar to the stations in Antarctica. So halfway through my period at Campbell Island, I applied to go down to Antarctica to Hallett Station as an upper atmosphere physicist. A few weeks later, I received a message to say that I had been appointed leader at Hallett Station for that next year and would I accept. I immediately responded very positively. So I came back from Campbell Island, and then within six weeks I was heading south again on the U.S. ship Arneb and arrived in Antarctica on the 3rd of February, 1960 at Hallett Station. DOB: The 3rd of February.

2 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Yes. DOB: How old were you at the time? such leadership. You must've been quite young to have a position of Yes. I was just on thirty, yes. So I was relatively young. So I stayed at Hallett Station then for that full year, then I stayed on at Scott Base for that summer as summer leader at Scott Base. In the meantime, both from the period at Hallett and at Scott Base, I met many, many people within the U.S. program. David Tyree (Admiral Tyree) who later became a very close friend a good person. So in subsequent years, I reclaimed these friendships which were very helpful to me in a variety of ways in supporting work and later on at Wilkes Station and so forth. So certainly my introduction at Campbell Island, set, if you like, my future, and it didn't divert from that to any great extent. DOB: And Campbell Island was a part of the International Geophysical Year. Yes. DOB: What were they doing there particularly? We were doing mainly upper atmosphere studies of aurora and the ionosphere. We also had a major weather station there which was very important insofar as the U.S. operations flying to Antarctica were concerned. But our primary work was very much geophysics related to the IGY. DOB: And Campbell Island is about halfway between New Zealand and the Antarctic Convergence. It's almost precisely halfway, yes. DOB: Is that significant... this location? Yes, for ships to visit and obtain any necessary supplies, but for science it's more significant in the magnetic latitude. So sort of halfway between this ring of aurora, the aurora belt, and we were right in the middle of that. Now auroras were even better than what you see in Antarctica because we were right underneath that main belt of them. DOB: Oh. Spectacular. Yes. Very spectacular. DOB: Tell me about an aurora.

3 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Oh, it's almost unbelievable to see. A real good aurora is a mass of flashing lights of different colors with different gases which form the aurora. Sometimes you get this great circle; other times the flashes come all the way down to earth like lightning striking. It's just outstanding. And of course in IGY, that was the peak of the sunspot period. That's why they held it in those years. And of course we got maximum aurora and so forth, and of course right here at Campbell Island we really were in the middle of it. DOB: How fast does this phenomenon move? Oh. It's moving at hundreds of miles an hour sometimes. Sometimes it's just moving more or less vertically above you. DOB: Like a pulsation? Yes. So you get these pulsations. Then you get pulsations going out horizontally as well, depending on the gases in the air at the time and the intensity of the actual electrons coming in from the source. And the other thing that I introduced there and this was through the Japanese, in fact, way back in those years was of getting the maps of the sun which were produced in an observatory in Japan up in the Japan Alps. So these maps showed the development of sunspots. And we had a special code so I could get those and draw the maps at Campbell Island and then figure out, okay, this is happening in three days' time. We should expect some action from the ionosphere, etc. And I was able to figure out the time delays and so forth. Also that was not only the magnetic disturbance but of course was the aurora and the radio blackouts. They all link that very, very closely to the sunspot activity. DOB: What colors are in the aurora? Oh, depending on gases, but they tend more towards greens and yellows. If you had a red aurora, that was a very, very massive outburst from the sun because it's a recombination of electrons and so forth. And that is when you do have radio blackouts the red aurora. DOB: So the more spectacular the aurora, the more you paid for it, as it were. Exactly. Yes. That's very, very true. I also built some equipment myself on Campbell Island to look at other phenomena in the upper atmosphere. And also introduced the first earth current studies that were undertaken there. DOB: First...?

