And on such a day I have seen the sky shatter like a broken goblet, and dissolve into iridescent tipsy fragments—ice crystals falling across the face ofthe sun. And once in the golden downpour a slender column of platinum leaped up from the horizon, clean through the sun's core; a second luminescent shadow formed horizontally through the sun, making a perfect cross. Presently two miniature suns, green and yellow in color, flipped simultaneously to the ends of each arm. These are parahelia, the most dramatic of all refraction phenomena; nothing is lovelier.
—Richard Byrd
The beautiful description of Richard Byrd's experience of seeing the parahelia on 13 April 1934 highlights the almost spiritual, transcendental kind of beauty that certain moments in Antarctica can convey, touching a person's inner soul with a subtle sense of oneness with the universe. I recall a similar experience when we traveled over the glacier throughout the night, in totally peaceful, still conditions.
We were ready to head off at midnight. The continuous fall of light snow from the past ten days had draped the entire landscape with a thick white blanket. Coupled with the cloudy weather and diffuse daylight, this made the ground definition rather poor, so that bumps and depressions could barely be discerned. Nonetheless, we had to move northwards to our depot of food and fuel. We started off by heading out a long way into the center of the Skelton Névé, skirting well round the protruding snout of Alligator Ridge with its accompanying large crevasse field. It was fairly easy going from that point onwards.
The sun hung low in the sky, casting an almost hazy purplish hue over the newly fallen snow that mantled the rocks and sastrugi, smoothing the landscape with its gentle undulations and subtle reflections. The whole scene was bathed in an almost surreal glow. There was also an eerie absence of any wind noise after the almost incessant gales of the last ten days. The only sounds I could hear were the rhythmic swish-swoosh of the sledge runners below me and the distant drone of the Skidoo engine, about 50 meters ahead, as we moved solemnly along. My mind was spinning, I was singing old songs aloud to myself and my heart was full of joyous tranquility. I felt incredibly lucky to have experienced these moments, at that time and in that special place, and I now carry them with me always.
Byrd relates an almost spiritual experience he had one night during his winter alone in 1934, where the majestic chords of Beethoven 's Fifth Symphony merged with the visual splendor of the aurora in a twilight evening: “The music and night became one; and I told myself that all beauty was akin and sprang from the same substance. I recalled a gallant, unselfish act that was of the same essence as the music and the aurora.”
The surface of the Névé was flat and smooth from the newly fallen snow. At one stage the going was so easy that I dared to climb up onto the back of the sledge, right on top of the gear and sit there with my legs stretched out. I lay down for a brief moment, my eyes staring upwards at the clear night sky, my thoughts rapidly wandering away from reality. Brian towed me along, but after a few moments I became aware that my lack of concentration could prove to be dangerous, so I straightened up to watch the path of our journey carefully.
We reached our depot close to 1:00 A.M., after just under an hour of wonderful traveling. The two sledges at the depot were covered in snow from the almost continual falls of the last two weeks. It took us about half an hour to re-hitch the second sledge to each of the skidoos, then we decided that while conditions were so good we should attempt a dash towards our next fossil site to set up a camp at Mt. Metschel. At the west end of Mt. Metschel very strong winds were blasting down off the crevassed slopes. The sledges had to be steered hard and worked constantly to keep them on track with the skidoos and to prevent overturns.
We reached Mt. Metschel at about 3:40 A.M.It was then starting to get very cold and blustery so we quickly searched for a suitable place to pitch our tents. Unfortunately, there were no obvious campsites with reasonable snow cover for the winds had stripped it all away, exposing just jagged blue ice. In the end we decided to get out the ice screws and strike camp upon the hard glacier. This involved having to hammer in the ice screws to secure down the corners of the tents and instead of shoveling snow over the extended tent flaps we packed them with heavy rocks.
About 5:00 A.M., exhausted from the full day's work, long night's journey and having pitched camp on the blue ice, all four of us gathered in our tent for coffee and to finally partake of some of the delights of the new food boxes, bristling with fresh supplies of chocolate. A special luxury we sampled that morning was the homemade cake originally destined to have been one of Margaret's special surprises for Christmas Day. It was excellent. We were all feeling pretty pleased with the night's work, so we opened a bottle of Southern Comfort and passed it round with the cake. Soon after Margaret and Fraka stumbled off to their tent to sleep.
