Heimefrontfjella Geology

by

Lewis Juckes, geologist; 1964-1965


Geologists and surveyors from Halley Bay worked in the Heimefrontfjella Range, in western Dronning Maud Land, in the years 1963-66. In the late 1980s and 1990s others moved into the area, heading south from bases on the Dronning Maud Land coast. These included expeditions from Germany, Sweden and Finland.

Recently the Germans have published a batch of papers on their work there, and Wilfried Bauer has let me know of two useful websites where these and related items can be found. Admittedly there may only be a small group interested in the geology there but the sites have links to other papers too - such as their deep-drilling programme to the east of Heimefrontfjella.

The first website is www.polarforschung.de/Inhalt, from which you can download papers as PDF files (unless your security settings are too high, in which case you have to lower them).

A related source of information is www.pangaea.de which leads to their publications site. If you enter "Heimefrontfjella" into the search box, it brings up a list which is mainly of maps. Click on the map you want, and it will give a page with a brief description. The bottom line says "View dataset as HTML"; click on that. This brings a page that looks very similar but now at the bottom left is a small table, Under the heading "Format", the first line is "PDF". Click on the blue word "Link" to the right of this, and the map should download.

The maps seem to come out in the wrong orientation. If so, while viewing one with Adobe Acrobat, click on "View", "Rotate", "Counterclockwise". It would be nice to save the rotated version so that this does not have to be done every time but the nature of PDFs means that this is not possible with the software used by most people.

For some reason the map sheet for Scharffenbergbotnen ("Slippery Cove") did not come out when all the others in the series did. Later it was added but that may explain why it is in a rather different format. This is the sheet showing Steinnabben ("Bird Rock"), where one of our depots was.

Note that for historical reasons the Germans may use some place names which are different from the ones that we know. They call Milorgfjella "Kottas", Vestfjella (or the eastern end of it) "Kraul", and sometimes much of Dronning Maud Land is shown as "New Schwabenland".

8 January 2010


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