Four-Year Effort Succeeds in Establishing Land Route To South Pole
Brian Wheater had no hint of the luck he was about to have as he rumbled across Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf in November 1990 on Linda, a Caterpillar D8 LGP bulldozer. He was in the middle of a three-machine convoy dragging a huge sled of gear toward the foot of a glacier for a round of seismic testing. The machines tracked a few hundred feet apart. Hills and troughs regularly hid them from each other as they traced a route declared safe by visual inspection from a C-130 days before. “It was like rollers on a lazy ocean,” Wheater recalls. He didn’t know it at the time, but that was a huge warning sign.
Wheater and Quintin Rhoton, at the dozer’s controls, were in the heated, glazed cab when suddenly the world exploded. The 140,000-lb dozer vanished through an 8-ft-thick cap of snow spanning a huge crevasse. It smashed through the snowbridge. The windows imploded and snow and ice rammed inside. “It entombed us,” Wheaton says. They would have been dead, but for a stroke of luck.