Indeed, human progress from a long-range point of view 
and man’s eventual survival on this planet depend upon an 
increasingly better knowledge of his environment. 
I shall not take your time to go into details about the 
various aspects of the IGY program in Antarctica. ‘There 
are a few special high spots, however, that I think would 
interest you particularly. I suppose of all aspects of man’s 
environment the one that touches everyone most is meteor- 
ology, the study of the earth’s weather. Blanketing our 
earth in a closed system is the atmosphere that provides us 
with life-giving oxygen and water and also protects us from 
the lethal rays of the sun. Surprisingly little is known about 
the exchange of the air masses between the polar regions 
and the tropics. The vast Antarctic ice cap, which is large 
enough to cover the United States and Europe combined, 
has long been suspected of having a profound effect on 
weather and climate. The air over Antarctica today may 
be over Chile tomorrow. Certainly the hub of the atmos- 
pheric circulation of the Southern Hemisphere is located 
on Antarctica and just as certainly it is the world’s greatest 
factory for cold weather. 
We are now achieving coordinated observations from 
many stations in and around Antarctica which may provide 
a major breakthrough in our understanding of the role 
played in weather and climate by this vast, ice-covered con- 
tinent. I predict that this role will be so important that it 
will dramatize the urgency of providing the continuous 
flow of data necessary for the construction of world-wide 
weather maps through the maintenance of Antarctic 
weather stations. Such maps are becoming indispensable 
with man’s increased speed and global flights, which 
are surely coming with jet transportation. 
2 
