Chippings

THE POLAR ROUTE. For anyone visiting Japan on business or pleasure the trip by the Polar Route is recommended, especially in summer. Flying over Alaska one has splendid views of the Yukon River, the Alaska Range and in particular the McKinley Group, which one flies past quite close. After leav­ing Anchorage for Tokyo one crosses a fine range of glaciers, ice-caps and peaks.

R.G.

ROCKS FOR CLIMBING. Dr. Peter Stubbs, New Scientist No. 448, 17th June, 1965, discusses how the holds available to the climber are very much a matter of geology. A classic instance is the Matterhorn; the repeated failures of Whymper, Tyndall and others to climb the mountain from the Italian side were partly due to the outward shelving strata. The holds were found to be more accommodating on the Swiss side. The earlier assaults on Everest from the north were brought up short by the steepening of the rocks which resembled the overlapping tiles on a roof; above the South Col the opposite edges of the layers jutted upwards and afforded a much better purchase. Dr. Stubbs goes on to describe the qualities desirable in the best rocks for climbing, millstone grit for its coefficient of friction, the limestone of the Dolomites for its verticality, its thin cracks ideal for gripping pitons and so lending itself readily to the laborious techniques of mechanised climbing, the clean frost-riven crystalline granite rocks of the Mont Blanc aiguilles and the almost too- rough gabbro of the Cuillins, giving some of the best rock climbing in the world. But it is to the rhyolites, fine grained cousins of the granites, that we owe the main body of our native climbs, in North Wales, the Lake District, Glencoe and Ben Nevis; this type of rock has the merit of tremendous diversity, cracks, chimneys, ‘side’ holds, ‘jug’ holds and exquisite small incut holds which often turn up unexpectedly just as they are wanted, acute angled corners, horizontal edges for hand traverses, spikes for belays, finely situated isolated little ledges and, for beauty, trees and flora in abundance.

H.G.W.

HOW OLD ARE THE GLACIERS? This question is asked by Andre Reynaud in Les Alpes for the second quarter of 1964. Early 19th century geologists, by analysis of glacial debris, concluded that as much as 1,000 million years ago glaciers covered what is now South Africa and North America. Recent methods of dating have established three well defined glacial periods: —

1) The Pre Cambrian, 600 million years ago, of which traces have been found in North Greenland, Australia, India and China.
2) The Permo Carboniferous, 325 million years ago, extend­ing over Central Africa and Australia. This coincided with a warm, humid climate in the northern hemisphere, in which flourished the exuberant flora of the European coal measures.
3) The Quaternary Glaciations, beginning 1 million years ago and alternating with warm periods. The last glacia-tion, of which Homo Sapiens was a witness, finished in about 15,000 B.C.

The alpine glaciers are as old as the Alps, some tens of millions of years, but the actual ice is very much younger; being a plastic substance it flows downhill, eventually melting at the tongue of the glacier. The famous moraine block on the Lower Aar Glacier, which in 1827 sheltered Hugi of Solothurn, moved 5-343 Km. in the following 135 years; in the interior of the glacier, 400 metres deep in places, the rate is lower and the ice at the bottom may well be 500 or even 1,000 years old.

An attempt to measure the rate of flow was initiated by Paul-Louis Mercanton who, in 1926, placed 8 shell cases in the neve on the Jungfraujoch, two on the Berne and six on the Valais side; in several centuries these should appear at the tongues of the Guggi and Aletsch glaciers. In 1928 he put 19 more, sealed and containing documents, into the higher cre­vasses of the Rhone glacier and these are due to appear be­tween 190 and 250 years later.

Isotope analysis can be used to determine the age of ice. Snow crystals formed in winter contain fewer atoms of Oxygen 18 than those formed in summer, thus the ice core of a boring gives full information on age as do the rings of a tree trunk. A borehole to 411 metres in Northern Greenland showed that the ice from the bottom was about 1,000 years old. The hydrogen isotope Tritium, which is continually formed in the atmosphere and has a half-life of 12J years, can be used to determine age up to 100 years. A Greenland sample taken from a depth of 40 metres was found to be 70 years old; extrapolating from this the ice on the rocky bottom, some 3,400 metres below the surface of the ice-cap, must have been formed more than 10,000 years ago, while that which has been pressed outwards and has made the 400 Km. journey to the coast may be 30,000 to 40,000 years old.

A Carbon 14 method has also been developed, this consists of measuring the Carbon 14 content of the carbon dioxide present in the air trapped in the ice at the time of its forma­tion. The half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,568 years, so the method holds up to 50,000 years, but a lot of ice has to be melted to give a single small sample of air.

H.G.W.

A NEW CLIMB ON GREENHOW END — DEEPDALE

SARGASSO. 435 ft. v. difficult. Avegetatious route, but follows a natural line and has a nice finish.
1st ascent: J. Richards, G. Batty (alternate leads), 1st August, 1965.
Start. 20 yards down the scree to the left of Deepdale Gully. Two short walls and a rib further left give a rock route through the lower jungle to a conspicuous V-shaped nick in the skyline.