An hour or so later, I heard Fraka and Margaret laughing and giggling in the next tent. Brian and I had almost finished off the bottle of Southern Comfort by then. The standard joke about having it “ on the rocks” had worn a bit thin by that stage. Brian was chatting more about the merits of taking live pigs along on NZARP deep field expeditions, a subject now clear to our hearts. Basically, after having no alcoholic drink supplies for the previous week, it was no wonder we were all quite merry on that occasion. Mt. Metschel looked very beautiful from our tents with its alternating olive green and red bands of sedimentary rock below a thick black dolerite peak.
Brian and I had another “nightcap,” demolishing the bottle of Southern Comfort, then chatted until 7:30 A.M.when we contacted Scott Base with our new position. There had been no response to our earlier call at 4:30 A.M.Then, having done this last duty, I slept deeply until the early afternoon. On waking I fired up the primus and had a simple lunch of porridge and coffee. I then got my gear ready to go out and search for fossils.
That afternoon I wandered out alone to explore Mt. Metschel as the others slept inside their tents. Large Bothriolepis plates were scattered around through the rocks with abundant crossopterygian bones and scales in the top units. I climbed over massive flat pavements of grey silty sandstone, making the whole cliffside seem like the world's largest amphitheatre. After a few hours of collecting, I sauntered back to camp for dinner. We were all in bed by 10:00 P.M. I noticed how exhausted we sometimes became after very long days of sledging, as it would sometimes take us two days to fully recover from the ordeal.
The next day was clear with light winds. We decided to examine two main outcrops at Mt. Metschel. The first, Section 13B, as named by the previous field party, is situated about 500 meters north of Section 13A, the site where I had collected some nice specimens the previous day. After looking thoroughly around these sites we then drove around to the southern end of the mountain and walked up some beautifully terraced exposures of reddish-brown mudstone. This site was amazing in that we had a small series of flat rocky platforms surrounded by a huge cliff of jagged ice, forming an icy cirque towering about a hundred meters higher than the rocks, somewhat akin to a hole carved into the ice with a low rocky bluff exposed in the middle. It was well sheltered from the wind and received some sunshine in the early afternoon, so made for pleasant working conditions.
One of the most spectacular finds of the whole trip was made here on the very top layer of exposed mudstone. I found a mass of bright orange scales and bones that bore a shining “cosmine” surface. Cosmine is a special type of dentinous tissue unique to certain types of extinct lobe-finned fishes. It has little flask-shaped cavities in it that are interconnected by tubules below a dentine layer. What all this means is that the highly porous nature of this surface tissue is interconnected with the fish's sensory-line system, possibly making the whole exterior surface of the fish into an electro-receptive organ. I knew just from the shape of these scales and their glimmering surface that they came from a very large predatory lobe-finned fish, maybe two to three meters long.
The strangest coincidence occurred some years later, as I was rummaging though the fossil collections of the Australian Museum in Sydney. I came across a specimen collected by Alex Ritchie from the
exact same site at Mt. Metschel. I saw large chunks of bones, scales, and teeth preserved in the same kind of brownish mudstone, and all had the same characteristic bright orange color. I have no doubt that I had collected more of the same beast that was exposed at the surface when Alex was there twenty years before me. The weathering action caused by water thawing on the dark rock and freezing in the cracks had fractured the rock into hundreds of small pieces, exposing more of the giant fish, but as I collected all the fragments I could find, I think there is a good chance of one day piecing it all together and reconstructing its huge fossil skull by using the Australian Museum material to complete the jigsaw. Cross-sections in the rock show large teeth and jawbones, indicating it was an osteolepiform fish, the same group which eventually gave rise to the ancestors of the first land animals, the tetrapods.
