Slide show: Cold Digger

Bentley, far left, defended his PhD thesis at Columbia University and left the next day for the first leg of his journey. He boarded a ship bound for Antarctica from New Zealand with other team members (left to right): Ned Ostenso ’52, MS’55, PhD’62, the team’s assistant geophysicist and a UW assistant professor in the early 1960s; Tony Morency MS’66, PhD’68, the team’s mechanic; and Vern Anderson, the team’s chief glaciologist. Mario Giovinetto, not pictured, was the assistant glaciologist.

Bentley, the team’s chief seismologist, marked his twenty-seventh birthday — December 23, 1956 — “in the raw sea,” he recalls.