Scientific Colloquium
March 21, 2014
"The First Year of Human Habitation, and Science, at the Geographic South Pole"

The speaker was a scientific member of the first wintering-over party at the International Geophysical Year (IGY) Amundsen-Scott South-Pole Station in 1957. In addition to his scientific duties as the seismology lead and as an assistant to the ionosphere and aurora programs, he collected a comprehensive set of historical graphical material depicting the first wintering-over experience both inside and outside the South Pole Station. He will use this material to illustrate that first winter at the South Pole and will relate this experience to his nearly 50 years of active space-borne radio-sounding research at Goddard and to later scientific research conducted from the South Pole by others.
About the speaker:

Robert F. Benson is an emeritus scientist in the Geospace Physics Laboratory (Code 673) of the Heliophysics Science Division at Goddard. He obtained a B.S. in geophysics from the University of Minnesota before working as an IGY scientist in Antarctica. He returned to the University of Minnesota for a M.S. in physics and then earned a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska in 1963. After one year as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Minnesota he came to Goddard as a NASA/NRC Postdoctoral Research Associate before becoming a Civil Servant scientist in 1965 where his main research interest has been the investigation of linear and nonlinear plasma-wave phenomena using data from radio sounders on ionospheric and magnetospheric satellites.

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