| Summary: | This was taken by one of my graduate students. It shows myself and Dr. Ry Rasmussen from the Oregon graduate center at the South Pole. At this stage, what we’re doing is measuring freons. In fact, Ry has on his little shoulder there, a small portable gas chromatograph that he was using to measure freons in real time as we walked around outside. Inside the station we had a more sophisticated setup chromatograph to measure the freons. We brought him down there so that we could measure freons. This is the first time freons were measured in the Antarctic. This is in 1973. And in my program, I asked Ry to come down as a guest scientist, and so we obtained funding for him from the National Science Foundation to measure freons. This shows that at the South Pole, we’re at the geographic South Pole; the fish bowl is right behind Ry’s head. It says that the average temperature is minus 56 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s at an altitude of 9,186 feet. The ice thickness is over 9,000 feet, which meant that if we melted the ice, you would only have an altitude of only maybe 170 feet over sea level. Since melting the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level world wide by 270 feet, obviously, it would be under water. The South Pole area and the middle of Antarctica, the South Pole desert region of Antarctica, is all a very high altitude and it’s all ice pack over very, very low mountainous area which would be mostly inundated by water and under water if it melted.
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