ANTARCTIC RESEARCH EXPEDITION—RONNE 373 
and a half long, stretched for some 5 miles in a northeasterly direction. 
Numerous small islands were 15 to 20 feet high, and most of them 
were bare. ‘The larger islands, however, were covered with snowcaps 
more than a hundred feet high, though bedrock was exposed at the 
water’s edge. 
Thanks to the skillful piloting of our skipper, Commander Isaac 
Schlossbach, U. S. N. (ret.), who was also second-in-command of the 
expedition, the vessel moved steadily among the huge shelf ice and 
glacier-formed bergs that blocked the entrance to the sound. At 
4 o’clock in the afternoon we reached 69°20’ S., our farthest point, 
a new record for ships navigating in this region of the Antarctic. 
To make a landing anywhere was virtually impossible. I was unable 
to see the 150-foot ice wall which marks the entrance to the sound and 
over which I had traveled in 1940, but it was obvious that these 
tabular bergs had recently broken off from the shelf ice of the sound 
itself.2 (Our plane flights several months later revealed that the 
shelf edge was discharging bergs such as those among which we were 
now sailing and that the face of the shelf had moved back 35 miles 
in 7 years.) Not only did the conditions ahead offer an immediate 
danger to our only means of transportation back to the civilized world, 
but had we continued to search for a suitable landing place farther 
south, a sudden change in the weather so late in the season might 
have blown these huge bergs in upon us and blocked exit for another 
year, The risk was too great, so I gave orders to return to the open 
Marguerite Bay. 
Our ship was moored in Back Bay, a cove a third of a mile from the 
base. As temperatures fell during the first week of May, it became 
safely frozen in the bay ice, and it remained so until the summer thaw 
of the following year partly released it from the icy grip (pl. 2, fig. 2). 
WINTER PREPARATION AND TRAIL PLANS 
The winter passed rapidly, and an immense amount of preparatory 
work had been accomplished by the time we were ready to start the 
field program. On July 15, [ led a sledge party up to the plateau, 
6,000 feet high, 17 miles east of our base to establish a meteorological 
station. This station was manned and operated during the entire 
flying season and, in conjunction with a station later established at 
Cape Keeler, 125 miles to the south of the Weddell Sea side, made 
it possible for H. C. Peterson, our meteorologist, to forecast the highly 
variable weather with good accuracy. 
By August all three planes had been unloaded from the ship, 
assembled, and made ready. I intended to use the single-engine, 
8 Ronne, Finn, The main southern sledge journey from East Base, Palmer Land, Antarctica, in Reports 
on Scientific Results of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, 1939-1941, Proc. Amer. Philos. 
Soc., vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 18-22, 1945. This journey confirmed the insularity of Alexander I Island. 