4 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Yes, the first recording of earth currents on the surface of Campbell Island. Through the magnetic field this top surface layer of the earth has an effect on electric current going through it. And that change is related to the upper atmosphere and so forth. So that was something else I introduced. I think through all that work that I did at Campbell Island is why I got the position at Hallett because I introduced some new ideas and new equipment, etc. A lot of that, in fact, I carried on at Hallett. And I built other equipment there. DOB: You built other equipment, is that what you said, at Hallett? Yes. At Hallett as well. DOB: Did the fact that New Zealand was a jumping-off point for Antarctic exploration have anything to do with your interest or is that just a coincidence? Certainly, because of the number of U.S. people coming through and of course historically with the British parties and so forth going back to the Byrd parties, Richard E. Byrd, years before that. Most New Zealanders were sort of well aware of the importance of New Zealand to the Antarctic and sort of vice versa. In addition, as a young person I'd always done a lot of mountaineering and so forth. I was sort of a bit of a snowman. So that was another interest, you know, the sort of physical side, I suppose. DOB: And New Zealand was a claimant state. Oh yes. Yes, under the treaty, although when I first went to Campbell Island, it was before the signing of the treaty. The negotiations were taking place when I was on Campbell Island and the first year at Scott Base. And then, after signing the treaty, of course, that didn't come into effect until There was a lot of good thought went into it, but then the thing was to see how it worked. DOB: Okay. We'll come back to that. What was the basis of New Zealand's claim in Antarctica? In fact, the Ross Dependency, which New Zealand lay claim to, this was only because the British had passed on their claim. They claimed that area, the Ross Sea, and they passed that on to New Zealand in would New Zealand accept this responsibility, sort of thing. Otherwise, if New Zealand hadn't accepted that, it was only because of, again, the close proximity of New Zealand to the Antarctic and that the British, you know, the Shackleton and Scott expeditions had come through New Zealand, hence the British claim, then they thought, well, Britain then was more involved in the Falkland Islands and that area of Antarctica, so they suggested the New Zealand government accept this Ross Dependency, which they did. DOB: A gift as it were.

5 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Yes. That's right. DOB: Let's talk about Hallett Station. When were you there? I first got there in February 1960, and I spent almost the full year of 1960 at Hallett. DOB: And Hallett was a joint U.S.-New Zealand effort. It was a joint U.S.-New Zealand, and they used to alternate the leadership. I took over from the U.S. leader, although there were only three New Zealanders there, and I think fourteen U.S. people, only three of whom were civilians. The rest were Navy support personnel who did just an amazingly good job. Tremendous people. DOB: Do you know how this ended up being a joint station? scientists of each? And why it was just three It wasn't so much governments of the two countries. It was the scientific interests of the two. At McMurdo Station, in the IGY, McMurdo was not doing any research. IGY relied on Scott Base because Scott Base had all the equipment and so forth and why duplicate it in McMurdo just a couple of miles away. So McMurdo, therefore, was just the support base. I think this then sort of ran over into the Hallett situation. Scientifically, New Zealand had that sort of expertise from Campbell Island and Scott Base; therefore, the New Zealanders do this geophysical work at Hallett. The Americans, as far as their research was concerned, were mainly in the meteorological fields. But it worked out as a very, very good combination. At least I thought so. And I know the quality of the results of those years was just tremendous. DOB: So the U.S. Navy then provided all the support. Yes. DOB: Who provided the support for other New Zealand stations? Our own navy, the New Zealand navy, provided a great deal of support, and then in later years, both army and air force also provided a lot of support to the program. So New Zealand, too, relied quite an extent on the military because they had the equipment and they had the people, so why not use them? Give them the experience in cold weather action. DOB: So there were really, in my mind, three cultures at Hallett Station: the New Zealand scientists, and the U.S. Navy personnel the U.S. scientists,

6 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Right. DOB: which are different cultures, as it were. Yes. DOB: And you're saying they got along well. It was a unique personal relationship which worked extremely well, certainly in my case. I know that some years they did have a few problems, but in my case my experience there was just no problems at all. I had Navy people used to come to me quite frequently and say, "I haven't got much to do. Can I help you in some way?" or whatever. And I always used to keep a mental note of things that I could always respond positively then and say, "Yes, please. We want this science hut rewired." And I did say that to the electrician when he came to me, and over the next several days he rewired that whole hut. It was an important thing to do, but it was a matter that well, it could've gone for another year, but at least it gave him some work and something to accomplish and he was very pleased with the end result, so they could achieve something. The worst possible thing anywhere in the Antarctic is to have people with time on their hands. The main thing was to keep everybody busy. We, the scientists, were kept pretty busy because we had routines to follow, such as recording chart changes, and were working a lot of hours. In those days you didn't have all the automated equipment that we have now, so you'd have to be going around checking time clocks and all sorts. DOB: So this would've been in Yes. DOB: And the IGY is over by then, technically. Well, we really looked at IGY as going on for another year, really. In my mind, IGY really completed pretty much the time that I finished at Hallett. It was into the 1960s to complete that period of the sun's activity. The sun, if you like, really was a little slow in getting started; therefore, the maximum sunspot activity went on into the 1960s. And also I think an immediate result of some of the earlier work conducted in, say, '58 and '59 indicated, or showed quite conclusively in fact, that the sun was having a far greater effect on earth than what anybody had ever suspected before. So we needed to continue that sort of study for at least another year. And indeed those IGY type of studies, they in many ways are still going today. They're still monitoring the sun's activity.

