Only a few years ago, Antarctica seemed as remote and forbidding as the moon. Since 1957, however, lights have burned year round across the silent white desert that surrounds the South Pole. As new equipment and technology have helped to subdue the hazards of the hostile land, the U.S. and nine other nations*have set up some 35 permanent research stations, where scientists and servicemen who "winter over" en joy most of the comforts of home as they seek to unlock the secrets of the earth's ice-age continent.
Last week, when New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman made his second trip to conduct Christmas services at McMurdo Station, he found U.S. Opera tion Deep Freeze headquarters heated and lighted by an experimental $7,000-000 atomic reactor. There was turkey in the mess hall, a new movie nightly in the wardroom. Navy Seabees were bus ily installing a saltwater conversion plant which would ease the perennial water shortage, thus doing away with the "honeypot" latrines that have created a gleaming yellow man-made gla cier in the middle of the base. Navymen naturally echo the Rodgers-and«Ham-merstein plaint, "We ain't got dames," but ham radio at least gives them a chance to talk to wives and girls back home at less than the cost of a normal Stateside long-distance call. McMurdo's post office has even sprouted ZIP Code No. 96648.
Dog Sleds v. Tractors. In December and January, the Antarctic midsummer, icebreakers plow channels through the frozen sea for Navy supply ships, and McMurdo is almost as busy as the Brooklyn Navy Yard. To support a population that reaches 3,500 at summer's height and will include 120 scientists this year, U.S. freighters and C-130 Hercules air transports shuttle in mountains of food and gear, haul back tons of scientific records and specimens to U.S. laboratories.
McMurdo supports three other main year-round bases, one of which, in the storm-lashed Ellsworth Mountains, is 1,525 air miles distant, as well as two dozen smaller, seasonal outposts such as Beardmore Station, near one of the world's biggest glaciers, where 70,702 tons of equipment had to be airlifted recently to supply a three-man Navy meteorological team for a 30-day stay.
Explorer-scientists still use dog sleds frequently in terrain too rough for tractors or motor toboggans. New Zealand dog handlers have not only evolved a special breed of husky to withstand the world's crudest climate, but have even developed a new "language" that the dogs understand better than the "Mush!" used by old Yukon hands: to start the team, the handler cries "Wheet!"
Studying Sea & Sun. Braving 100-m.p.h. winds and temperatures that have been known to drop to 127.3° F. below zero, 43 U.S. scientists will winter over in Antarctica this year. Though it costs the U.S. up to $200,000 to put a single researcher on the continent, the 50 independent projects they are working on (total budget: $27 million) may ultimately prove a more fruitful investment than far costlier space research. Staging area for U.S. forces in Antarctica is Christchurch, N.Z. There, ten times weekly during summer months, Navy transports with special ski-type landing gear take off for the seven-hour flight to McMurdo.