From World War I to IGY

Technological advancements in exploration

The period between World Wars I and II marks the beginning of the
mechanical, particularly the aerial, age of Antarctic exploration.
Wartime developments in aircraft, aerial cameras, radios, and motor
transport were adapted for polar operation. On November 16, 1928,
Alaskan bush pilot C.B. Eielson and Australian explorer George
Hubert Wilkins showed that using aircraft was possible in Antarctica
when they circled Deception Island in a wheel-equipped Lockheed
Vega monoplane. The American naval officer Richard E. Byrd quickly
followed with better-equipped, aircraft-supported expeditions (1928–
30, 1933–35, 1939–41, and 1946–47), in which progressively greater
use was made of ski-planes and aerial photography. Byrd, on
November 29, 1929, was first to fly over the South Pole (having flown
over the North Pole in 1926). American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth,
along with Canadian copilot Herbert Hollick-Kenyon completed the
first transcontinental flight from November 23 to December 5, 1935.
Their aerial crossing of uncharted lands and ice fields demonstrated
the feasibility of aircraft landings and takeoffs for inland exploration.
These early aerial operations and the extensive use of ship-
based seaplanes in Norwegian explorations of coastal Queen Maud
Land during the 1930s were forerunners of present-day aerial
programs.

Byrd’s fourth expedition, called “Operation Highjump,” in the summer

of 1946–47, was the most massive sea and air operation theretofore
attempted in Antarctica. It involved 13 ships, including two seaplane
tenders and an aircraft carrier, and a total of 25 airplanes. Ship-based
aircraft returned with 49,000 photographs that, together with those
taken by land-based aircraft, covered about 60 percent of the Antarctic
coast, nearly one-fourth of which had been previously unseen. Other
technological developments—such as advances in cold-weather
clothing, vehicles, and fuel for overland travel—further opened up the
continent’s interior for scientific exploration.