Where All Directions Are North

The bulky, parka-clad man paused in the hatch of the transport plane and reached back for the duffel bags handed up by a friend. In them were some of his most prized possessions: dozens of tape recordings of South Pacific music, Beethoven sonatas, harp solos. The big man waved goodbye. "See you in 1958," said Paul Siple, 47, a geographer and polar explorer from Arlington, Va. Then he flew off from the U.S. Navy base at McMurdo Sound in the antarctic for a 14-month stay at the most isolated community on earth.

Seven hours after takeoff, Siple's plane was nearing 90DEG south, the point at which all meridians converge, from which all directions are north--the mathematical bottom of the earth. A featureless snow desert stretched away into a glittering white nothingness below. Then, incongruously, there was sudden evidence of man and the machine age. Tracks cut deep into the snow marked the routes of skiers, sledges, tractors and ski planes. Where they converged was a cluster of orange and tan huts and mechanized equipment.

The transport slid in for its landing, its skis burying softly, quickly into the sandlike antarctic snow. Siple was first out; after shaking hands with the men who had come from the huts to greet him, he unloaded his gear from the plane. At this two-mile-high U.S. base at the South Pole, Paul Siple (who first visited the antarctic as a Boy Scout with Admiral Richard Byrd's 1928-30 expedition, was a member of four later expeditions) will direct the research activities of a group of U.S. scientists who in the coming months hope to wrest from the antarctic some of its best-kept secrets.

Under Siple's direction, four meteorologists, a glaciologist, a seismologist and upper-atmosphere specialists will dig deep into the antarctic's frozen crust and probe far into its icy, gale-lashed upper atmosphere. While they pursue their specialties, other scientists will be working at six other U.S. bases around the rim of the 5,000,000-sq.-mi. continent. Like the polar scientists of ten other nations now assaulting Antarctica, all are participants in the International Geophysical Year studies of 1957-58. The I.G.Y's objective: a free exchange of the newly gained scientific information among all the nations concerning the world they inhabit.

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