Area man examines Antarctica

IT MAY SEEM UNUSUAL TO THINK OF ICE and snow while sitting in a Menlo Park office on a hot, sunny day, but Robert Brown, a geologist is doing just that.

Brown, 37, on a pair of skis, recently conducted a scientific exploration over 1,000 miles of ice during a three-month probe of the Antarctic.

Now he is back in his office at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park preparing reports on his findings.

DURING HIS STUDY OF THE ANTARCTIC, Brown combed a mountain range unknown to man a year ago--Patauxent Range of the Pensacola Mountains, 300 miles from the South Pole.

With a team of scientists, "Brown set out from the main camp at McMurdo Station, a U.S. Navy base, into the white Antarctic mountain range in search of clues to the earth’s past formation.

It was the first foray into the Patauxent Range.

"Life in Antarctica is drastically different from life in Menlo Park," Brown recalls. "In the cold, whiteness there is almost no sign of life. Only moss and lichens grow there and no animal life can be seen. Once we saw a bird and were overjoyed."

Brown and his team made their camp 1,000 miles from the station, which was the last point of civilization. The camp was a 16x16 foot quonset hut, the "Jamesway."

He and five other scientists branched out for days at a time with their motor toboggans. They took supplies for three months with them.

"When we branched out on shorter exploration trips we skiied behind the motor-toboggan, steering it like a team of horses." Brown said.

"That way, if there was a large crevasse, we knew it last. We were lucky--we never went down." He said.

Much of the travel was done by skiing alone, however, when Brown inspected rocky hills projecting above the glacial ice. It was from these rocky projections that Brown and his team took their rock samples.

AFTER PICKING AWAY FOR DAYS AT these formations, the team found fossil leaves and twigs that date back 200 million years.

Brown said the leaves give evidence that a forest existed in the area, which adds support to the belief of some geologists that South Africa and South America were joined at one time.

Brown said the usual silence, which is indigenous to a geologist’s life, was missing in Antarctica.

"The wind blows 80 percent of the time, and at 15 degrees below zero he said. "There’s not much of a temperature change--it’s just cold all the time."

BROWN DESCRIBED LIFE IN ANTARCTICA as a place where the loss of one glove is serious. "There was no chance for replacement there," he said. "We had to take everything with us."

When a blizzard hit, Brown and a teammate took to a tent--sometimes for two days at a time.

"During these tent-ins we read, wrote letters, listened to transoceanic radio and played the uke," he recalled.

Brown said the greatest hazard in Antarctic is the "white out."

"An overcast moves in and there are no shadows. Everything is equally gray so no elevations in the ground are apparent. You could step off a cliff just as if blindfolded," he explained.

Brown is now "packing-up" his gear from his residence in Palo Alto in preparation for an assignment in Washington, D.C.

The half-ton of rock samples his group brought out of the Patauxent Range is being studied in the U.S. Geological Survey’s Washington laboratories.

Palo Alto Times
July 22, 1963

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