NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: About time - Antarctica
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Mar 5, 09:43 -0800
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Mar 5, 09:43 -0800
With absolutely no expertise in the matter, I would speculate that knowing the water depth to several fathoms of accuracy would be enough, so that springiness of the line or a somewhat angular drop to the bottom would not be of utmost concern. I suspect these folks were trying to just get a general idea of the shape of the seabed, how far out the continental shelf extended, slope of the seabed (gentle dropoff or abrupt), etc on the shores of a basically unexplored continent.
Lu
From: Gary LaPook <garylapook@pacbell.net>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Monday, March 5, 2012 9:27 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: About time - Antarctica
Very much like using a hand lead line except it was a much heavier weight on a long wire which was on a motorized reel. This device was called a "deep sea lead."
gl
--- On Mon, 3/5/12, Bruce Pennino <bpennino.ce@charter.net> wrote:
From: Bruce Pennino <bpennino.ce@charter.net>
Subject: [NavList] About time - Antarctica
To: NavList@fer3.com
Date: Monday, March 5, 2012, 7:50 AMJust finished reading The Storied Ice by Joan Boothe. A very good overview book about all major explorations of Antarctica; many references.Anyway, Antarctica explorers had a longitude problem. In 1926-27 the Discovery "was the first vessel in these waters capable of receiving Greenwich time signals directly, and her men used the signals to check longitudinal positions on the maps." Only Deception Island was properly located.Also,as the early explorers headed south ,they measured water depth for various reasons. How did they measure depths of several thousand feet with a drifting ship, angle of cable, flexibility(springiness)?Boothe gives a brief overview of Cook's explorations....she says he was an extraordinary man.
Bruce Pennino