To wait any longer to tell this story is to dally with the attention span and interest level of my audience, which exists at both ends of the age spectrum. At one end are my geriatric friends, dropping into the silk-lined wooden box on a daily basis, whose attention span may be seconds when they are alive and awake. “What was that story about you just told us?” asks Fergie, age 83. At the other end of my audience age spectrum lies my three young grandsons, here forth referred to as the Seattle 3, ages 12 and twins, 9. Unless a superhero saves the galaxy every few minutes, they’re outta here, leaping off the porch railing onto waiting skateboards. So, to keep them engrossed and in the same place, listening attentively, aI have to lie, and lie big. Lying appeals to the other end of the age spectrum, too. The saga I’m about to tell is of my experience visiting Antarctica 50 years ago. It feels like it was the Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, and it was as far as the Seattle 3 were concerned. perhaps because there was so much ice around. It is a blend of fact and fiction, mostly fact, but primarily fiction.
Fact. Everything fell into place beautifully during that life-changing decade between undergraduate graduation in 1965 and doctoral graduation in 1975. In the summer of 1966, as an MS student at Ohio State, I joined a summer palaeoecological four month field expedition to the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador. Every biologist’s dream is to spend time at the epicenter of evolution and, if lucky, maybe see Darwin’s ghost. I lied my way onto that expedition by telling the leader that I could cook and photograph. I had heard Paul Colinvaux, a famous paleoecologist, give a talk about his upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands. Paul said he needed one more field assistant to round out his crew and that person would need to serve as the field cook and official photographer. I bounded over chairs to get to the front of the room, and he invited me to his office for an impromptu interview. Fortunately, he didn’t ask me to cook some Eggs Benedict or take him to my darkroom. At that time, I had only used my mom’s Kodak camera and could cook liver and onions, rice, and Campbell’s soups in my apartment.
I completed my MS in paleoecology, based on Ecuadorian data the following year and was offered an opportunity to study the plants of Marie Byrdland in West Antarctica by an OSU botany professor during the Antarctic summer of 1967. I thought it might lead to a doctoral dissertation, but it didn’t. It did result in fascinating experience in Antarctica studying mosses, lichens and algae, followed by 6 months living in New Zealand, and eventually, in 1971, a Antarctic peak named in my honor. Greegor Peak. During that Antarctic summer of 1967 and 1968, the U.S. Geological Survey was on a mapping mission in West Antarctica where I also was, and they needed to name numerous geomorphological features, such as mountains and glaciers. I just happened to be at the right spot at the right time. My name was probably plucked off the list of field investigators, checked for any records of serious foul play in my youth or when roaming the back streets of McMurdo Station, and shazam, Greegor Peak becomes official. And still is as best I know unless some senator plopped down a wad of dough to rename Greegor Peak, which is highly doubtful given its lack of prominence. It is surrounded by thick ice and its 550-meter elevation is measured from sea level not ice level, so you may miss it if you blink because the ice field is thick there, but I don’t know how thick. However, my hypothesis is that it could be gaining in stature as the surrounding glaciers, named after friends, melts.
Fiction. In the alternative story, dedicated to my grandsons and their buds, and the geezers, my buds, I was Crevasse Man. To obtain the infamous Greegor Peak name, I had to save a party of six mountaineers who were stuck on a tiny, fragile snow bridge in a bottomless crevasse on Mt. Erebus, the highest active volcano in Antarctica. I wanted to really yank their eyes out of their sockets, so I told them it was spewing hot lava down the slope toward us as I feverishly worked to save the team. Just before turning to charcoal, I hauled the entire rope team out of that crevasse, one-handed, the other hand carrying one of young maidens from another rope team who had fainted in my arms. With biceps rippling, I led the entire team around several hundred crevasses and smoldering lava to safety and down the mountain to their families who were waiting for them with cookies and hot chocolate. I lied for the same reason we lie about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you know anything about the truth, you know that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are frauds. If you know anything about me, you know that my biceps have never rippled enough to haul six mice out of a crevasse. Furthermore, I am not an altruist even if my adrenaline had red lined. Glaciers and bottomless crevasses scare the peepee out of me even just looking at them on the map. I was never sure why I climbed crevassed mountains in the first place.
