\"Byrd\'s First Antarctic Expedition\" Laurence Gould Hand Signed Biography Page For Sale

Up for sale "Byrd's First Antarctic Expedition" Laurence Gould Hand Signed Bio Page.  

22, 1896 – June 21, 1995) was an American geologist, educator, and polar explorer. He made expeditions

to both the Arctic and Antarctic, and was chief scientist on Richard Evelyn Byrd's

first Antarctic expedition, which Gould described in his 1931 book Cold:

the Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey. He served as president

of Carleton College from

1945 to 1962, and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in

1964. His namesakes include the research vessel Laurence M. Gould as

well as Antarctic features including Gould Bay, Gould Coast, and Mount Gould. Gould was

born in Lacota, Michigan on

August 22, 1896. After completing high school in South Haven, Michigan in

1914, he went to Boca Raton, Florida and taught grades 1 to 8 in a one-room school for two years, while saving money for

college. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in

1916, but interrupted his education the following year to enlist in the U.S. Army following U.S. entry into World War I. He served in the Army until 1919, when he

returned to the university to resume his studies. After graduating in 1921 with

a B.S. degree in geology he joined the University of Michigan faculty as a

geology instructor while continuing his studies there. During his undergraduate

days, he was the founder of the Beta Tau chapter of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He also was an active member

in the university Society of Les Voyageurs.

He received an M.A. degree in 1923 and a D.Sc. degree in 1925, with a

dissertation on the geology of Utah's La Sal Mountains, and he advanced to assistant professor in

1926, and to associate professor in 1930. In the summer of 1926 Gould undertook

his first trip to the Arctic, serving as assistant director and

geologist with the University of Michigan Greenland Expedition. The following summer he was

geographer and topologist for George P. Putnam's expedition to survey the coast of Baffin Island in Arctic Canada. During

1928 to 1930 he accompanied Admiral Richard E. Byrd on Byrd's first expedition

to Antarctica, serving as the expedition's chief scientist and

second-in-command. On November 4, 1929 Gould and five companions began a

grueling 2½ month, 1500-mile dog-sledge journey into the Queen Maud Mountains, with

the primary purpose of providing ground support and possible emergency

assistance for Byrd's historic first airplane flight over the South Pole and a secondary purpose of conducting the

first geological and glaciological survey of an area that Gould called "a

veritable paradise for a geologist."[2] After the flight over the Pole in November

1929, Gould and his companions climbed Mount Fridtjof Nansen to

investigate its geology. The layered sandstones that Gould found in outcrops at

the mountain's peak helped confirm that Antarctica was linked geologically to

the Earth's other continents. The expedition's progress had been reported

regularly in the news media, and after his return he received the Byrd Antarctic Expedition

Medal in gold, the 1930 David Livingstone Gold Medal of the American Geographical

Society, and a Medal of the Mayor's Committee of the City of New York. On August 2, 1930, two

weeks after returning from Antarctica, Gould married Margaret ("Peg")

Rice in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She had been a student in one of his classes at the

University of Michigan.

In the months and years after returning from Antarctica, Gould traveled around

the US giving lectures on the experience. His 1931 book Cold: the

Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey described the dog-sledge trek,

recalling blinding blizzards, snow bridges that

collapsed into deep crevasses, and weather so cold that it nearly froze a

person's eyelids shut. Additionally, he published several scientific articles

about the findings of the Byrd expedition. In 1932 Gould and his family moved

to Minnesota after he accepted a position as a full professor at Carleton College where he founded and served as chairman

of the geology department. Gould was named president of the college in 1945,

holding that position until 1962. In 1962 he took his retirement package

from Carleton College, and then accepted a position on the geology faculty at

the University of Arizona where

he taught from 1963 through 1979.

He also served as President of the American Association

for the Advancement of Science. During his lifetime, Gould was the

recipient of 26 honorary degrees. In 1995 Carleton College renamed its college

library the Laurence McKinley Gould Library in his honor.

The R/V Laurence M. Gould,

a 76-m-long ice-strengthened research ship built in 1997 for the National Science Foundation and designed for year-round

polar operations, is named in his honor. He is also commemorated in the names of several

places in Antarctica, including Mount Gould, Gould Bay, and Gould Coast