1. 35 ft. Up the little wall on good holds, across a grass ledge to belays on top of jammed blocks.
2. 40 ft. Climb above the belay and scramble up to the left to a stance by a dead Rowan at the side of a steep rib.
3. 30 ft. Step left on to the rib and climb pleasantly up to more grass, which is followed by a Rowan belay at the foot of a chimney slanting up to the left.
4. 80 ft. Climb the chimney by bridging to an awkward exit on the left, continue up grass to belay.
5. 50 ft. Scramble back to right to good belay at foot of rib
6. 35 ft. Climb rib on good uncut holds to belay beneath grassy slabs.
7. 25 ft. Start the slabs up on the left, make an awkward step right and climb direct to grass ledge with small cave. Belay on right.
8. 40 ft. Climb above the belay up a rib overlooking Deep-dale Gully to a stance and small belays, where a runner can be arranged to protect a downward traverse leftwards along a grass ledge to a good stance and belay on the slabby wall.
9. 60 ft. Using the belay as a hand hold make a strenuous pull to a narrow grass ledge which is followed up to the right to a square cut corner. Climb this to an overhung ledge on the right which is traversed awkwardly to a short V-chimney. Climb the chimney with the aid of an excellent spike on the right, further good holds assist the step on to a rib overlooking the gully. In a further 20 ft. there is a poor stance and assorted belays.
10. 40 ft. climb above the belays, the angle eases and scram­bling leads to the top.

J.R.

GLORIES. In his book, The Lakeland Peaks, W. A. Poucher speaking of Glories says “These appear as a coloured ring round the shadow cast by the climber on the mist. .. especially if he is on a ridge enclosing a combe filled with mist. . . Each member of a climbing party can only see his own glory.” A glory is thus understood to be a type of halo that surrounds what would otherwise be called a Brocken Spectre. When doing a recent winter traverse of the Snowdon Horseshoe how­ever, my companion and I had an experience which does not seem to conform to the usual circumstances of this phenome­non. We had just started along Crib Goch when we noticed our shadows cast across the valley on the slopes of Glyder Fawr. The shadows were life size and were both encircled by one set of concentric rings in all the colours of the spectrum. Both of us could see the phenomenon and the atmosphere was very clear, with a total absence of mist. Mr. Poucher himself could offer no full explanation when approached on the matter and described the occurrence as “an incident which must be unique”.

D.J.F.

THE RAPE OF WIDDYBANK FELL. Under the title “Where will will all the flowers go?”, New Scientist, 7th July, 1966, page 6, clarifies certain features of the proposal by the Tees Valley and Cleveland Water Board for a dam and reservoir in Upper Teesdale which cannot be anything but deeply disturbing to all of us who love the high and isolated regions of the Pennines.

The scheme is likely to destroy “a natural experiment which has been in progress for not less than ten thousand years”. The Upper Teesdale assemblage of rare species preserves fragments of the vegetation which was widespread in Britain and North Western Europe 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Their survival, as was pointed out three years ago for the flora of the Alps by Piccard and Stickelburger, depends on the maintenance of an adequate breeding stock to ensure that the essential characters continue to be reproduced in their progeny. The destruction of even a fraction of these populations would diminish out of proportion the value of the whole to geneticists. Detailed studies of the Upper Teesdale microclimate, which may well be entirely disrupted by a reservoir, have only just become possible with the recent development of transistored recording instruments compact enough to be used in the field.

The reason for the reservoir is I.C.I.’s need, by 1970, for more water to supply its three Tees-side factories. Alternative supplies could be obtained by building a dam elsewhere but this would cost a million or two more and take at least a year or two longer. The issue boils down to “are the flowers on Widdybank Fell worth a million pounds?”

The I.C.I. Magazine, in a recent issue, dismisses another alternative, the desalination of sea water, as too expensive, though it might be possible in a plant of high capacity asso­ciated with nuclear power to reduce the cost to a reasonable figure. It goes on to say that the agriculture at Cow Green is limited to sheep grazing, that minerals are no longer mined there and that there is no outstanding natural beauty apart from the valley itself which has the appeal of solitude. It con­tends that few of the flora are rare in the absolute sense but it concedes that as a collection of unusual species brought to­gether in one area they are of great interest. They are mostly minute flowers, nearly all likely to be overlooked except by the knowledgeable, though they “in some cases are believed to represent survivals from the Ice Age”. The reservoir, the total area of which would be 700 acres, abuts on one side of Widdy­bank Fell and would inundate about 20 acres of special botanical interest which contain one of the most interesting communities of flowers in the dale. LCI. has offered to finance a research programme on these 20 acres and to finance the provision of a warden during construction to ensure that no damage is done to Widdybank Fell above top water level. I.C.I, has also carried out microclimate studies on the Fell and experts have been consulted on the question of water table levels.

All this reads rather like the story of the young lady who had an illegitimate child and pleaded that it was only a little one.

It is not only the flooding of an irreplaceable area that is so saddening in this scheme, it is the far greater invisible and inexpressible tragedy that it will bring in its train. The noise, the mess, the traffic and the human invasion during the con­struction period, the artificial look of the finished work, the control of one of the few remaining untamed rivers in the British Isles, the seemingly inevitable planting of ugly conifers and above all the demonstration to the world of British in­difference to conservation of what is rare and beautiful when Britain’s own financial benefit is concerned. As New Scientist points out, a number of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa have courageously rejected immediate financial gain in favour of the conservation measures urged on them by the (largely British) World Wildlife Fund, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and other bodies. The danger of the scheme in Upper Teesdale is that it could prove a drastic setback to conservation all over the world.

H.G.W.