From Name and address supplied
At the British Antarctic base of Halley Bay, the toilets were just seats
above a deep hole in the snow. A structural timber passed beneath one of them,
and jobbies (we did not call them that) could land on it, freeze, and build up
to a large mound.
One of the tasks of Saturday gash (there’s a versatile Antarctic word) was to
poke and lever at this mass, using a crevasse probe, to send it crashing into
the depths. I thought that calling it a bog chisel was purely local, and am
intrigued to find that the term is still used
(Feedback, 4 April
and Letters, 2 May, p 53).
The term for the accumulation was almost certainly abandoned with
the hut at the end of the 1960s: it was a stalagshite.
