Stay-at-Home-Explorer

Without leaving comfortable Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, Physicist J. F. Nye took a crack at a new kind of Arctic exploration. Using the integrations of abstruse equations, he ranged over Greenland's great icecap, checking the observations of scientists who had made the trip in person. In Nature magazine, Dr. Nye reports his findings. Greenland, he concludes, is probably a mountain range rising from the sea, surrounding a vast, frozen, inland lake.

Greenland's glacial blanket, explains Dr. Nye, tends to spread out and flow downhill because of its own weight. But this movement is balanced by the rock floor compressed under centuries of ice and snow. Some ice is lost in summer's melting and in icebergs that break off to sea. But the big glacier is refreshed with snow slowly hardening into more ice. It is this almost perfect equilibrium that Dr. Nye describes in his complicated formulas. Having written the equations, the lab-locked explorer then works backward, calculating ice depth from surface contours.

Dr. Nye began with a Danish survey map made in 1938. His mathematical predictions agree with measurements made by French Explorer Paul-Emile Victor as recently as 1950. Victor's party, however, had to make a 700-mile trek across southern Greenland. Every ten miles they measured ice thickness by detonating a charge of dynamite and timing the echo as it bounced from the rock floor far below. Admittedly more accurate, Victor's seismic soundings were time-consuming and limited. As check-points for Nye's formulas, they take on new importance.

Today, when almost every nation that can afford Arctic expeditions is sending them into the field, Nye's stay-at-home equations may prove to be a valuable key to polar secrets.

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