This story of Antarctica 50 years ago gets most interesting to little boys because it deals with dinosaurs and to them, half a century ago was the Dinosaur Age, so I told them I’m a dinosaur, which they understand and get a kick out of. They know better, but too many adults in this country believe Jurassic Park was a documentary. There were large, extinct beasts that lived in Antarctica simultaneously with dinosaurs who weren’t technically dinosaurs, but a significant group of extinct giant amphibians, called the Labyrinthodonts (see front piece). Paleontologically speaking, to be a dinosaur, you needed to be a reptile, and current, extant dinosaur descendants include snakes, turtles, and lizards. That didn’t make any difference to the Seattle 3 because while Labyrinthodonts may not have been T. rex, they still looked like bad hombres, several meters long with lots of bacteria-laden teeth, and living a semi-aquatic, semi-tropical lifestyle not unlike crocodiles but not related to crocodiles. They still had good, powerful choppers that could trip up little boys and run down hobbling old geezers.
“You’re saying that you saved a bunch of mountain climbers on Mt. Erebus with your so-called rippling biceps, which you don’t have, while there were sorta giant dinosaurs roaming around on the ice with nasty, dirty teeth waiting to eat you? That doesn’t sound quite right chronologically,” said G-man, the oldest of the Seattle 3.
“Not exactly,” I said, trying to lessen the magnitude of my hyperbole. “Remember, we weren’t around on Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs and their allies were roaming around. And also remember, this was a long time ago when I was a lot stronger then than I am now. My biceps were huge.”
West Antarctica is where the Thwaites Glacier, the infamous “Doomsday Glacier” resides. The Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world and as large as Florida, and is only 657 miles from Greegor Peak, which is between McMurdo Field Station, the main U.S. base, and the Thwaites Glacier (1,315 mi. from McMurdo Station). When the Thwaites breaks off, possibly, at the earliest, within the next five years, the sea level could rise several feet drowning coastal cities all over the world.
“That’s really cool,” said the Seattle 3 in unison. “Not only did you have your own mountain, but you could control the sea level from the top of your mountain by breaking off the Doomsday Glacier.” This story was rapidly getting further and further away from the truth. I had forgotten about the wild imagination of little boys. “You could flood some of the big cities of the world,” they shouted, their eyes shining in idolatry.
“What’s cool about that?” I asked. “You live in a big city which is on the coast.”
“That’s true,” Ben admitted. But did it really do any harm to let them believe that I’m Doctor Doom, a super villain, who has control over the world?
Before leaving for “The Ice,” as it is called by those cool enough to know, in the fall of 1967, I went to Washington D.C. for a workshop given by USARP – U.S. Antarctic Research Program. At that workshop, held in the Smokey Mountains when the fall colors were at their zenith, I was introduced to the concept of continental drift – the concept of super-continents that were in different global positions and broke up and drifted apart to their present positions. This is where fossils enter the story. Fossil evidence has been a cornerstone in proving continental drift. At one point, Antarctica was part of the super-continent called Gondwana or Gondwanaland which sat on the equator , that also included South America, India, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, Australia, and New Zealand. Gondwana existed through much of the Mesozoic (250-66 my. ago) and it was during this time that Antarctica sat in a tropical position, warm and wet enough to allow dinosaurs, tree ferns, and the giant amphibians, the labyrinthodonts, to roam Gondwana from late Paleozoic into the Mesozoic (390 -150 m.y. ago). At that fall conference, a number of geologists still believed that the continents didn’t drift but were connected by huge land bridges that are now covered in water that allowed fauna a flora to move freely between continents. Not unlike the Bering Land Bridge that existed between Siberia and Alaska during the Pleistocene Ice Age. But that theory was losing ground while continental drift was gaining ground. The icing left on the cake was more fossil evidence that proved conclusively that the same Mesozoic species or same genus or family was found in Africa and South America and Antarctica.
On Monday, December 18, 1967, we flew out of Andrews AFB outside Washington to Travis AFB in California on a C-141 cargo-troop jet. Our ultimate goal was McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. We sat in webbed seats with no windows except those over the emergency doors. As a New Zealand paleontologist friend put it, it was like flying in a giant al-u-min-ium tube. We overnighted at Travis and flew the same plane through Honolulu, Samoa and into Christchurch, New Zealand in two days, overnighting in Honolulu. In Christchurch we were outfitted with our cold weather gear which included a giant red USARP parka and huge white rubber Mickey boots and very dark, heavy Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. Being half blind, the lens in 1967 were glass and so damned heavy they sat on my nose like a cement block and instantly gave me a headache.
