Antarctic and Southern Ocean Meteorology

The first member of the Bureau to work in the Antarctic was meteorologist, geographer, geologist and glaciologist Griffith Taylor who joined Captain Robert Scott's British expedition in the Terra Nova in 1910 and participated in the field parties which explored considerable areas of Victoria Land bordering the Ross Ice Shelf.

Born in London on 1 December 1880, Taylor moved with his family to Sydney in February 1893 and was educated at Sydney Grammar and King's School, Parramatta, where he was able to avoid the study of "moribund classics" and to "indulge to a greater degree than heretofore in matters geographical".

After graduating B.Sc. and B.Eng. in 1905, he delivered the first lectures in geography at the University of Sydney in 1907. In that year he was awarded an 1851 Scholarship to Cambridge University. He was offered an appointment to the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology in 1909 but was persuaded by Captain Scott to gain experience with glaciers in Europe before joining Scott's Antarctic expedition late in 1910 from which he returned to the Bureau in April 1912. As well as his work in the Bureau, Taylor was involved with surveys of the Canberra area, wrote a thesis on Antarctic geology for the degree of D.Sc. and lectured in geography at the University of Melbourne before being appointed McCaughey Professor of Geography at Sydney in 1920, the first to occupy such a chair in Australia.

He moved to the University of Chicago in 1928 and from there to the Chair of Geography in Toronto where he remained until his retirement in 1951. He then moved to Sydney where he died on 5 November 1963. I have a copy of a letter from Canada from Griffith Taylor, complimenting me on an article published in the Australian Geographer (Gibbs, 1945).

Bureau of Meteorology