7 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, There were like other people that came into the, if you like, the act around that time like Van Allen, who's got the Van Allen belt named after him. And I had suspected that there's got to be something out there, you know, because of this plasma, and he showed that in fact there was something out there, and it got the name the Van Allen belt. That satisfied me to a great extent because of the delays in the electrons that are emitted from the sun getting into the upper atmosphere. See, some things were coming directly at the speed of light. Others were coming at a relatively slow speed, only about 37,000 miles an hour. It takes a long time to come from the sun. DOB: Why the difference? Well, one is using, if you like, its radiation from the light. The other is the impact and actual movement of electrons. But we didn't know in those early days how these sort of gathered outside of the ionosphere. There's something outside the ionosphere, and Van Allen was the person who was able to indicate what this was. It has since been proved to be precisely right. DOB: And this thing was...? Yes. These two big belts beyond the ionosphere. DOB: Belts of...? Of radiation. DOB: Okay. In the February 1960 report of the scientific leader of Hallett Station, who I guess would've been your predecessor Yes. DOB: recommended an additional science building for Hallett, even though by then one would think that the IGY was winding down. But the suggestion was, I would assume that, in fact it was not winding down, that there was an anticipation that that work would continue. And was that true? Did it go on for a long time after that? Well, unfortunately, only for about three years after that. They had the major fire at Hallett in which the scientific hut was burned and all the equipment was lost. And the U.S. and New Zealand decided that they would no longer winter at Hallett. Much of the data that they really wanted had been gathered during IGY and the few subsequent years, so they didn't replace that building nor did they put in new equipment. They operated that station then for a number of years, mainly as a meteorological station and also to provide emergency landing for aircraft flying from Christchurch, New Zealand, to McMurdo.

8 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, DOB: So after that it would've been a summer station? Yes. DOB: How adequate were the facilities at Hallett when you were there... for living and working? I think pretty good. A number of things we sort of did ourselves. For instance, in the science building, I slept there and two of the other scientists slept there, just in sort of almost a little box we made for ourselves so you're close to your equipment. A lot of this had to be checked at odd hours and so forth, so it then allowed the main sleeping quarters to be a little bit larger, providing more space for those there, for the Navy people and so forth. So a lot of the things that were done there, we did ourselves because our needs were probably a little bit different from the previous year and so on and in different people. But there was no sort of "we are the scientists and you're the Navy people," even in my little bunkroom there. I used to have Navy guys come in at odd hours and sit on the edge of my bunk and talk to me about their lives you know, they were pretty lonely in mid-winter and things that they hoped to do and what have you. I guess I'm just a good listener. But through that I was able to get a much, much closer sort of personal relationship with all of those people. It was just tremendous. DOB: And a recipe for success. Yes, I think it was all just good sort of personal relationships made on that... understanding their families and so on. DOB: Who was the Officer in Charge at Hallett? He was a doctor. He was the medical doctor. He was really only temporary Navy, and he didn't have much to do, so he did some biological work as well. That was sort of associated with a sort of more medical side of biology. He was often coming to me asking could he help do this and what have you. And again, you know, I was usually able to find something that he could do. DOB: What was his name... the medical officer? Towle. T-o-w-l-e. DOB: An American. Yes. He came from someplace in California.

9 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, DOB: Hallett had an unusual water situation. I read that water was supplied by glacial melt during part of the year until the end of March about, and then seawater was distilled during the winter. Yes. DOB: And then there was snow melting, then more distillation, and then glacial melt. We tried all sorts. I think the quality of the water from the glacier was the best by far. The distillation of seawater and so forth was not very good, certainly not to drink anyway. So even in wintertime often well, we'd get the ice from the area of the glacier anyway and melt that, and that had been there for a long, long time. It was good, clear water. DOB: For a while at Hallett there was like a pond in the first year at Hallett Station. Yes. Well, that wasn't very good because of the penguins. [Laughs] A nasty taste and strong smell. DOB: The report said, and this may have been a quote from you, that... well, blasting a hole in the sea ice to get to water instead of less disruptive drilling... well, the blasting seemed to be favored by the Navy men because they'd get demolition pay. Yes. DOB: And somebody, maybe you, commented that they should be paid not to blast in such a place. Yes. That's true. DOB: Tell me about that. At one stage they virtually destroyed our seismograph, which are very, very sensitive instruments, and this was a new one which I brought in with me, and suddenly there was a very violent explosion. The Navy guys had tried something very close to the science building. These shaped charges that they had, they exploded one just outside there. And I was inside and the roof of that building lifted and then came down again. Our darkroom was no longer dark. The walls fell apart. So I went out, and I think it was the only time that I really said a few strong words, and the Navy guys went pretty quiet for a while. But they did help in the restoration of the building as it were, and I think I would've said about that time that they should've been paid not to blast, and there are much simpler ways of getting the water, such as drilling. They should've been paid for drilling rather than blasting. But there was no more blasting done after that. That was the finish of it.

