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Every 15 miles another team measures the strength of gravitation, which gives clues about the earth's crust deep under the ice. Every 30 miles seismologists bore a hole in the ice and explode a charge of dynamite. Waves from the explosion travel to the bottom of the ice and into the rock beneath it. At each boundary between ice and rock or between layers of different rock, some of the waves are reflected up to the surface, and when they are recorded by the proper instruments they tell the scientists what they have found under the mile-thick ice.
When all the painfully gathered data are digested and assembled, they will give a cross section of the Antarctic Continent, which is believed to be a great saucer of rock with a center near the Pole pressed down by the weight of ice that it carries. The thickness of the icecap will tell how much water is locked up in it, and how high the oceans stood during geological ages when the earth's Poles were ice-free. Perhaps the precious data brought back by the Fuchs expedition will explain the seams of coal in Antarctic mountains. Coal is the remains of lush vegetation, and nothing except a few hardy lichens and mosses grows in Antarctica now. One theory is that Antarctica had a tropical climate many millions of years ago. Another is that the earth's thin rocky crust shifted around its plastic core like the loose skin of a puppy, marching a fertile continent with all its plants and animals to frozen death at the Pole.
Sastrugi. Doggedly sticking to its scientific schedule, but far behind its timetable, the Fuchs expedition crawled up the domed icecap from South Ice. It painfully threaded through a line of nunataks (mountain peaks almost submerged in ice), and reached ice with fewer crevasses on the high plateau behind. Here were great fields of sastrugi—wind-formed ridges of hard-packed snow sometimes 4 ft. high. The Sno-Cats crossed them all right, but with dangerous pitching and crashing. Progress slowed to a crawl; the weather grew worse; but the scientists kept to their schedule as if they were making their observations in the south of England in June.
When the expedition reaches the U.S. polar base, Fuchs will have to review his decision to brave the 1,200 miles to the Ross Sea. The nearest supply cache left by Hillary is 500 miles away, and toward the end of the short Antarctic summer the weather will be too bad for reliable air transportation. If his hard-punished Sno-Cats break down or run out of fuel, the howling blizzards that blow in February may make it impossible to rescue his men by air.
As Fuchs nears his final decision, every man at the polar base, both American and British, will be thinking of Fuchs's countryman, Captain Robert Scott, who got to the Pole in 1912. He started back toward the Ross Sea—the same terrible journey Fuchs will have to make, and at the same terrible season—and was frozen to death with the last of his five-man party, in a nine-day blizzard.