The next day, we left Christchurch for “The Ice” as everyone called it AFB on a Constellation Tri-tail C-121, fondly called the “Connie” in those days when it was originally commercially flown by airlines like TWA. About two hours into the flight, the pilot came on the intercom and said that we were approaching the fail-safe point and were going to have to return to Christchurch due to problems with the magneto compass. I was scared shitless because I kept wondering how we were going to find Christchurch without a compass and had visions of going into the ice soup below us when we run out of fuel. The soup was gray with lots of floating white crackers. I told the Seattle 3 this, embellished with visions of flying around above the Southern Ocean, running on fumes, looking for an iceberg to land on.
“Were you scared?” they all asked, simultaneously and wide-eyed.
“So scared I had to change my BVDs twice,” I told them. They got a kick out of that but really wanted to know why I’m still alive. I said, “The Connie pilot was a great pilot and got us to Christchurch just before we ran out of fuel.” Which may have been true, but I didn’t ask and they never volunteered that information.
“Thank God,” Jordan said. “This is one of your best stories and if you had died, we wouldn’t know how it ended.”
“If I’d died, you wouldn’t even know how it started, and what’s more, you probably wouldn’t even be here,” I said.
After pondering for a minute, Jordan said, “Yeah, Baba, you just might be right about that.”
We hung around the Christchurch airport for several hours conjuring up some wild tales about what really had happened to the Connie before we departed a second time, arriving at McMurdo without another scare. We did fly over lots of big ice bergs and sheets which made me think of Ernest Shackleton’s book, Endurance, an enthralling read about the journey from Antarctica which he and his crew made from 1914 to 1917 after the Endurance got stuck in the ice. Shackleton kept his entire crew alive for those three years floating around on ice floes and eventually crossing the deadly Drake Passage in a lifeboat to a Chilean whaling station to save every one of his crew members.
We flew into McMurdo Station on an ice runway without skis but after that, all trips on the ice were on Hercules C130s, equipped with skis or helicopters which didn’t need them. Any flying once on the ice required perfect pilot visibility for obvious reasons. My base of operations was Camp #3, about 1161 mi. west of McMurdo Station which is about 526 mi. west of the famous Greegor Peak and 169 mi. west of Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier, which was not called the Doomsday Glacier until 2017. On the map below, the directions appear reversed.
Waiting for the right flying conditions to get to Camp #3, I gained some serious blubber eating, sleeping, drinking, reading Playboys and an occasional decent book. One day, in an effort to get out to my field site, I hopped a Hercules C-130 that was headed to a field camp in the Transantarctic Mountains before going on to Camp #3. where the first fossil of a labyrinthodont was found in an ancient stream bed by a group of geologists from Ohio State. When that same OSU team returned to McMurdo, a New Zealand paleontologists came into the dormitory and said to me, “Hey mate, you’re a bloody biologist what do you think this is?” as he shoved a white, cotton-lined box in my face with a 3 in. black object in the middle of it.
“Looks like a dog turd to me,” I said.
“No way, mate, that’s a fossil but we aren’t sure what of.”
When I told the Seattle 3 that tale, they were shocked. “Why did you think it looked like a turd?” they asked.
“Look at the picture,” I said. “What would you call it?”
“Maybe a piece of wood, but not a turd,” G-Man said as he shook his head in disgust.
Before leaving The Ice, I got a unique opportunity to help band 1200 Adelie Penguins at Cape Crozier Rookery, 45 mi from McMurdo. When I left The Ice at the Antarctic summer on February 22, 1968, and returned to Christchurch. I left an exciting chapter of my life behind and began the next chapter on the South Island of New Zealand. That’s another story. Exactly one month later, on March 22, I picked up a copy of the International Time Magazine one bright sunny Sunday morning in Queenstown to discover a short article about the fossil find in the Transantarctic Mts. by the same OSU geologists I knew. Instead of a dog turd, it was indeed a piece of a labyrinthodont jawbone. I said to the Seattle 3, “Had I identified that dog turd correctly when David Elliot shoved it in my face, I’d be even more famous than I am. In addition to Greegor Peak, I might have gotten a critical fossil named after me, or at least gotten mentioned in Time magazine.”