10 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, It took me four days to repair the instruments, which is a job which is only done by experts in a particular factory or whatever. I made new pieces, new suspensions and so forth for the galvanometers. For that I got a very, very nice complimentary message from the director of the government's Department of Magnetic Survey in New Zealand for getting it all going again. You know, there are enough difficulties in a place like that in keeping your instruments going that you don't want to have some other sort of human factor come into it and destroy your instruments. Even the ionosonde. An ionosonde is a very large instrument for recording. It's a radar, really, basically a radar recording the height of the ionosphere and the density of the layers. We used to have to check that at least daily, and it had doors and drawers on it which you just pulled out the electronics. You couldn't pull it much further than that because of all the cables behind connecting the various units. But when this blast went off, all these things came shooting out and broke the cables. So that was another thing that took two or three days of work to get that going. And when I think about it, we had this big pendulum clock, a big timepiece, stood about six feet. The pendulum itself broke loose and came right across the room. DOB: Presumably you got some apologies from the blasters. They were very quiet for a long time. But then I built an electronic clock to replace the pendulum made the clock electronic. So there was a lot of new work went on there. DOB: What kind of training did you have for being able to do all that kind of stuff? Mainly because I'd been an apprentice in the electrical and electronic trade, radio serviceman and so forth. I became registered, and that was just before I went to Campbell Island. And a lot in those days, of course, one taught oneself a great deal because even radio was still being developed and used all sorts of circuitry, and new types of components were being developed. It was not going to be as large as what it used to be, and things became much smaller. Therefore, you could build up some small pieces of equipment that you could fit in, as I did with this clock. I think that's in that report there. DOB: So the kinds of scientific research at Hallett had to do with the upper air physics and meteorology And seismology. DOB: Seismology.

11 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, But the emphasis was pretty much in that year on the upper atmosphere, the sun-earth relationship, and that's what I enjoyed most, because we did make, as I say, a number of discoveries about the closeness of this relationship and the effects the sun has on our earth. Once you get involved in learning so much as we went along it becomes that much more interesting, of course. DOB: We know that a great many Adelie penguins were displaced from their homes for the original construction of Hallett Station, and apparently, at least until Deep Freeze IV, that encroachment on their rookery continued and expanded. How did the penguins ultimately fare at Hallett? Well, when we were there, I think we got to living together fairly well. There weren't many people sort of rushing around outside. The penguins were right up against the buildings. I think the previous year, they built some sort of a fence to keep them out of the sort of walking area. We didn't mind that. We let the penguins come in and walk with us and so forth. So I think in my year, at least, the disturbance was very minimal from the humans to penguins. DOB: How many penguins? At that time, I think the estimates were about three-quarters of a million. And they all had different voices which you could hear all the time. [Laughs] DOB: What do penguins sound like? Just a kwah-kwah-kwah-kwah-kwah-kwah. But when you get many thousands of them together, it's one heck of a din. Quite a big noise. DOB: You told me last night you had penguin callers. Tell me that story. Oh yes. The penguins there the previous year had come in on the 10th of October, and supposedly they usually come back to their nesting site pretty much about the same day every year. DOB: Where do they go in the meantime? They go out onto the sea ice and they do their fishing out there during the wintertime. But anyway, on this 10th of October in the year that I was there, it was the evening and we were in the aerologists building, a few of us, talking about this and that. There was a sort of a tap on the door, and we sort of looked at one another. What's that out there? Somebody got up and opened the door, and three penguins walked in and walked around us and stood there and sort of flapped their flippers and sort of said, here we are. And they were beautiful clean birds because they'd just come out of the water, you see, and walked across. So they stayed there with us for probably half an hour or so. We opened the door and away they went.

12 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, [Laughter] And the next day there were a few dozen that arrived. And then we sort of looked out across the sea ice and you could see these penguins coming across from the horizon. And within a day or two we had several thousand there. But these newcomers, they were just checking to make sure everything was all right and let their buddies know they could come ashore. We were friends. DOB: They knocked first. Exactly. Yes. DOB: That's a wonderful story. Oh, let's see. What kinds of material contributions, aside from personnel, did the New Zealanders and the U.S. provide at Hallett Station? The Navy provided all of the food stuffs and so forth... all the supplies. Just crates after crates after crate and spare parts for all the equipment and so on. New Zealand provided a lot of the spare parts for the electronics associated with the scientific programs, and the U.S., of course, did also, particularly for meteorological programs. Clothing, there was tons of spare clothing there, most of which had been provided by the Navy back over the last year or two. So we had a Jamesway full of clothing. And New Zealand, of course, outfitted the New Zealand people anyway their own clothes. The same for U.S. So there was no great shortage as I recall of anything, really. I think we did fairly well. I preferred some of the U.S. clothing to some of the New Zealand clothing. Some of the U.S. people preferred some of the New Zealand clothing, so by mid-year you couldn't recognize anybody as being a U.S. or New Zealander. It was just a combination of what you preferred on a personal basis. DOB: You mentioned earlier that Hallett was used as a waypoint for incoming airplanes. you have a lot of traffic? We had a number of aircraft that landed there in almost emergency situations. Did DOB: So you had to maintain an airstrip then. Yes. They generally manned it on the sea ice, which again at Hallett was in pretty good condition. But we would go out there and we would mark this area best suited to an emergency landing. And of course then we did have some scheduled flights in and out, bringing the admiral in or something to make a visit to us. We relied very much on the ship to provide the main resupply, etc.

