Tim Bowden

Strange things happen to those who go to Antarctica. There is a strong sense of unreality about confronting nature on such a vast scale. No one who goes there, even for quite short periods, is unaffected by the experience. Phillip Law, who directed Australia's exploration and scientific program from 1949-66, puts it this way:

It is fair to say that no man ever goes to Antarctica without its having an immense impression on him. There's the beauty and grandeur of it all and the feeling that one is so insignificant in this scale of nature. The fact that you have enough time down there to sit and ponder and philosophize and sort yourself out enables you to look back on civilization from a stand-off point of view . . . and I think most men in Antarctica for any length of time do go through some sort of personal reassessment.

For the scientists and support personnel who work there, Antarctica exerts a compelling fascination, leading to chronic recidivism for many. Yet no humans live permanently in Antarctica. We go there like astronauts into deep space, taking everything needed to sustain life: food, fuel, and accommodation. Twenty-six nations now maintain permanent stations in Antarctica. Scientific research by paleontologists, geologists, meteorologists, glaciologists, upper atmosphere physicists, biologists, and microbiologists—among other professionals—is the

driving force for all Antarctic activity, most of which is compressed into the short summer season.

Those hardy souls who venture out into the field from the security of the stations do so at considerable risk. Although they have the advantage of satellite communications and motorized over-snow transport, no crevasse detector has yet been invented, sudden blizzards can overwhelm individuals unexpectedly and frostbite and wind chill are still as vicious as they were to Scott and Mawson. At even greater risk are those whose projects take them into “deep field,” more than 200 kilometers from base and outside helicopter rescue range, where the thin fabric of polar tent is all that separates those sheltering inside from the howling super-chilled winds, from life or death. At those times “deep field” might as well be “deep space,” with rescue impossible if the worst should happen. This is adventuring and scientific exploration on the cutting edge.

I have not read a finer account of a modern Antarctic field trip than Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica, by Australian paleontologist John Long. This book chronicles two summer expeditions to Antarctica but principally the deep field trip to the remote Cook Mountains (part of the Transantarctic Mountain chain that separates Greater and Lesser Antarctica) in 1991-92. Long and his companions were searching for fish fossils from the Devonian period some 400 million years ago, first discovered high in the mountains by veteran Antarctic geologist Margaret Bradshaw two years previously. Two men and two women (including Margaret) were flown in by C-130 ski-equipped Hercules aircraft and landed on the ice among the mountains, together with their skidoos, sledges, tents, climbing gear, rations, and geological equipment in virgin territory. The planes were not scheduled to return for eight weeks. Many of the peaks around them had not been climbed or explored.

Long, a scientist-romantic, is a keen student of Antarctic writing and his quotations from men like Byrd, Cherry-Garrard, Mawson, Scott, and Shackleton add luster to this outstanding account. By coincidence, the party landed near the mythical location chosen by novelist H.P. Lovecraft for his classic Gothic story, At the Mountains of Madness, where a geological expedition stumbles across a strange and hidden

civilization. While blizzard-bound in their tents, the four expeditioners passed the time by reading Lovecraft out loud. Their isolation engendered their own moments of madness, courageously described by Long.

Scientifically, the expedition was a great success, with many new species recovered and named, together with important evidence of how certain life forms in the great conglomeration of Gondwana were later carried by continental drift to distant parts of the globe. Long's great skill is to take the reader through the adventure of a deep field experience while sharing the excitement of the fossil finds and, at the same time, putting it all in historical context.

Phillip Law's observations about no one going to Antarctica without some measure of self-assessment is an understatement when applied to John Long. The combination of near-death experiences with crevasses and avalanches, professional and physical achievement, camaraderie in the field, and the intensity of experiencing Antarctica at its wildest and most primal has, by his own admission, completely reshaped his life. You will have to read this singular account to discover how and why.

There is a clue in one of H.P. Lovecraft's quotes selected by John Long from At the Mountains of Madness:

Half-paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

Tim Bowden is the author of two books on Antarctica, Antarctica and Back in Sixty Days and The Silence Calling: Australians in Antarctica 1947-97.

No one goes to Antarctica without coming back a different person. A little part of Antarctica grows inside you and moulds your character, for better or worse, from the first day you step foot on that frozen land. I never suspected that going to Antarctica would change my life in dramatic ways, but it certainly did. Although many other scientists and adventurers have spent much more time on the continent, in far worse conditions than I ever faced, I believe my story is one of special interest because of the reasons our expedition went to such a remote and hostile place. We went there with a mission to search for the fossil remains and traces of Antarctica's earliest flourishing communities. Antarctica has had a profound effect on my life from then on.

