Cold Digger

Charlie Bentley

By Jenny Price ’96

Charlie Bentley’s adventure of a lifetime has lasted more than fifty years.

It started in 1957, when he first set foot in Antarctica as a young researcher. Bentley’s own photographs — some reproduced on these pages — document his two-year stay, including exploration of uncharted territory and some remarkable discoveries.

“I never looked back. I never looked around. I never considered doing something else,” says Bentley, shown at right in December 1958. Today an emeritus UW professor of geophysics, he has returned fifteen times and is considered a leading expert on Antarctica. Yet, his work is not done. Now seventy-eight, Bentley serves as principal investigator for the UW’s Ice Coring and Drilling Service and most recently traveled to the continent in January 2008.

But it was his first trip into the unknown that got him hooked.

Bentley, far left, defended his PhD thesis at Columbia University and left the next day for the first leg of his journey. He boarded a ship bound for Antarctica from New Zealand with other team members (left to right): Ned Ostenso ’52, MS’55, PhD’62, the team’s assistant geophysicist and a UW assistant professor in the early 1960s; Tony Morency MS’66, PhD’68, the team’s mechanic; and Vern Anderson, the team’s chief glaciologist. Mario Giovinetto, not pictured, was the assistant glaciologist. Bentley, the team’s chief seismologist, marked his twenty-seventh birthday — December 23, 1956 — “in the raw sea,” he recalls.

Penguins and seals populated the unbroken sea ice where Bentley and his team disembarked from their ship during the journey south.

“There were no rules or regulations about how close to the animal life you could get, so you could walk right up,” he explains. Today, the Antarctic Treaty System dictates that only researchers with special permission can get this close. Bentley says the penguins and seals in Antarctica have no natural enemies outside of the water, “so once they’re up on the ice, they have no reason to be afraid of anything.”

Ice measures three to six feet thick in the Antarctic sea, the reason Bentley’s ship needed Navy icebreaker USS Atka to lead the way through the expanse of large pieces of floating ice that were packed together. A helicopter that took off from the icebreaker would search for openings, called leads, to help find an easier route.

Mukluks made from caribou skin offered some relief when the temperature hit 65 degrees below zero. Bentley’s colleague Ned Ostenso, at left, is sporting heavy leather mitts known as “bear paws” or “nose wipers,” because of the fur on the back. “They still have them; I got some last January,” Bentley says. But the rest of modern Antarctic gear replaces animal skins with down clothing and thermal boots. The new stuff is lightweight compared with the heavy, army-issue clothing that kept Bentley and his team members warm on their traverses, but, he says, “I don’t think it works any better.”

Byrd Station was still a work-in-progress when Bentley and his team arrived. Living quarters and research labs, made up of four-by-eight-foot prefab panels clipped together, were still under construction. They traveled from Little America Station in February 1957 by Sno-Cats — tracked vehicles built for driving on snow and terrain — a nearly month-long trip along a marked trail. “It seemed like it was always sunny and nice weather,” Bentley says. “We did have storms, but they don’t linger very long in my memory.”

Layers of previously accumulated snow record individual storms and big changes in temperature each season. Researchers were able to get a closer look using this snow pit, dug 100 feet deep.

Bentley says he climbed down on occasion to help with the work, but it was the chief responsibility of the team’s glaciologists, Vern Anderson and Mario Giovinetto. The person pictured here is not identified.

Improvisation was key when it came to testing geophysical equipment in the lab at Byrd Station. Bentley used a simple stick to flip the on/off switch for amplifiers that were connected to twenty-four detectors out on the snow surface. Meanwhile, his other arm had to remain inside a developing box, where sensors recorded the signal reflected from the bottom of the ice sheet after charges were set off to determine ice depth. Bentley taught himself how to do seismic work on a research visit to Greenland while completing his PhD. “It worked beautifully; the records are just as good as anything they get nowadays … but the ease of getting them is rather different,” he says.

Snow buried buildings at winter’s end, along with the Sno-Cats that Bentley and his team would take on their summertime traverse across the continent. It took several days to dig out the vehicles before the journey could begin — six months after they first arrived at Byrd Station.

Ordinary life events crept in during the winter months that put much of Byrd Station underneath snowfall, including these puppies born midwinter, the offspring of a pair of huskies that joined the station as pets. Bentley took advantage of the minimal entertainment available during his second winter at Byrd Station: Ping-Pong and movies. “I saw Mogambo seven times,” he says of the 1953 film starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly.

Water for Byrd Station came directly from the Antarctic snow, which the navy man pictured above is shoveling into the station’s melter. Bentley says there was no need for the resulting water to be treated, because it was “nice clean snow,” though, he admits, “sometimes it got a little diesel fuel in it” from the generator that provided the heat.

5,000. Bentley covered that many miles on five traverses of Antarctica during the 1950s and 1960s. On the first traverse, his team discovered the lowest point on Earth not covered by water — later designated as the Bentley Subglacial Trench — at 8,383 feet below sea level. The team made the discovery by drilling holes in the ice, setting off explosives, and measuring how long it took for the seismic signal to return. Antarctica’s Sentinel Range of mountains also has peaks named for Wisconsin researchers, including Bentley.

Bentley and his team decided to name this extinct volcano Mount Takahe after the group’s first re-supply plane — a Navy R4D that happened to share the name of a New Zealand flightless bird. Shown here in December 1957, with Bentley reclining at the front, the group did its own navigation during its three-month journey across previously unexplored territory. “We were so far from where anybody had ever been before,” he says.

Back to the Future

Charlie Bentley plans to go back to Antarctica in 2011. That’s when the Deep Ice Sheet Coring Drill is expected to reach the bed of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where he did his early exploration of the continent.

The powerful drill, developed at UW’s Space Science and Engineering Center, is boring through a distance greater than two miles. Bentley serves as principal investigator for the drill project, which produces ice cores containing a record of the last 80,000 years of the earth’s climate. Scientists use that information to determine the connection between previous increases in greenhouse gases and climate change.

“The best way to figure out how to predict climate in the future is to understand what climate has done in the past,” Bentley says. “And the best record of what climate has done in the past comes from ice cores.”

On Wisconsin writer Jenny Price ’96 is in the market for a Sno-Cat she can drive to work during Madison’s brutal winter months.