13 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, In fact, I was out with the penguins one afternoon, and two aircraft just flew in straight over my head, two P2Vs, and landed there on the sea ice. They had flown from New Zealand to McMurdo. They couldn't land at McMurdo. Conditions were too bad. They decided to come into Hallett, and they had zero fuel when they got close to Hallett. And they were expecting just to run out, that's why they were flying low so they could land or attempt to land anywhere on the sea ice. And those guys stayed with us for a few days. We refueled them and the weather got better at McMurdo and they flew down there. But the one good thing for us about it was that they did have some nice fresh supplies destined for McMurdo. Fresh fruit, vegetables and so forth, so we had that. That was very welcome because that was early in the season. DOB: Like about October or so? Yes. And indeed one of those crew in that P2V crashed at Wilkes Station one year later, and I was there at Wilkes soon after that. DOB: So Wilkes had an airstrip by then? Oh yes. DOB: It did not at the beginning. There was usually a strip sort of prepared rather similar to Hallett in a way, but not expecting the same sort of traffic as what Hallett was, but just for an emergency. But that P2V, it crashed on takeoff, and there were a number of people killed on it. But the same crew. DOB: Was that the one that you have a photograph of with the wing in the snow? No. No. That was another one. DOB: You or someone wrote that, "The future of the station seems bright as it is no doubt ideally suited for scientific work." What was ideal about Hallett? Mainly its latitude magnetic latitude, that is. It was very close to the South Magnetic Pole. It was the closest point of land to New Zealand. I mentioned that the main work there was geophysical work, but also for a number of years a number of biologists went there because there's the ocean and you had a very, very good harbor to work in doing all sorts of marine work and so forth. For glaciologists also, geologists, and volcanologists we had a wide variety of people over a number of years, a wide variety of scientists that visited Hallett at least for a short period of time during the summer. So it was, I still believe, ideally situated for a wide range of research activities. DOB: Tell me about the physical setting of Hallett Station.

14 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, The most beautiful place in the world. Indescribable. If anybody sees photos of it would recognize, you know, it's such a beautiful spot. But just to be there and see the changes take place over a period of time, I mean even to the angle of the sun, looking forward to the first sunrise of the spring-summer period, and you have this great colorful glow towards the northeast behind Mt. Herschel. And the reflection then on the ice of the mountains. It was forever changing. Just tremendous. Even by moonlight, and I took a lot of photos by moonlight, it was just indescribable. DOB: There's mountains and water.... Mountains and water and there were big rock outcrops as well, so you had that sort of definition of mountains. Black and white and blue and there tended to be greens and oranges and reds. Forever changing. DOB: Is it like a harbor there? Yes. There's quite a big bay, and it's not... a lot of people I think in the earlier days, they thought, this is a nice sheltered harbor. But it's not, because you have a southerly wind that comes obviously from the south and just sweeps down that harbor, and a number of ships were blown against the edge of the sea ice. [End Side A, Tape 1] [Begin Side B, Tape 1] On May 20 of 1960 we had a very big storm at Hallett, and we estimated that the wind speed must've been well in excess of 200 miles an hour because we lost our anemometers and everything were torn off the wall when they were recording 148 miles an hour, and it was much stronger after that. Groups of us were in different buildings. We couldn't get from one to the other. DOB: You didn't have tunnels. No. And there was no way in those sort of wind speeds to even crawl from one building to another. So those of us in the science hut, we lived on a few cracker biscuits and coffee for about two-and-a-half days. After that, I made sure we did have some supplies in there in case of a repeat of those strong winds. The same time, incidentally, was a major earthquake in Chile. And when our storm abated and I looked out, there was no sea ice, and I couldn't even really understand because the sea ice at that point was about five or six foot thick. I thought, my gosh, it must take more than the wind we had to break all that sea ice. But within a day or so we got the report from New Zealand to say that this big tidal wave, as a result of the Chilean earthquake, had come right across that South Pacific Southern Ocean. Yet it swamped the port of Campbell Island and destroyed the wharf there and so forth, so they were very