The 1970-71 VUWAE 15 expedition had collected a large cosminecovered skull from Mt. Crean, which Gavin Young, Alex Ritchie, and I described in 1992 as a new genus, Koharolepis, meaning “shining scales” after the Maori word kohara. As explained previously, this beast was one of the canowindrid family, an endemic group of extinct fishes known only from East Gondwana. The new specimen from Mt. Metschel is a much larger fish, having scales nearly twice the size of the Mt. Crean beast. It is exciting material and in 1990 I published a paper suggesting that the first tetrapods may have originated in East Gondwana. I put this hypothesis on the evidence that we had remains of Devonian amphibians in New South Wales, based on a jaw named as Metaxygnathus found near Forbes; and we had lobe-finned fishes that were more primitive than anywhere else (as argued more fully in our paper of 1992).
Lately, though, this idea has been losing ground as many remarkable new discoveries from Europe and North America are showing that the true tetrapods did appear earlier in the Northern Hemisphere, and that fishes more intermediate between amphibians and osteolepiforms also existed there: a group called the panderichthyids. The clincher came recently when my colleague Dr. Per Ahlberg of the Natural History Museum in London found the remains of a very primitive fish-like amphibian that he named Elginerpeton, after its lo-
cality near Elgin in Scotland. The picture is now emerging that tetrapods most likely evolved from lobe-finned panderichthyid fishes by the end of the Frasnian Stage, about 370 million years ago, in the northern hemisphere.
However, the early radiation of the lobe-finned fishes may still be a Gondwana phenomenon. Gavin Young has suggested that there is good evidence for a faunal interchange event between the northern hemisphere landmasses Euramerica/Asia and Gondwana at the end of the Middle Devonian, about 380 million years ago. This could have allowed the primitive lobe-finned fishes from Gondwana to get into Euramerica and from these ancestral forms the more specialized panderichthyids could have arisen. Any piece of the evolutionary puzzle that sheds new light on the mystery of tetrapod origins is an important scientific find, so I was more than pleased to collect the skull of another early lobe-finned fish, possibly one that will turn out to be a new genus, from the top of that low rocky platform on the southern edge of Mt. Metschel.
For dinner that evening Brian cooked an unusual chicken recipe, peppermint chicken à la Staite, a delicate dish that resulted from the fact he had inadvertently used the frying pan in which I had spat out my toothpaste water that morning. We never told Margaret or Fraka where the unique flavor of the dish came from. Actually it wasn' t too bad, and for the benefit of doubters, I have included the details of the recipe in the appendix at the back of this book. Just make sure you have a good brand of toothpaste or it could taste awful!
It certainly wasn't the first time that honest mistakes had been made and not recognized in the long history of Antarctic field cookery. Apsley Cherry-Garrard notes how on the depot journey of Scott's 1912 expedition he was tired and made a mistake mixing up the cocoa: “It was dark, and I mistook a small bag of curry powder for the cocoa bag, and made cocoa with that, mixed with sugar; Crean drank his right down before discovering anything was wrong.”
We heard a rumor that evening from Scott Base that VXE-6 Squadron planned to pull us out on 10 January, so if this eventuated we would have only two weeks left to reach the remaining localities where we wanted to work. Our original plan was to sledge up to Mt. Fleming,
just inland from the Dry Valleys where I had explored in 1988, and be picked up from there. This would position us within easy helo range of McMurdo Base, but it seemed unlikely now that we could get that far by the suggested pick-up date. Mt. Fleming was about 140 kilometers to the north of our current position, a long way to travel in unpredictable weather conditions.
I received a telegram that day from my family, read out to me over the radio from Scott Base. My daughter Sarah was excited because she was going to see Phantom of the Opera in Melbourne on 10 January. I also learned that recently Sarah and my son Peter had lost a tooth each. I always felt that when Scott Base announced there was news from home it might just be bad news —if that was the case I'd be powerless to return home at once to be with my family. So, any good news from home was always uplifting, no matter how trivial it might seem in retrospect.
The last day of 1991 we packed up camp and moved to the Portal, 24 kilometers away at the head of the Skelton Névé. It was fairly easy going over the thick mantle of recently fallen snow. As we left Mt. Metschel we found a damaged polar tent, perhaps one lost by an earlier VUWAE field party.
