On leaving CTAM our practical business was completed for the day, so it was time at last to do some sightseeing. We were near the top of our glacier as it was, so we flew to the southern end of the mountain range to our east and then turned to round it, and suddenly, this was revealed:
First view over the upper Beardmore Glacier from behind a nunatak, or ‘island’ in ice (as opposed to a peak in a range of other peaks). There will be more on this nunatak later.
I knew the Beardmore was huge. No one has made any underestimations of it, in my reading. What I was not expecting, with all the analogies of glaciers to rivers, was that the Beardmore was practically a lake, if not a sea. We had just been on such a wide plain of ice that I thought that must have been it, but the real thing caught my breath in its vastness.
I can try to explain how big it was by reminding you these photos are taken from a plane quite high up, but a far better analogy can be made with a picture. The Beardmore Glacier is, on average, about the same width as the Salt Lake Valley (a little over 25km), which is similarly flanked by mountain ranges. Helpfully, the latter has has a modern American city sprawled across it, providing a context that most people will find more relatable than plains of ice. So here is a similar angle of that:
Photo ©Michael Hylland, Utah Geological Survey and used with permission. (original)
Not only were we turning the corner here, but the ice was as well, and the force of that showed on the surface. See, ice is a fluid! From this angle you can easily see that the glacier ice is in fact a light blue. This is the natural colour of ice; if the ice cubes in your summer drink were big enough, they would be blue, too.
The white stripes are snow settled in the troughs of the ripples formed by the ice flowing around the nunatak. The fingerprint-like cracks in the foreground are crevasses bridged by snow lids. These crevasses are easily a few hundred feet across.
When Shackleton first explored the Beardmore he reported it to be blue ice all the way up, with frequent crevasses, an account on which Scott based his plans. Some freak weather deposited thick soft snow on the bottom half of the glacier in December 1911, hiding the hard slippery surface under a blanket of miserable heavy stuff to pull a sledge through. By the time they got up here they were clear of it; I mention this now because my shots of the lower Beardmore are all into the sun so you can’t see that, in 2019, it was blue ice down there as well.
The clear blue ice of the upper Beardmore was not free of difficulty, however. Where the glacier meets the polar plateau – or, rather, where the plateau flows into the glacier – the ice breaks up as it pours over submerged mountains and buckles on itself. These are the Shackleton Ice Falls. It was a tricky enough business finding a path through them on the way up; each returning party had a worse time here on their journey back down. When the Polar Party failed to return in autumn 1912, those who had been on the Southern Journey all thought they must have died in an accident here.
It’s tempting to pick out a route from this high up, but imagine trying that from the ground!
The mountain we had come around was of no less interest. We did a few loops of the area, so I got to see that it had an unusual bench of loose rock that had been caught and pulled along by the glacier into quite an impressive moraine.
I thought I knew what this must be when I saw it, but, not having seen any photos, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. After some investigation upon arriving home* I’m pretty sure this is in fact the Mt Buckley moraine where the Polar Party stopped for half a day’s ‘geologizing’ after surviving the harrowing icefalls. This was most likely a scientific gloss on giving Taff Evans a rest, as his condition was already starting to worry Scott, but it was here that they found a fossil Glossopteris plant which would ultimately contribute to proving the theory of continental drift. 35 pounds of geological samples, mostly from this moraine, were found with the Polar Party’s belongings when the search party found their last camp the next summer.
After another loop or two (I began to suspect that Steve was enjoying himself) we set off down the length of the glacier. This is some way down from Mt Buckley, where there is a slight pinch and the Beardmore turns a little more due north. That makes the nearer mountain The Cloudmaker, so named because the cold dry air coming off the plateau meets the damper air of the lower elevations at this turn, and produces clouds and fog. The far one with the distinctive fang shape is Mt Kyffin. It’s in the background of one of my favourite historic photos but I was astonished how big it was in context, in an already big place.
You can also see, here, the different textures of the glacier surface. On the western side is a wide smooth path, which is the way ascending parties came. Down the middle was a vast labyrinth of the most hideous pressure. We hadn’t flown any closer to the ice falls than the photo above, but this gives you some idea why the explorers thought them so harrowing. The photo above is deceptive, because it looks like it’s taken from standing-human height on the ground – I am in fact a thousand feet up, in a plane. Looking down on the pressure, like this:
. . . was like flying over Manhattan:
Manhattan photo sourced here; original photographer is Otman Lazra, for whom I have not found contact details. If you are, or know, Mr Lazra, please put us in touch!
As mentioned before, we had an incredibly clear and calm day at our disposal, so the Cloudmaker was off duty. Further down the glacier I got a stunning view of the smooth ‘highway’ on the west side, gleaming in the sun, with the mouth of the Beardmore ahead:
Around here we started to get into some turbulence, so instead of figuratively bouncing around the fuselage taking photos, I was instructed to strap in, in order not to do so literally. This prevented me from taking a bunch of glamour shots of Mt Kyffin, but that was providential, because it meant I saw this instead:
The two things I most wanted to get a sense of, on the Beardmore, were at the top and bottom: the Shackleton Ice Falls, as described above, and the feature known as The Gateway, a narrow pass at the bottom that allowed access onto the glacier without having to deal with the similarly hazardous glacier/ice shelf interface. There are few photos or sketches of this area from 1911, as explorers had their hands too full with heavy sledges sinking deep in the soft snow that wasn’t supposed to be there, but Bowers snapped this one of the dog teams turning back from the Gateway and I recognised it instantly.
The hazard they were supposed to be avoiding, by ascending via the Gateway, was a ‘chasm’ over which they never could have taken their sledges. What sort of chasm? Well, this is some idea:
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to try to cross that, either.
With that, we had left the Beardmore behind, and were on our way back across the Barrier to home. It should have been a quiet and relatively boring flight, but there were some more points of interest along the way, so I’m not letting you off the plane yet!
*Photographic records of this part of the world are scanty, one reason why I needed to go myself, and I hope my going has contributed positively to that record. Some helpful sources for ID-in what was historically known as Mt Buckley have been:
https://antarctica.recollect.co.nz/nodes/index/q:GASCW/source:2
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/44290486.pdf
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Re-examination-of-changes-in-fluvial-stacking-the-Sieger/241976bfe72a9748048652e5950aae7b07a882b0
https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/241976bfe72a9748048652e5950aae7b07a882b0/119-Figure47-1.png
If you have any further references, please do send them my way!