15 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, interested then in the sort of destruction of the ice and so forth as a result of that earthquake. It's interesting. All those things come together. It was a challenge to figure out the time, distance and so forth of this great tidal wave that came across. DOB: You were telling me about the wind and attempting to send somebody for supplies? Yes. Well, you know, we got to that stage... when you get hungry, you know. So I looked around and I decided that the youngest person, who was a person by the name of Mark Gordon, our upper atmosphere person, and so we tied a rope around Mark, and we had double doors on each building. We got him into this cold porch area, opened the outer door, and sort of let him go. Well, he went up like a kite. [Laughs] All we could do is just pull him back in. It just shows that those were the wind speeds. There was no way in which you could hold yourself on the ground. He proved that. DOB: What did he think of being the one to go? He was speechless for some time. [Laughs] DOB: Had he been willing to do... well, I guess he Well, it was a matter that we got to that stage, you know. What do we do? We'd better get some food to us somehow. The guys in the meteorological hut, the aerographers, they were okay because they were right alongside the mess. And we were communicating around the base by our very high-powered radios, so at least we could talk to one another, you know, what's happening here, what's happening there and so forth. There was a lot of debris flying around. We lost some of our Jamesways. Fortunately, prior to that, there'd been quite a bit of snow buildup and ice buildup in the Jamesways, so some of the equipment was still there under the ice, but the Jamesways themselves disappeared. And I was very concerned about our aurora tower. I wouldn't permit anybody to go up in there during those few days. You had an internal ladder and so forth, a sort of staircase, and I could look up and this whole thing was just twisting like this, backwards and forwards like a corkscrew. I thought that's the next thing that's going to go. Oh, and the other thing was the noise. The noise of rocks. The science building which we were in was the most southern building, so rocks a foot in diameter were being hurled at the side of that building. And the din. We couldn't talk inside. We had to go up to one another and shout that was the other thing shout into one another's ear. Imagine that for days on end.

16 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, DOB: Was that typical of the length of a storm? This one was probably the greatest storm that's ever been recorded there. DOB: And it went on for how many days? It was about two-and-a-half to three days. Three days I think, and even then there were still gusts and so forth as it wound down. But it was around three days before anybody could get out to go and get some food. DOB: The first order of business. That's right. But that noise. That was probably about the worst thing of it. And nobody knew how long this thing was going to last and what other damage would occur. Could we lose the whole building? That was possible there. But after the storm when we examined the building, the exterior plywood and so forth had just been about torn to shreds with this constant crashing and banging of all these rocks and so on. DOB: Were your buildings cabled down? Yes. Yes, they had cables. Fortunately they had cables right over the top and down from all the corners. So it was just as well, I think, or the whole building might have disappeared. DOB: Easier to laugh after the fact. Yes. In fact, it was later in the winter that I went outside, and I was going from the science lab to the mess I'd often go down late at night to make myself a sandwich or something down there and quite suddenly a gust of wind lifted me and took me right out on the sea ice. I just floated in the wind and crashed on the sea ice. Fortunately for me, I guess, the sea ice was pretty rough out there, and I managed to crawl back a fair distance and then I can see it now I looked up and I could see this red light, which was the doctor's quarters. He always had this red light outside, and I crawled up there and sort of fell inside into this building. That's not a nice experience. DOB: During this terrible storm, what did you talk about or think about to keep going for such a long time? Yes. I think self-preservation was one of the things. As I mentioned, the other thing which was sort of an aggravation was no good food. But for myself mainly I think it was walking around in that building and checking this and checking that and trying to see if there were any damage, what could I do about it to try and save the situation.

