THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 7, 1995 TAG: 9506070032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY BONKO
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
THANK YOU, Brian Igelman, for re-acquainting me with the majestic, nearsighted emperor penguin of Antarctica.
And thank you for giving me a peek at the lake of lava inside the volcano Mount Erebus.
In my months in the antarctic - your humble columnist was a Navy journalist on assignment with Operation Deepfreeze - I wondered from time to time what it looked like deep in the heart of the crater of this volcano, which towered 13,000 feet above our base camp at McMurdo Sound like some fluffy white creation from Dairy Queen.
Now I know. It looks scary in there.
This is an active volcano.
Igelman, a photographer with WTKR before he trekked to the antarctic last October, and a member of Channel 3's news department once again, shot much of what you will see tonight at 8 on PBS in ``The New Explorers: The Crystal Laboratory,'' including the penguins.
I've been dying to go back to the bottom of the world - to revisit the hut from where, in 1911, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott started a journey to the geographic South Pole that would cost him his life. The next best thing to being there is watching the images captured by Igelman on his Sony Beta 400 camera. Chuck Kramer of Yorktown was another photographer who worked on ``The Crystal Laboratory.''
Scott's hut is much as it was 84 years ago with tins of onions, sugar, coffee and tea stacked neatly on shelves, with boots and socks waiting to be slipped into, and with readable copies of the London Illustrated News still about. The cold, dry air in the antarctic has preserved these things.
``For a photographer, the antarctic experience is unbelievable. There is a great vista, a great picture, waiting to be taken anywhere you look,'' said Igelman. His work in Antarctica extended beyond his assignment with the ``New Explorers.''
He helped to beam out pictures live from the South Pole to classrooms in the United States. The National Science Foundation selected an 18-year-old student from Northwestern, Elizabeth Felton, to visit the pole and report from where Scott wrote in his diary, ``Good God, this is an awful place.''
There is no colder, windier or more remote place on this planet.
Igelman said it was 48 below down there when he visited.
And the wind chill?
``Seventy below.''
While in that hostile environment, Felton talked live with students in the U.S. She picked up the copper-covered South Pole and moved it around. You have to do that every once in a while because glaciers have a tendency to shift some. (While I was in the antarctic, I had to be content with merely flying over the pole in a P2V-Neptune reconnaissance plane.)
``The first-ever live broadcast from the pole was an amazing feat of television when you consider the technical difficulties involved,'' said Igelman.
Igelman also sent pictures back to ABC for its pre-game Super Bowl show last January - for a whole-world-is-watching-the-Super-Bowl, even-the-people-at-the-bottom-of-the-world, segment.
Igelman says he's going back to Antarctica in November to work on another documentary. The seasons are reversed in the antarctic. Right about now, the scientists are settling in for a long, dark, cold winter.
It's a terrific place to study the heavens because the air is the Earth's cleanest, clearest and coldest. In tonight's documentary, host Bill Kurtis points out that from the bottom of the world, scientists ``unlock nature's secrets,'' and can see clearly into the past and future.
Throughout ``The Crystal Laboratory,'' Kurtis relates the trials of Scott, Roald Amundsen and Henry Shackleton as they pushed for the South Pole on foot, helped by sled dogs and ponies. Today, you hop on a plane and fly there.
And send back TV pictures. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Brian Igelman spent three months filming the PBS documentary.
by CNB