| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica's Age of Science. By Dian Olson Belanger. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. xxxiv, 494 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-87081-830-1.)

The epic contest to reach the South Pole ended in 1912, with victory to Roald Amundsen's efficient, well-equipped team of men and dogs, and the frozen death of Robert Falcom Scott's entire man-hauling expedition. Both men would have been dumbfounded to see the C-124 Globemaster II airplanes, Sno-Cat tractors, crevasse detectors, scientific instruments, and sturdy, semipermanent bases proliferating across the continent just forty-five years later. Sled dogs, dutifully brought in the mid-1950s, would have seemed superfluous even to them. Scientists and military personnel came to Antarctica as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957–1958)—an event that ushered in, as Dian Olson Belanger puts it, "Antarctica's Age of Science." Most scholars know the IGY only unconsciously; it was under the mantle of that international cooperative exercise that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Since then historians have debated the IGY's legacy: it heightened world tensions, yet it led to several treaties, including the one to keep Antarctica an international zone freely accessible for scientific research.

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