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> The National Science Foundation is setting up an elaborate camp in Marie Byrd Land to study the strange magnetic ducts that arch through space and carry radio waves between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. > The U.S., Britain and Russia are leading a smooth-running Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, which is already working out plans for securing valuable weather data in the international "quiet sun" year in 1964-65. Expected to be of great help: the U.S. Tiros satellites.
Promised Land. No matter how hard the Antarctic scientists work, they know that they have barely scratched the surface of the continent's mysteries. Meteorologists are trying to explain why the Antarctic does not start to warm up, as the Arctic does, before the sun rises in spring, would like to know whether the Antarctic ice will increase or shrink if the earth's climate gets warmer. Other areas to be explored are multitude—the ice sheet, weather, temperatures, winds, communications, geology.
For ambitious young scientists, Antarctica is thus a promised land, stuffed with ready material for thousands of reputation-building papers. But it is a land where it is easier to discover new mysteries than to find the answers to them. Recently, three U.S. scientists were pulling a fish trap through a hole in the ice when a seal rose through the hole with a big fish in its jaws. The scientists struggled with the seal for the fish, won after a desperate tug of war. The fish, 52 in. long and weighing 58 Ibs., turned out to be an unknown species of a family that was not supposed to be swimming in those cold waters. With it are surely swimming hundreds of other interesting creatures also unknown to science.