Accumulation between Mount Chapman and “Byrd” station, Antarctica

Sir,

I had the opportunity to re-measure the snow accumulation along the line of the “Byrd” station-Mount Chapman ice-movement markers (Brecher, 1967) this past Antarctic season. It seems to me rather interesting to note that while the mean accumulation between “Byrd” station and array V (300 km. from “Byrd” station) has decreased markedly, from 16.1 g. cm.⁻² yr.⁻¹ for 1962–65 to 11.5 g. cm.⁻² yr.⁻¹ in 1965–66 (the value between arrays V and VI has remained unchanged), the variations of accumulation along the line correspond very closely for the two time intervals with a coefficient of correlation of 0.926. This could well be a topographic effect.

The decrease of accumulation with time has also been observed at “Byrd” station, where measurements of 100 stakes have shown a decrease from 11.0 g. cm.⁻² yr.⁻¹ to 9.4 g. cm.⁻² yr.⁻¹ for this same time period (personal communication from R. L. Cameron).

My paper (Brecher, 1967) contained some minor errors which should be corrected as follows:

• i. On p. 575, lines 8 and 9, the standard deviations should be 3.0 and 3.1, respectively.

• ii. On p. 575, Table I, the column heading “Standard deviation” should read “Standard error”. The values were obtained from the following expressions:

where

is the sum of the squares of the deviations from the mean and n is the number of observations, and the observations are considered to be several measurements of the same quantity.

7 May 1967