We arrived around 2:30 P.M. and immediately selected a camp site in the shadow of the Portal Mountain, about 200 meters away from the impressive cliff faces draped with heavy snow. The Portal was so named as it forms one of the major gateways to the polar plateau up the head of the Skelton Glacier. It is a towering 2556 meters high and is mostly composed of layered sedimentary rocks with only small amounts of black dolerite rock.
There was a small depression, of which I didn't think much at the time, between the mountain and us. Later we would discover that the whole area was riddled with crevasses. Our campsite was chosen on a slight hummock surrounded by a thick snow cover all around it. It was lucky that we arrived early in the afternoon, as snow began falling the moment we started to pitch the tents. By 3:30 P.M. we had finished but had to wait yet again until the snow stopped before we could try and get out onto the outcrops to search the fossil-bearing horizons. I was very excited at finally getting here as the Portal was one of the best fossil fish sites known from any of the Aztec Siltstone outcrops.
On the 1970-71 VUWAE expedition Gavin Young and Alex Ritchie had collected a large number of very well-preserved specimens here, including some complete head shields of placoderms and some very large fossil shark's teeth. A number of smaller undescribed placoderm plates from the site were tantalizing in that they belonged to family groups poorly known in Australia, such as the phlyctaenioid arthrodires. These were little armor-plated fishes with wide triangular pectoral fins guarded by flaring spines. The significance of these fishes has to do with their evolutionary position as the most likely ancestral group to the later groenlandaspid and phyllolepid placoderms. Only one species of this entire group, very diverse in northern hemisphere countries, had been discovered in Australia previously.
One very interesting placoderm specimen was collected from the mountains of this region by the 1955 geological sledging expeditions led by New Zealanders Bernie Gunn and Guyon Warren. It was a tiny partial skull about four centimeters long that they sent to Dr. Errol White of the Natural History Museum in London. White named this fish Antarctaspis mcmurdoensis. This intriguing little skull was actually a missing link for us placodermophiles as it showed characters intermediate between the regular arthrodires and the peculiar flattened phyllolepids. Further scientific papers by Gavin Young have alluded to East Gondwana as being the center of origin for the phyllolepid placoderms, so I was very eager to search here for more remains of this little beast and any of its close relatives. So, having to wait once more to get up onto the outcrop was frustrating for me to say the least.
That evening it continued snowing heavily as the night grew colder. Not only was it Margaret's 50th birthday but it was also New Year 's Eve, so we had more than ample cause for celebration and enough grog supplies to indulge our whims. We feasted on a large turkey that was originally meant for our Christmas Day dinner. We then mixed up a bottle of our patented “Deception Irish Cream” and finished that along with a bottle of Robard & Butler's Artillery Port. I often wondered why it bore this name and thought that it must be because the empty bottles were used for target practice by the artillery.
Needless to say we were all in high spirits that night, and played “pass the pigs” and “Black Maria” until quite late. At midnight we went
outside, held hands in a circle and loudly sang “Auld Lang Syne” while dancing around in a circle. Then we had a snowball fight, wrestled around on the ground, and carried on with play fights for a short while until we were all quite exhausted.
Inside the tent we listened eagerly to the radio for messages from Scott Base and other field parties as the time approached midnight. We were greeted by many New Year messages, including one from our old friend Garth Falloon, one of the surveyors just back from the McMurdo Ice Dome, who arrived in at the base just before midnight!
We also heard from Paul Fitzgerald's group (K5076), who had finally been successfully pulled out of northern Victoria Land. They had only one beef: they had to leave all their rock samples and gear behind in the field. They told us optimistically that VXE-6 Squadron was planning to go back and eventually retrieve their things. We merrily chatted to everyone on the radio till around 1:00 A.M., then had some more to drink, and finally turned in to bed about an hour later. We all slept like babies as the New Year settled upon us.
That was the end of 1991 for us. But 1992 had already begun, with promises of exciting discoveries up on the Portal once the weather became favorable.
Little did I know that 1 January 1992 would come dangerously close to being my last day alive.