Spotlight

Man About Antarctica

By Cathryn Crane

Alex Pyne looks ready for yet another summer on the ice -- flannel shirt, heavy boots, healthy beard. He's not your typical white-coated laboratory lurker. Pyne has spent the last 13 summers in Antarctica, probing the cold continent's geology. He's expedition manager at Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre.

It all began in 1977 when Pyne first went to the ice as a student. Two more summers went by in sub-zero conditions as he completed his geology masters thesis on coal deposits in McMurdo Sound.

In 1986, Pyne was part of the team that drilled 702 metres into the sea floor looking for information on Antarctica's history. It was the deepest hole yet drilled there and provided a whole series of marine sediments leading back 36 million years.

Like any earth scientist, Pyne thinks in geological terms. He's interested in the "recent" history of Antarctica, a mere 60 million years or so. By looking at the fossils and debris in the marine sediments from core drilling, Pyne and his colleagues can learn a great deal about the changing conditions in Antarctica.

"Up until a few million years ago it's quite clear that there was some form of beech forest near the shore," Pyne notes. "It was wiped out recently by glaciation." By "recently" Pyne means during the last glaciation some 20,000 years ago, that is.

Pyne has been looking at glaciation in Antarctica, noting the waxing and waning of the snow and ice. He thinks that the evidence indicates more changes than were previously believed, and changes that occurred quickly, geologically speaking.

Talk to Pyne and you hear of an Antarctica that's constantly on the move. Glaciers race back and forth, forests spring up and die back, rocks are crushed and carried away. He mentions the Transantarctic mountain range tilting up on one side, rising abnormally high above a thin part of the Earth's crust. It's been doing this for at least 50 million years, but at only 100 metres every million years or so. It's not very fast, Pyne concedes, not like the speedy Southern Alps.

During one expedition, Pyne trundled a bulldozer loaded with tons of instrumentation out onto the Ross Ice Shelf to drill for information on marine records. By drilling at various points, he could see how fast the glaciers retreated across the ice shelf and get a better picture of glaciation than land-based records could provide.

Nearby Ross Island has proved to be of some help. The rocks there are quite unusual, Pyne observes, and so make a useful tracer when they're carried up into the valleys during the march of the glaciers. He waves at the large map on the wall of his office, indicating a million years of ice movements with the sweep of a hand.

Pyne sees this research as very relevant to today -- the information may provide some important data on climate change and the stability or instability of ice caps under changing temperature conditions. At one stage the Ross Ice Shelf extended thousands of kilometers out, and then the ice retreated "quickly". The whys and wherefores are still being argued.

Pyne hopes to work on another drilling programme in 1992-1993 in a joint project with US scientists. The core samples will not reach the depths of the 1986 expedition but Pyne has the site all set.

"It's shallower, but goes back further", he says enthusiastically.

It's not the rugged conditions or the isolation that places some of this research under threat, but the more mundane danger of funding cuts. Like many scientists, Pyne is concerned about bureaucrats encroaching on the laboratory. A funding application form for US research projects run to about 60 pages, he notes. The less formal New Zealand ones take about five, but that may change as funding goes through some major reforms.

"I just want to get on and do science," Pyne avers.

Pyne was recently awarded the Polar Medal by the Queen for his services to Antarctic research. He'll have one reward for his dedication -- this summer will be a warm one home in New Zealand. After 13 years of Antarctic summer, it should prove a welcome change, but it's unlikely to dim his enthusiasm for life on the ice.