Cold, White Nothingness?

In November of 1929, there was a small military village, Little America, near the South Pole in Antarctica.  Capt. Ashley C. McKinley was third in command at this expedition, and was the aerial photographer.  Mapping the Antarctic From The Air: The Aerial Camera Earns Its Place as The Eyes and Memory of The Explorer, National Geographic Magazine, October, 1932, is his account of the flight to the South Pole.

After miles of nothing but flat snow as seen from their plane, the team spotted their dog sled teams.  They dropped supplies for them. Soon thereafter, they were flying over Liv Glacier but were in danger of crashing into the mountains (Rockefeller Mountains) ahead.  Frantic efforts ensued to fill the gasoline tank with the gasoline supplies in order to be able to throw out through the trapdoor the cans and 250 pounds of emergency food rations to lighten the plane.  It worked and they cleared the 10,000 feet tall peaks.

As the crew passed over the South Pole, the American Flag was dropped out the trapdoor.  As the plane turned north, pictures were taken to the west.  Eight hundred miles more of terrain were to be photographed, but this was done almost without incident.

Returning to Little America, McKinley's films were developed.  The results were amazing.  We who take air trips routinely could not imagine the excitement.  The distance "which the geological party had been plodding with dog teams for weeks," (photo caption, p. 477) was covered by plane in less than two hours.

A particularly difficult challenge was "melting the snow to obtain the 200 gallons of water which were needed for the development of each roll of aerial film. . . A bucketful of Antarctic snow, taken out of an atmosphere thirty degrees below zero, must "set" on a red-hot stove half an hour before it melts, and then there is only one-third of a bucketful of water," (p. 479).  What slow, meticulous work!

We with our digital photos printed from our computers at home cannot appreciate the film development process in the 1930s: "The hypersensitized film must be developed in absolute darkness. . . Upon completion of the developing of the first season's work, I had time during the winter night to study the results.  I then realized how much the airplane does to increase one's conception of the vastness of this ice-covered land. Hundreds of square miles of territory, with long, rolling expanses of white, could be seen at a glance," (p. 479).

The goal of this trip was not only to photograph the Antarctic area, it was to use the resulting photos to construct accurate maps of the mountains, plains, glaciers, and crevices. McKinley concluded, "I believe the work in the Antarctic and the long, tedious map construction at home have been fully justified by the results obtained.  The aerial camera has earned its place as the eyes and memory of the aerial explorer," (p. 485).