Obituary: Peter Macdonald 1926-2022

Abstract

A blast on the ice, a spout of water rises into the air – unfortunately it all freezes into platelet ice and then falls back down to fill the hole. Peter Macdonald is using explosives to try and make a hole through the iceshelf outside Scott Base to install a sensor for his tide gauge in early 1957. Ultimately he was successful and started recording tidal data from the start of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) period, after overcoming problems with keeping the hole through the ice open through the winter and the freezing of recorders. He started the long record of sea-level changes for McMurdo Sound (one of the longest in Antarctica), made possible by his insistence for a well-defined datum for his tide gauge measurements in 1957.