The dry valleys of Victoria Land are one of the best known and strangest places in Antarctica. They were discovered, but not explored, by the Discovery expedition in 1903. Although surrounded by glaciers, the valleys have remained ice free for thousands of years. In Wright Valley, the central of the three valleys, the longest river in Antarctica, the Onyx, flows inland to Lake Vanda. The lake reaches temperatures of 25°C, despite being ice covered. The only vegetation is algae and lichens, including endolithic species, and bizarre mummified seals, some hundreds of years old, lie kilometres inland. The geology is unusual and complex, and the valleys are the nearest place on Earth to conditions found on Mars. From the late 1960s the dry valleys have been the subject of a huge amount of scientific research. This was not the case in the summer of 1958–1959.
In that year, Colin Bull, a lecturer in physics, and three companions, Peter Webb and Barrie McKelvey, both 3rd year geology students, and Dick Barwick, a biology lecturer, mounted a two month expedition to Wright Valley, then unnamed and unvisited. It was an adventure with plenty of geographical and scientific research, a lot of hard going and hard work in harsh conditions and plenty of fun. This was at a time when it was still possible to go to Antarctica and easily carry out fruitful research on a shoestring. It could not happen nowadays.
Bull had participated in the Birmingham University Expedition to Spitsbergen in 1951 and then the British North Greenland Expedition, 1952–1954. He was invited to join the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition but had just become engaged. So he went to New Zealand as a senior physics lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. While listening to Webb and McKelvey talking about their recent visit to Antarctica, he realised that it might be possible to make a short visit himself. He had seen aerial photos of the dry valleys and chose the unnamed valley as his venue. Barwick, who had also worked in Antarctica, completed the team. They enlisted the enthusiastic support of Bob Clark, the Professor of Geology, and set about raising funds and gathering equipment. A novel approach was to place £1 from the Lord Mayor's donation on a horse in the Derby. It won at 40 to 1. And an anorak, a veteran of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, was retrieved from the rubbish dump at Scott Base and made serviceable. The expedition cost less than $1000 but this is somewhat misleading. Travel to McMurdo Sound and flights out to the Wright Valley were free of charge.
After two weeks at McMurdo and Scott bases, the four men were deposited in the Wright Valley. They spent 52 days exploring this valley. Their main base was close to Lake Vanda (named after one of Bull's Greenland dogs to alliterate with nearby Lakes Vida and Vashka named after two of Scott's dogs) and they traversed Bull Pass to reach the McKelvey and Barwick Valleys to reveal some of the secrets of this amazing place. It was hard work, climbing mountains to survey the surrounding country, carrying or dragging huge loads of equipment over difficult terrain and suffering drift sand.
Surveying was a major part of the programme, together with geology and biology. The geology proved complicated and hard to interpret. The biology was limited, thieving skuas and some obscure and virtually microscopic life forms. Innocents in the dry valleys is an account of the expedition rather than a description of the field programmes and the results they obtained. That the programmes were successful is shown by the list of 17 scientific papers derived from the seven week, four man expedition. From this expedition sprang a series of 50 annual expeditions from Victoria University of Wellington and the dry valleys are now the most intensively studied area of the Antarctic continent, with over 2000 scientific papers published.
I would have liked to have seen a summary of the expedition's scientific results followed by a brief resumé of 50 years’ subsequent research in the valleys to put their pioneering efforts into perspective, although Bull considered this to be impracticable. However, he mentions finding fossils of the mollusc Pecten (scallop) far inland. The team were divided on their origin but we do not hear the definitive conclusion. Barwick, the biologist, was interested in the mummified crabeater seals (together with a few Weddell seals and some Adélie penguins) also found many kilometres inland. What were they doing there? ‘Odd bit of weathering’, thought Bull, tossing away a piece of sandstone with a dark line, thereby missing ‘yet another important discovery’. A decade later this was found to be caused by endolithic bacteria. They narrowly missed taking the bottom temperature of ice-covered Lake Vanda, discovered a year or so later to be so amazingly hot.
Before Bull's visit nearly every expedition to Antarctica had been a national expedition, like Scott's or a large private expedition, like Shackleton's. The Kohl-Larsen and Carse expeditions to South Georgia are more like Bull's, especially in the way that they were able to overcome the major problem of reaching their destinations by cadging lifts.
Bull dedicates the book to his ‘uncomplaining, contubernial accomplices’. A note helpfully explains that ‘contubernial’ means sharing the same tent. Although now retired, he has written the book with the same enthusiasm and humour that made the expedition such a success. It reminds me of Thomas Bagshawe's Two men in the Antarctic, in which two young men mitigate the rigours of life in unpleasant conditions through their sense of humour. It harks back to a time when working in Antarctica could still be an adventure and the simplest observations could reveal something new to science.
All in all, Innocents in the dry valleys is a very enjoyable ‘read’ and makes a change from accounts of yet another ski jaunt to the South Pole. It is enhanced by maps, a glossary, an explanation of place-names and a detailed index.
