From the Archives: The Ghost of Mount Glossopteris
A small tribute to Bill Long
An audio version of this post is available on Substack and Spotify.
With a wingspan of 28 inches, Emil Schulthess’s 1960 volume Antarctica takes up more than half of any respectable coffee table. I sought it out on the advice of Ed Stump, who pointed me to one image in particular: “There's a fantastic photo of Bill Long coming off Mount Glossopteris, out of the cloud, with a pack laden with rocks.”
The photo was taken during the second season of the International Geophysical Year (1958-59), when the Swiss photographer Emil Schulthess accompanied the Byrd Traverse, a tractor train of three tracked Sno-Cats that set out from Byrd Station (80°S 119°W) to “conduct geophysical and glaciological studies on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet” (as Stump explains in The Roof at the Bottom of the World). At the time this photograph was taken, the team was near Camp 414, in what I infer was December 1958.
William (“Bill”) Long had not yet begun a PhD when he accompanied the Traverse as a glaciologist. He’d “briefly” studied geology at Berkeley, which apparently meant a lot of “extracurricular rock climbing.” Long had subsequently joined the Air Force, which sent him to Nevada to work as a survival instructor and then, in 1954, to the Himalayas as part of the first recorded attempt to ascend the world’s fourth highest mountain, Makalu.
Of the photo, Schulthess writes: “Bill appears in the fog like a ghost. His rucksack, full of geological finds, almost pulls him to the ground. Fred [Darling] is the last to arrive. Although they are utterly exhausted and at the end of their strength, they first of all spread out their treasures—fossilized snails and sea shells, parts of fossilized trees and imprints of leaves. They are of the utmost scientific importance, because they are proof of the existence of vegetation millions of years ago. Our friends only settle down to their well-earned rest after they have described in detail where every piece was found.”
Glossopteris is an extinct tree that flourished across Australia, India, South Africa, South America, and Antarctica during the Permian. The tantalizing imprints of glossopteris leaves had caught the eye of Dr. E.A. Wilson (“Uncle Bill”) around the Beardmore Glacier, as he and his remaining three companions (Scott, Bowers, and Oates) trudged back from the South Pole in 1912. The party spent half a day “geologising,” despite their weariness and dangerously low food rations, and Wilson hauled the glossopteris specimens to his final resting place on the Ross Ice Shelf. Scott felt that the pause on a warm(ish) day to hunt for fossils did them good, and it’s not likely that a few extra pounds made the difference between life and death—but their refusal to jettison the specimen bag says something about the party’s priorities. The fossils were found in their tent and sent to Cambridge University; they formed part of Alfred Wegener’s argument for the theory of continental drift.
In 1960, when Schulthess published this photograph, the theory of plate tectonics did not yet exist in its modern form. As Naomi Oreskes writes in Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History of The Modern Theory of The Earth, “before the 1960s, there was no generally accepted global theory to explain the major features of the earth: the continents and oceans, the mountains and valleys, the volcanoes and earthquakes.”
Long’s specimens would be one tiny piece of that jigsaw puzzle.
Postscript: My second-hand copy of Schulthess’s book contains the bookplate of Hans and Elaine Jorgensen, a husband-and-wife photography and design team who were based in Washington State. They passed away recently, and I’m grateful to them for preserving what Stump calls “the original coffee table book on Antarctica.”