Turned Antarctica into hot spot for astronomy research

Martin A. Pomerantz (1916-2008)
Posted Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 12:12 PM


REMEMBERANCES, WSJ, November 14, 2008
Martin A. Pomerantz [1916-2008]
Astrophysicist Turned Antarctica Into Hot Spot for Astronomy Research
By STEPHEN MILLER


By bringing astrophysical research to Antarctica, Martin A. Pomerantz fostered what he called "astronomy on ice."


"Almost single-handedly, he recognized the value of one of the world's most remote and inhospitable places as an ideal place to study the physical origin of the universe and other complex astrophysical phenomena," says Karl A. Erb, director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, which supports U.S. scientific efforts on the Earth's southernmost continent.


Today, Antarctica supports a thriving international community of scientists who watch stars, study cosmic rays and dark energy, and capture elusive neutrinos with tubes drilled more than a kilometer into the ice. The continent offers astronomers the clearest skies on Earth. A permanent hole in its magnetic field allows exotic particles from space to reach terrestrial detectors.


Dr. Pomerantz, who died Oct. 25 at age 91, used the 24 hours of daylight during the Antarctic summer to make high-altitude, 100-hour observations of the sun impossible anywhere else on Earth. From the data he compiled, he confirmed that the sun oscillates every five minutes, rather like a bell: "This great musical instrument," as he described it to the New York Times in 1981.

In turn, the NY Times article referes to an earlier Times article published  on 18 February 1992, quoting Dr. Pomerants.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Pomerantz was alone trying to drum up interest from peers and funding agencies to erect telescopes in Antarctica. "People wrote in books such things as, 'Why would anybody be stupid enough to go to Antarctica when you could be in Hawaii and then go to the beach in the afternoon?' " Dr. Pomerantz told the American Polar Society's oral-history project in 2000. (A major observatory complex is at the peak of Mauna Kea.)


A former journalism student at Syracuse University who converted to science after taking a "physics for poets" class, he was hired in 1938 by the Bartol
Research Foundation, then at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.


He began balloon investigations of cosmic rays, highly charged particles that enter the Earth's atmosphere from outer space. He traveled to northernmost Canada, Peru and India to release balloons into the upper atmosphere and collect data.


His doctoral thesis included the unexpected finding that the sun's magnetic field was far less intense than was believed.


During World War II, he was lent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he researched radar. Back at Bartol, he became an expert on the structure of the Earth's magnetic field, which is sometimes depicted as a bar magnet stuck through the Earth's axis but is, in reality, far more complex.


Dr. Pomerantz was named director of the Bartol Foundation in 1959, just as new research possibilities in Antarctica were opening. In 1960, he installed a cosmic ray detector at McMurdo Station, the U.S. research center on the Antarctic coast. Later, he would set up a detector at the South Pole and conduct experiments there himself during summers -- 26 in all.


Life in Antarctica could be scary and bracing, he recalled. He suffered from insomnia -- "big eye" in South Pole parlance -- enduring uncomfortable sleeping quarters where "you had to put the beer in just the right place so it would not freeze. It would freeze on the floor and it was terribly hot above." But the camaraderie was great and he later said that one of his lifetime regrets was never having spent the winter at the remote South Pole station.


Frustrated that he couldn't persuade astronomers or funding agencies to commit to putting telescopes at the South Pole, he bootlegged some of his cosmic ray grant money in 1979 to set up a solar telescope. The resulting 100-plus hours of continuous solar observations set a new standard for helioseismology -- the study of "sunquakes" and the sun's internal structure. Within a few years a slew of new astronomy projects were under way at the South Pole.


Explaining how Dr. Pomerantz was able to highjack the funds needed for his solar study, Stuart Pittel, the current director of what is now the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, says "Martin did things the way he wanted to and there was nobody to tell him no."


Dr. Pomerantz retired in 1990. Already possessed of many tributes, he contemplated retiring to a typical senior scientist's role. But he also had a yen for business and partnered with his son, Martin A. Pomerantz Jr., to open a Nissan car dealership in Georgia. "He really threw himself into it," says his
daughter, Jane Anne Staw.


In 1994, he proudly attended the dedication of the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole, the main research facility at the U.S.


Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Earlier, a part of the Antarctic continent was dubbed the Pomerantz Tableland.