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US Army first engineer arctic task force.
US Army first engineer arctic task force. |
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Thomas Bohan's pictures from summer 1957
Thomas Bohan's pictures from summer 1957 |
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Project 23.1
The Whiteout Project, Project 23.1, had as its goals the observation of "whiteouts" caused by fog, and the study of the means of dissipating them. Branch Chief Bob Gerdel ("Doc Gerdel") was in overall charge, with Howie Reiquam, who had recently received his M.S. in meteorology from the University of Chicago was the project director in 1957. (Ultimately, in 1959 I became director of the project, following Howie's departure from SIPRE.)
Howie had been in the military during WWII, probably in the navy. During our time together in 1957, he told me stories of working the control tower for a landing strip on a South Pacific island. The landing strip was so hilly that they once had a collision between two planes on the ground that the tower was unaware of, he said. The name "whiteout" caused a great deal of confusion among visiting honchos.
There were three separate phenomena referred to by that name, only one of which involved fog. The most interesting "whiteout" phenomena is that where the sky is overcast in such a way that the viewer cannot see the horizon, not being able to distinguish the cloud cover from the snow cover, and can be fooled in such a way that he thinks a black sign 50 feet away is a mountain 50 miles away. The third phenomenon bearing the name is simply a blizzard where visibility is very low.
Much as I was happy to have been able to go to Camp Fistclench to participate in the Whiteout Project (I was an undergraduate physics major at the University of Chicago, working in the Department of Meteorology at the time), I always thought that it was a sign of blind bureaucracy that it existed on the Ice Cap.
The fact is that it essentially never gets foggy where we were, unlike Thule, for example. My belief at the time was that the reason the project was at Camp Fistclench was that that was where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had its research station. It did not have a station in TUTO (where the fog was more common but where there was no airport) or at Thule, where there was a lot of fog that interrupted operations but which was an Air Force, not an Army operation.
Not only did fog occur only rarely at Site II/Camp Fistclench, but the fog that did occur was not amenable to dispersal by the means we planned to use. It was a warm fog. This was my "contribution" to the Project, serendipitously securing information that made the Project fruitless, its ultimate goal being to learn how to disperse fog that interfered with air operations. Silver iodide requires fog droplets colder than about -6C.
I found that the fogs that rolled in at Site II was actually above freezing. Dry ice is also not of much use with such warm fogs. (There was a WWII technique for dispersing warm fogs, called FIDO for "fog, intensive dispersal of," and consisting of blowing warm air into the fog, at the expense of a huge consumption of energy for heating the air.
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Mid-June--Beginning of season photo, showing project wannigan, sled delivering project equipment, and instrument shelter (not yet in final location). Shot taken looking in direction of ice-coring project, just visible in background several hundred yards away. The project site was about 1.5 miles from Camp Fistclench/Site-II.
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Another view of the project wannigan, bearing the name Renée. The figure is neither Howie nor I (TLB). Probably it is a signal corpsman taking theodolite readings on a rising black balloon of calibrated buoyancy as a means of determining wind direction and magnitude as a function of elevation (the elevation as a function of time being determined by the buoyancy). Note the location of the instrument shelter, near to which is a black sign on a post. The sign is a one-foot square piece of plywood, one of 16 I painted a uniform black and mounted on a 2x4. Four each were placed in a line extending about a mile in each of the four cardinal directions from the wannigan as visibility references. The line to the south also served to give notice that the surface was not uniformly flat, as it might have seemed. There was actually a dip and a corresponding rise in the southerly direction from the site. The signs not yet deployed can be seen leaning against the equipment to the left of the theodolite.
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One of the visibility signs readied for hauling to location.
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A short time later showing a clear view of the nearby coring project and the just dug (by TLB) snow lab, as yet not roofed over. Note the three weasels, two belonging to the coring project and one belonging to the whiteout project. They were manufactured in South Bend, Indiana, in 1947 and had a top speed of about 24 mph, as determined from occasional pick-up races back to camp. As instructed, I (TLB) pulled maintenance every Saturday on the whiteout project weasel, changing oil and doing a complete lube job on the vehicle that had traveled at maximum 20 miles since the previous job through what was, to say the least, not a dusty environment. I have forgotten whose idea that was, Howie's or the Army's.
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Another shot of the project site with instrument shelter, possibly taken the same day as previous photo.
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My 19-year-old self checking the temperature, etc., in our instrument shelter. The fact that it is still early in the season can be seen from the height of the shelter above the snow surface. Coring project visible in the background.
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Out-of-focus shot of our dry-ice-making facility. The technique was simply to allow gaseous carbon dioxide to expand from high pressure cylinder into a small, closed container. The resultant adiabatic cooling of the gas lowered its temperature below the sublimation point of carbon dioxide, resulting in a solid cake of the stuff.
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Howie Reiquam doing microscopy in the now-roofed-over cold lab shown in the second photo above. This is not a fake shot; he is examining snow flakes captured on collodion or the like on a microscope plate.
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During the early July storm, shortly before Howie and I left for coring project and then for Camp. About 22 of us left the coring site with the three weasels, using the telephone line for guidance. (Read KN6H' story by following this link). Fairly shortly two of the weasels conked out, probably because of oxygen starvation as the wet snow clocked their air intakes. So all but one or two of us walked in. The temperature was not low, possibly right at freezing, but the wind was fierce (probably in excess of 70 mph in gusts) and the snow was wet and thick. When we reached camp, we did not realize it and found ourselves, at least some of us, walking on top of one of the Jamesways from an earlier season, which had started out the 1957 season already low down in the snow. First Sgt. Stolkenberg (sp?) came raging out when he heard the sound of hoof beats on his roof. We were saved, and went directly to the mess haul for steaks, etc. The storm continued for at least 48 hours, during which we were forbidden to leave our Jamesways.
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TLB auguring a hole somewhere in the vicinity of the project site. The hole was about 4 inches in diameter and 30 feet or more deep. Once it was in place and had come to thermal equilibrium, a temperature sensor was lowered into it, and the temperature recorded as a function of depth below the surface. Because of the nature of the heat conductance down into the snow/ice an oscillating temperature profile was observed, with the highs and lows being associated with summers and winters at the location. The oscillations damp out as the depth increases, with the temperature ultimately going to the average annual temperature at the site. I have forgotten how far down one must go for this, but I did observe the oscillations.
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Sometime after the July storm.
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Fence experiment in 1957...
Fence experiment in 1957... |
For the uninitiated, I note that SIPRE stood for the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It had its headquarters in the late 1950s first in Wilmette, IL, and then in Evanston, IL, both north suburbs of Chicago on Lake Michigan. I spent time in both offices, working under Robert Gerdel ("Doc Gerdel," a man in his late 50s who had been deafened as a child and relied--quite successfully--on lip reading.
I believe that his PhD was in chemistry.
The civilian director of SIPRE during those years was named Gillis, as I recall, maybe Robert. I knew Gillis somewhat, and enjoyed at least one jeep ride with him driving along the Greenland coast below Thule in summer, 1957.
Over Gillis was Col. Clark. SIPRE changed its name to the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in the 1960s and moved to Hanover, NH -its new location chosen at least in part because of the influence Dartmouth College professors had with the agency. By the time of the move, both Marv Diamond and Howie Reiquam had left the agency, Howie joining Boeing in Seattle.
The "fence project" was as far as I know the brain child of Marvin Diamond (Marv) of SIPRE. He, along with Howard Reiquam (Howie) was the director of the Whiteout Project mentioned previously. Howie and he, neither of whom enjoyed being exiled to the Greenland Ice Cap three months of the year, took turns going to Greenland.
Marv's involvement in the fence project was, I believe, completely separate from his work on the Whiteout Project.
Accordingly, in 1957, when Howie was the man on the spot with the Whiteout Project, Marv showed up late in the 1957 season to oversee the construction of various types of snow fences on the Ice Cap. The goal of the fence project was to determine which of several fence designs was best for building up a runway-shaped plateau above the surface of the Ice Cap, a plateau that could be used to land heavy planes. In other words, the fences were to act as snow fences, causing snow to fall preferentially on their leeward side.
I don't know whether there had been any small-scale field testing of the various fence designs. The test on the Ice Cap was far from small scale, and involved most of the military and civilian personnel of Camp Fistclench working for several full days in construction of the fences. In addition to hammering reinforced paper strips onto wooden posts during the construction phase, I spent a day taping colored tape onto several hundred bamboo poles.
In doing the taping I worked with a full-time SIPRE employee from the Keewanaw Field Station. The day was perfectly clear, with temps in the 20s, a painfully beautiful day on the Ice Cap marred only by the pain that developed in my fingers after about half an hour of work, as I found that I could not do the taping while wearing any type of gloves or mittens. In the midst of admiring the wonderful day while trying to ignore the pain in my fingers, I was drawn into a conversation with my helper, gradually realizing that he was a bit unbalanced.
He directed the conversation repeatedly to the possibility of people being left behind on the Ice Cap at the end of the season. From there he expounded on his religious faith and the help that his bible provided in comforting him when he got frightened. (At another time and place, I heard Doc Gerdel say with respect to this employee that he was afraid he was headed for "another breakdown," given that he was carrying his bible around with him again.)
At noon, I pleaded my finger pain and as a result the bamboo-taping operation was moved into one of the larger buildings of the Camp. That was interesting in itself, since I got to observe an egregious failure of human relations on the part of the young army individual (perhaps a corporal) who was in charge of the 20 or so GIs in the room. (I have forgotten what they were doing--perhaps they were also taping bamboo).
This young fellow began talking to the GIs about how terrible GIs were, how he would never want a daughter of his to have anything to do with a GI or to even live in the vicinity of an army base. Even as a not-very-seasoned 19-year-old, I was amazed at the guy's lack of judgment in saying things like this, which of course put him in a minority of one in the room.
The purpose of the bamboo was to provide the means to measure the depth of the snow augmentation as a function of position with respect to the various fences, as the years went by and the snow continued to accumulate in the production of the desired landing strip. Alas, it was all for naught, as I describe below.
So, the marked bamboos were stuck in the Ice Cap in a predetermined pattern mapped across the area, and the periphery of the area, selected for the landing strip. It was a mile or two from Camp, in the SE direction as I remember it. Then, for at least the next two day, I assisted in hammering strips of reinforced paper strips onto the vertical wood posts that had also been deployed in that area. (See photos.) The array was several hundred feet long and perhaps a hundred feet in width.
I do not recall the various fence designs used, but believe that they pertained primarily to the type of material hammered onto the posts. (I note in passing that we did not have anything as useful as staple guns--maybe they had not been invented yet--but strictly had to use hammers in attaching the papers to the posts.) I only worked with one design, that using continuous paper strips that were on the order of 1 foot in width. (See photos.)
A day or two after the job was completed, I exited my Jamesway (we were still living on the surface in 1957) to find strips of fence paper wrapped around my Jamesway and everywhere else as well. A moderate wind blowing from the fence to the Camp had undone the work of several hundred man hours. The fence project was for all practical purposes over with. No one said what some of us were thinking, namely that the experiment might have been thought out a bit better before deployment, with perhaps some small-scale preliminary runs being done beforehand. In my opinion the test of concept could have been set in a couple of hours, with the full deployment, with the three hundred taped depth measurement gauges prepared only after the concept had been shown to work.
In spite of the lack of criticism in the Camp, Marv was everywhere telling people that the experiment was worthwhile, since "the failure provided us with valuable information." In spite of the brave front he put up, I suspect that the failure of the snow fence project was one of the things that led Marv to leave SIPRE in the summer of 1958. (That is another story, as his abrupt departure from SIPRE in 1958, the year he was supposed to have his turn running the Whiteout Project on the Ice Cap, is what led to my de facto, and later de jure, promotion to Project Director). Whatever the reason Marv left SIPRE for the National Center fo Atmospheric Research, he seems to have had a successful career at the latter location. I once saw his name mentioned in TIME magazine in connection with his demonstration that cannon fired at Queen Victoria's coronation could have been heard at the great distances reported, as a result of the atmospheric conditions then prevailing.
The following four photographs show the construction of the set of snow fences in late summer 1957. They were about two miles from Camp, probably to the SE. The purpose was to determine which design of fence would be best for achieving the end goal, which was the creation of a large runway-shaped plateau that could be used as a permanent landing strip for large aircraft. Unfortunately, less than a week following the dedication of several hundred man-hours to the construction of the fences, they were all destroyed by a moderate wind blowing from the fence to the camp. During the next two seasons, while I was back at Camp Fistclench, no further efforts were made consistent with the original work.
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At an early stage in fence making, when it consisted just of an array of wooden two-by-fours and a bamboo forest, the latter consisting of three hundred bamboo poles on which I and others had placed colored tape at measured intervals. The marked bamboo was intended to provide a means of measuring the depth profile of the snow accumulation expected to occur over successive years. In this photo, both the two-by-fours and a couple of the bamboo poles can be seen. Note the reinforcement members affixed to the two-by-fours. Their orientation indicates what were considered to be the most critical wind directions.
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A view of the project after some of the horizontal fence components had been affixed. Toward the right of the photo is the fence design to which I applied the horizontal components; they consisted of continuous bands of fiber-reinforced paper approximately a foot (30 cm) in width. Several of the marked bamboo poles are visible in the foreground of this photo.
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The operation. As the weasel moved from post to post, the workers (including myself; Howie was driving the weasel I was mounted on) would hammer the paper to the posts. After the whole shebang failed, it was suggested that perhaps the wide paper without openings gave too much surface area for the wind to develop force against it.
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The fences at the point where they were nearly completed, and two days from destruction. Note that the fences were not all oriented in the same direction. That did not matter when the wind took the horizontal elements (paper) down. It all went.
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TUTO-Thule and environs...
TUTO-Thule and environs... |
When I arrived in Tuto in June, 1957, Howie Reiquam was already there. I had been delayed by some paperwork problems, and probably reached Greenland around the 15th. It was overwhelmingly exciting for me. My first morning there was a wind blowing off the Ice Cap at 40-50 mph (strong enough anyway for one to support most of one's weight as one leaned into it). I was surprised to see snow in the air, since I had studied the Thule climate in the materials prepared by SIPRE and saw that the temps during June were not below freezing.
Of course, Tuto was at least 1000 feet higher than Thule, and the adiabatic lapse rate by itself would indicate that June temps in Tuto could easily be below freezing even without the air draining off the Ice Cap.
I ended up spending about a week in Tuto, following Howie out to Fistclench (which we all called "Site II," by the way) several days after he had made the trip out by air.
The reason I did not travel with him was that I had been arrested in Thule!
What had happened was that in an effort to make my time useful, and perhaps at Howie's suggestion, I volunteered my services to a couple of geophysicists who were doing seismic measurements in the hills above Thule. Since they already had as a technician a graduate student from Cal Tech, I expected my contribution would be fairly low level, though I did not anticipate how low.
We four set out from Tuto in an open Jeep containing geophones, sledge hammers (for simulating seismic impulses), and a pound of dynamite and dynamite caps (for simulating a really big seismic impulse). I like to think that the caps had been brought previously to the research site, but do not remember.
Once at the site, the Cal Tech technician was sent out with the sledge hammer to strike blows at some distance from the geophones. On the shaft of the hammer was an inertial switch with a wire extending back to the equipment connected to the geophone, which was imbedded a short distance beneath the surface. In that manner the instant of the blow could be recorded as well as the instant the impulse reached the geophone.
Pretty basic stuff, but very interesting to me, who was mainly standing around with my hands in my pockets listening to the geophysicists discussing how impressed they were with their Cal Tech assistant.
I was there also when the dynamite was set off, and when the Jeep got stuck in the mud. It was at that point that my value to the project became apparent. I volunteered to walk into Thule to get the help needed to extricate the vehicle. Meanwhile, unknown to me of course, a plane to bring Howie and me out to Site II had become available and he went without me.
The stuck Jeep was several miles from, and 500-1000 feet higher than, Thule. The walk took a couple of hours. On the way I noted and plucked representative flowers I encountered. I had read previously that there were something like 65 flower/plant species in Greenland.
My impression was that I saw nearly that many on my walk. I also took an occasional photograph of my destination. With exposed arms, I could observe the truth of the statement that there were no mosquitoes at that latitude in Greenland. I had read or heard that the "mosquito line" lay about 100 miles to the south. There were some flying insects, but they were not numerous and none of them bit me.
Eventually I reached the Tuto-Thule road and strode on into Thule--where I was stopped by an airman pointing a rifle (M-16?) at my chest and saying "JET." To this day, I am embarrassed as a one-time budding meteorologist that I did not guess that the countersign was "STREAM." Anyway, not saying it led to my being arrested as part of the "Red Alert" festivities that had been called for that day, and confined in an office, surrounded by filing cabinets but otherwise not restrained, for several hours.
It was during this period that "our" flight to Site II left.
Eventually I was released to some people (I have forgotten whom or whether they were army or civilians) down from Tuto. The Alert, however, had not ended, and as we drove out of Thule on our way to Tuto we passed airmen holding rifles spaced every few hundred feet. Occasionally one of them would decide we needed to be stopped, but, whether because I recited the countersign or just said "That's okay. I have already been arrested" we were not impeded.
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The two geophysicists I volunteered my services to while awaiting transport to Site II (Fistclench) in mid-June. I believe that that is Mount Dundas in the background. We were located a few miles to the NE of Thule. One can see in the photograph the wires leading up and to the left from the geophone monitor. These are attached to the switch on the handle of the sledge hammer used to generate a seismic pulse and in that manner to permit the monitor to record the time interval from the creation of the pulse until it is received at the geophone. Because of reflecting layers it was in general received more than once, depending on where in the vicinity it was created.
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I believe that this was taken shortly after I left the geophysicists to walk into Thule for help in extricating their Jeep from a mud hole. The view is the same direction as that of the previous photograph and I appear to be slightly farther from Dundas, probably because I started to walk out going in the direction from which we came after leaving the road. On the other hand, it may be that we had moved to a different site at the time this photograph was taken. Certainly, the men and equipment are not present. A number of features nearer than Dundas can be identified in this shot that are present in the previous one.
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This shot was taken the same day, probably as I was walking to Thule. I am unable to determine the direction of the scene. Unlike the next shot, there is some vegetation visible. Note the tractor tread imprint.
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Another scene taken during the walk to Thule. The foreground resembles the surface of the Moon or Mars, like much of the terrain in the vicinity of Thule and TUTO.
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My walk has gotten me to the TUTO-Thule road and on my way to being
arrested in Thule, which was having a "Red Alert" drill at the time, about which the Army people apparently had not been informed.
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Mail to: Tomas Bohan ![Em@il to: Tomas Bohan](../pic/email1.gif)
Updated at oktober 07, 2018
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© Copyright: By Steffen Winther. Owner of the Thuleforum — All rights reserved. December, 3rd, 1996 - .
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