17 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, And then mainly talking to other people through our radios to see how they were getting on. I could say this and that and what have you. I think the... our intercom system was not working because all the cables from that had been carried away, so it was only through our main transmitters, which we had two big transmitters in the science building so we could talk to the aerographers and so forth, then they could communicate from there down to the mess where other people were. They were in the safest place, the mess place. DOB: One of my questions for later, but maybe I should ask it now, is were you ever truly scared for your life? No, never. No, I was never scared. I was concerned, but not scared. I guess there's just too much to do, really. DOB: Were others? I think Mark. He was pretty much huddled up most of the time there. I think it got to him. But you don't really talk about those things while you're enduring that sort of thing. And of course then there was the added difficulty of being able to talk to one another inside the building because of the tremendous noise. The noise was well above, you know... as I mentioned, we had to really talk into one another's ears, shout into one another's ears. Or as we did, too, we wrote little notes to one another. Easier to write little notes than shouting in ears. I should've kept some of those. It would be interesting now. DOB: Yes, wouldn't it? Anything else you'd like to tell me about the year at Hallett? I think one of the great occasions towards the end of my year there was Admiral Tyree coming in to visit the station. He visited all of the U.S. Antarctic stations, sort of an inspection tour type of thing. And he flew in, and I said, "I'll take you around the station." He said no, he would just like to walk around and have a look himself, etc., which he did. I was inside the building and looked out and here's the admiral walking around over here and so on, and he was there... he had a meal with us. And later in the afternoon he departed on his aircraft. And the next day I saw the message that he sent out to all other Antarctic stations covering his visit, in which he said, among other things, he was met when he arrived at Hallett by this band of happy smiling faces. After a year at this station to see such a great, happy bunch of people, or something, and that the station was in just superb condition and this and that and he went on to report it was the best station he had visited that year in Antarctica. He gave us a lot of credit, I guess, for a lot of things we didn't do because I guess a lot of the rubbish had been blown away. [Laughter]

18 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, DOB: This was after the storm. Yes. That's right. This was in October of 1960 when he flew in there. Yes, he gave us a great deal of credit. But it was just nice to see that somebody recognized that the station was in good condition despite all the things that we'd been through and so forth. But the greatest words were he was being met by this "happy band of smiling faces." DOB: That's a great achievement. It really is. Yes, I thought so. DOB: And you can tell. Yes. That's right. DOB: And so in about October or November of that year, you went to Scott Base directly. Yes. I flew from Hallett to Scott Base, and I was only a few days there and I went down to visit South Pole Station, and I got delayed there for eleven days because of radio problems... radio blackout. The longest blackout in Antarctica. So aircraft couldn't fly; therefore, the aircraft was going to standby. The next aircraft which I was going to go out on didn't arrive for over eleven days. And then I stayed at Scott Base for that summer. DOB: And you never went home between. No. So I did sort of an eighteen-month period in Antarctica. DOB: What was the appeal of extending your polar stay for so long and so soon? Well, I thought the Scott Base experience would be something different anyway, you know, when this position was offered to me. And I thought I might as well stay on, so I stayed on there till late March when the last ship went out. DOB: And how different was it at Scott? Very different from Hallett. Well, the number of people for one thing, and also DOB: More people? Oh yes. Many more because many more people were coming and going. These were field parties going out into the field to take geological work, glaciological work and so on. The upper atmosphere program was rather similar to what we had run at Hallett. And

19 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, also the number of people from McMurdo. You had all sorts of visitors coming and going, and we visited McMurdo, too. We'd go over there and sometimes have a meal or a few drinks with somebody or whatever. It was a very, very excellent relationship between the two parties there. DOB: How many were at Scott Base? It varied, but I guess the average population there would be about forty. At McMurdo there were about a thousand. DOB: That's quite large by then. For the summer. Yes. DOB: Do you have an explanation for how it came to be that McMurdo and Scott Base were so close to one another? Yes. The original Scott Base was to be built at Butter Point across McMurdo Sound on the actual continent. And McMurdo was partially established, and when the people from New Zealand came down to build Scott Base, the commanding officer and other people at McMurdo suggested that they'd do much better to build Scott Base on Ross Island in close proximity to their station also, so if they had any problems either side, any problems, at least you had another base nearby. What if one base was burnt down or what have you, and also sort of scientifically. The idea within New Zealand was to have a base actually on the main continent rather than on an island. I think there was probably a little bit of politics in that one, that you're actually on the Antarctic continent. There was a little bit of politics there, I think, originally to promote New Zealand's position as a claimant state, at least to the Ross Dependency. But anyway, those people who went down to construct Scott Base then decided we will put it on Ross Island in this position, and I think it was a very wise decision. DOB: But they were very close neighbors in a huge empty continent. Yes. But then when the aircraft started... well, even with the ships. Okay, to get across to Butter Point you'd have to cut in another major channel with an icebreaker to be able to get to Butter Point, which means much more work. Then later on with the introduction of aircraft, most people flying in, you'd have to then have surface transport to take them way across the other side of the sound. I know Butter Point well. We had sort of an emergency hut there and so forth, and not a good place for a base. Very windy, very exposed.