This book started out as an account of what occurred on my two trips to Antarctica. On my second trip during the 1991-92 season, I remember being on a permanent high of either discovery or adventure. The thrill of discovery came whenever we found expansive pavements of rock bristling with 380-million-year-old bones; the excitement of adventure came when we were sledging carefully through hidden crevasse fields, scaling ice cliffs wearing crampons and climbing harnesses, or being almost buried by an avalanche. That's how this book started. I then incorporated some of my own ideas and personal philosophy, which I now see as having been formed mostly from my Antarctic experiences.

In the banks of one's memory the two entities of discovery and adventure combine as one stream of consciousness, as all adventure is merely an act of discovery about one's self; particularly one's inner nature under stress. All scientific discovery is simply revelation about the nature of all things outside of the realm of self, where nature can be measured, quantified, and in some small way, qualified. By coalescing the two, one can experience true discovery, a heightened awareness about the world as we perceive it with our senses and feel it in our hearts. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a veteran of Scott's 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition, expressed similar sentiment by saying that “exploration is the physical expression of the intellectual passion.”

During the three months I spent in Antarctica on the 1991-92 expedition, every evening my colleagues and I took turns at reading aloud a few pages of H.P. Lovecraft's classic gothic story, At the Mountains of Madness, first published in 1931. In that book an expedition to the remote wilds of Antarctica finds evidence of an incredibly ancient civilization still inhabited by strange beings. At the time of writing it, Lovecraft based his hidden civilization in a totally remote, unexplored location inland from the Transantarctic Mountains at 76°south. This position (which incidentally Lovecraft cites with an exact latitude and longitude) coincided with being directly inland towards the polar plateau from the mountains where we were based near the end of our long sledging journey. Most of the Cook Mountains had never before been investigated on the ground, so we were the first humans to scale several of these lofty peaks, to explore for geological treasures and to discover many new fossil sites there.

Yet, always, each evening, we would anxiously wait to hear more of Lovecraft's gradually unnerving tale. Recently I pulled out my old maps from the field trip and saw that I had annotated the northern-most mountain range in the Cook Mountains as the “Mountains of Madness. ” The name has no official status. It was our little joke for the expedition, yet somehow it has stuck in the back of my mind.

My career as a paleontologist has taken me to many interesting places to collect or study fossils over the last decade—throughout Australia, Europe, North America, South-East Asia, South Africa, Iran, and Antarctica. Never in my wildest dreams as a child did I imagine that

the study of long-dead fishes (my particular specialty) would lead me to so many fascinating places, usually way off the beaten track where tourists never venture. Yet of all the places I have visited, Antarctica was without any doubt the most scenic, dangerous, and scientifically interesting of the lot. Moreover, it left an indelible impression on my soul. This book is my personal story of Antarctica, told from a slightly different perspective to those of regular visitors to the south, as it is an account of two scientific expeditions as well as the ensuing story of how my life changed from those experiences.

One of the main aims of our expeditions was to discover new information on Antarctica's ancient creatures, as only by filling in more of the blanks in Antarctica's bleak fossil record can we eventually hope to solve the larger problem of how the global biodiversity of this planet unfolded. Antarctica's ancient prehistory may hold the key to how and why many of the animals and plant communities around the world today came to be where they are. Furthermore, I believe that if we read carefully between the lines, the story of planet Earth's rich prehistory may give some rare glimpses into where we as a species, in a complex ecosystem, might be heading in the future. You can read more about the prehistoric life of Antarctica in another book of mine, Life Frozen in Time, which will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Some excerpts from the writings of the early heroic explorers have been included throughout this story to add color and historical content to the places we visited and the similar situations in which we found ourselves. There was no intention here of making direct comparison between our “comfortable” modern expeditions and the rigors and suffering of the early expeditioners who “man-hauled” most of their way to their destinations.

The stories of the expeditions of Scott, Shackleton, and Mawson are referred to throughout this narrative, for reasons that are clear: our journey started off from the same base area on Ross Island as did Scott's and Shackleton's expeditions, and I was fortunate to visit their original huts. Mawson was way over the other side of Antarctica from where I was, but as his story is one of the best, and as he was a geologist like myself, I have liberally drawn from his tale to illustrate certain points. Similarly, I have used quotes from the writings of some of the later

explorers, like Admiral Richard Byrd, an American who was the first man to winter alone on the barrier ice of Antarctica in 1934, and of others whose writings show the uncanny ability to express similar feelings to those I experienced with a clarity that I could not hope to emulate.

The heroic deeds and accomplishments of these brave men are to be highly lauded, and I hope that you gain a sense of admiration for them. I have come to appreciate their deeds, not just from reading their accounts, but also because I have been privileged to visit the same places as some of them.

And, by some miracle of good fortune, lived to tell the tale.

John Long

September 2000

MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS