November 30, 1975: Sunday

Got up at noon. Dr. Treves said, “Good morning.”

I said, in a very cross voice, “It’s about time I got up.”

Spent the afternoon x-raying, working on the chart of 1A, and talking to Kathy. She was embarrassed last night by Hamish. While we were talking, I asked her something, and she snapped back at me. But she apologized for being short. I said, “Never mind, that’s what I’m here for.”

She said, “You’re nuts, then.”

“I think we’ve had this conversation before and you still haven’t convinced me.”

But we were interrupted and she didn’t understand my meaning. She’d probably forgotten.

Sidebar:
From her tone of voice, it’s my hypothesis that she’s done a bit of thinking along these lines and formed strong opinions at some point, which may or may not be in conflict with my own opinions on the worth of friendship.

After dinner (she sat with us, finally) we put the core into boxes, two cardboard boxes to one plywood box, wrote weights on them, and nailed them shut. Kathy and I did all this. Then Cal and Dr. Treves banded them with steel bands. I went down to get some more at the BFC.

The drillers came by to pick Kathy up to take her somewhere to apologize for being rude last night. Said she’d be back in an hour. Never saw her the rest of the night.

Got all the information gathered for the chart and started plotting all the depths and grab sample locations. Kathy and I are having a big fight over the location of the extensions to the Ferrar and Taylor Valleys. Our data seems to be in conflict with the sounding chart data.

George Denton and his people came up for noodles. Sixteen people. A new record. Katsu was very busy.

Denton is fascinating. New ideas about glaciation in Antarctica and all of it relevant to DVDP. His ideas fit in very well with what we’ve observed. But none of his results are published (he’s waiting for DVDP to publish). But Dr. Treves, in drawing conclusions about DVDP 15, would like to quote Denton, or make use of his concepts.

See, it appears that the deposits that we drilled were carried up to the surface by anchor ice forming on the bottom. The ice shelf melts on the top and freezes on the bottom, concentrating all the debris on top. When it fluctuates, melting and dropping its load, the Sound floor deposits are formed.

As far as I know, no one has ever proposed this before. It all fits so very well together.