20 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, DOB: So where Scott was was better. Oh yes. Much, much better. DOB: What's the name of the point where... can you spell it for me? Butter? DOB: Yes. B-u-t-t-e-r. Butter Point. And I think also in New Zealand with the Antarctic Society and so forth and the historic huts of both Scott and Shackleton being on Ross Island, there was a lot of interest in that part of it, so we wanted really to be somewhere fairly close to those huts. So there was another some of the reasoning, I think, to put Scott Base where it was. And when we rebuilt Scott Base in the early 1970s this was my idea and it took about five years to do that but at one stage a number of people on my committee wanted to move Scott Base at that time to another position. So I had to fight that one. Logic has to come into it, and certainly the logistics then of trying to maintain a base fairly remote from McMurdo would be very, very difficult indeed. DOB: Where would they have put it and why? There were some people who wanted to feel more independent. DOB: So there is that sense. Yes. That's the sort of feeling that I got from these people. The new base was built... I built one stage of it each summer over a period of five years. I replaced all of the old base without too much disruption to the function. The new base, which was opened really about the same time as the new Pole station in 1974, became a very, very comfortable base because it was roughly three times as large as the original and had much more in the way of home comforts. This was the permanent base rather than the original base which was regarded as being the IGY base, and at the end of IGY it was going to be shut. As we spoke about earlier, through IGY it had been indicated very clearly the value of continuing that sort of IGY program for the future. DOB: And Scott Base is still there. Yes. DOB: Are there other New Zealand bases?

21 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, We had Vanda Station, which was just a marvelous place. That was in the Dry Valleys. I had that put in there in DOB: And it still goes? No, it's gone. They pulled it down much to my annoyance and dismay about three years ago. A lot of things have happened in recent times, but I just shake my head in despair. DOB: There's work out there, though. It did a tremendous job out there. We had people wintering there, and this was a reverse situation which New Zealand invited U.S. scientists to winter over at Vanda Station. They had Japanese there as well. It was very much a center of Japanese, U.S., New Zealand research programs. And these were a different type of research. It wasn't too much of an upper atmosphere station. We certainly had meteorology and so forth, but it was mainly involved in trying to find out why the Dry Valleys were dry. DOB: Why are they? Mainly it's one of those sort of interesting phenomenon of... to the west of the Dry Valleys you have a high mountain range it's like the Blue Ridge here and predominant winds come off the Polar Plateau and go across this mountain range, and as they do so, they drop whatever precipitation they got on that western side of that range. Then they come down the valleys and they're cold and very dry. And so on occasions in which the wind might come from the east and you get just a little bit of snow it happened occasionally within minutes when the wind changed to the west again, you'd just see this snow disappear. It ablates just like that. So there's never any great accumulation of snow there. And then there's the interesting point about Lake Vanda itself, of why the bottom waters of Lake Vanda are warm, and all sorts of suggestions were made. I wrote a paper with a Soviet scientist suggesting some things, and others wrote different things for quite a few years, but it's really a sun trap. You have ten feet of ice, and this acts like a big magnifying glass. And then the chemistry of the lake becomes much denser. In fact, it's in layers. It's very stratified. And this warmth gets trapped in these layers, and the further you go down to the bottom of the lake, the warmer it becomes. So you have this sort of thing. DOB: Like steps. Yes. Steps of warmth. So the bottom of Lake Vanda is about 23 degrees Celsius or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It maintains that year round. DOB: Really. That warm.

22 Robert Thomson Interview, April 27, Yes. DOB: That's astonishing. There's many, many interesting things there. The Japanese had another nearby lake, Don Juan Pond. They discovered there a new chemical, which they call Antarcticide. I have some samples here. It's now manufactured in Japan; has been for several years for medical purposes. Very high calcium content, very, very pure and so forth. I got the instructions all there to use this, etc., and I'll live another hundred years or whatever. I haven't tried it. But that was a new chemical. DOB: Tell me again the name. Antarcticide. Antarcticide, they called it. What it really is is two to three million years ago, the ocean was in those Dry Valleys, and this is really the special salt, if you like, deposit from the bottom of the oceans in this particular area of Don Juan Pond. A lot of interesting things occurred in there. And among other things, it was the number one place for all the U.S. helo pilots. used to love to go in there, land there chopper and come in and have a meal or something and just come and have a talk with the people there. They DOB: Why was that a favorite, do you suppose? It was so different from McMurdo, you know. A lot of interesting things going on, interesting people, and it was like a nice little small international community. We had all sorts of people stay with us there Soviets, Germans, Italians, mainly Japanese. It was U.S., New Zealand, Japan... I had worked this sort of understanding. In fact, Phil Smith in those days agreed with my sort of suggestion that we support the Japanese. He said, "It would be much easier for New Zealand to make the invitation to the Japanese, and the U.S. would provide whatever support was necessary." That was mainly because of the sort of political side of NSF and so forth. To invite scientists from another country, you had to go through this whole business and what have you, so he decided it would be easier for New Zealand to actually make the official invitation, then the U.S. would provide the support. So the result of that also was the Dry Valley drilling project, which was the first deep drilling in the Antarctic, and they have this big plaque down there with Phil Smith's and my name on it. DOB: Drilling for what?