Charles Winthrop Molesworth Swithinbank,MBE (17 November 1926 – 27 May 2014)[1] was a Britishglaciologist and expert in the polar regions who has six places in theAntarctic named after him.
He was born inPegu,British Burma, the son of Bernard Swithinbank of theIndian Civil Service, and educated atBryanston School. He served for two years with theRoyal Navy before going up toPembroke College, Oxford to read Geography in 1946, graduatingDPhil in 1955.
Having developed an interest in glaciology he became a research fellow at theScott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, studying the distribution of sea ice and its effect on shipping in the Canadian Arctic, which involved the first hand observation of sea ice conditions from aboard the icebreakerLabrador in theBaffin Island region.
In 1959, he moved to theUniversity of Michigan to take up an appointment as a research associate and lecturer, spending three summers in the Antarctic investigating the glaciers which feed theRoss Ice Shelf in New Zealand’sRoss Dependency. He then returned to Britain to take up a further research appointment at theScott Polar Research Institute, spending two summers and a winter in the Antarctic as the British representative at the Soviet Novolazarevskaya ice shelf station.
He worked at the Scott Polar Research Institute until 1976, from 1971 as chief glaciologist, and from 1974 as head of the Earth Sciences Division of theBritish Antarctic Survey. During this period he revisited the Antarctic in the summer of 1967-68 and took part as sea ice specialist in the transit of Canada’sNorthwest Passage by the supertanker Manhattan in 1969, and in the return passage to the North Pole by the nuclear submarine Dreadnought in 1971.
In 1976 he joined theBritish Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. Every other season he spent several months in the Antarctic, primarily directing low level radio echo-sounding flights to measure the thickness of the ice within theBritish Antarctic Territory.
After his retirement from the Survey in 1986, he joined up with two pilots to locate suitable landing strips in Antarctica to enable flights to be inaugurated for the benefit of mountaineers, skiers and other tourists.
He lived for many years inFulbourn, near Cambridge. In 1960, he married Mary Fellows (née Stewart; born 1922). They had a son and a daughter, and Fellows had a daughter from a previous marriage. Fellows died in 1999; Swithinbank died in 2014.[2]
Swithinbank was awarded thePolar Medal with Clasp, Antarctic 1950–1952. He was the first recipient of the newMrs Patrick Ness Award of theRoyal Geographical Society in 1954 for his research into Antarctic glaciology.
He received theAnders Retzius medal in silver from theSwedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 1966,[3] thePatron's Medal from theRoyal Geographical Society in 1971,[4] and theMungo Park Medal from theRoyal Scottish Geographical Society in 1990.
In 2013, he was conferred anMBE.[5]
Swithinbank Moraine was named in his honour.[6]
Swithinbank published four books, describing his field work and adventures in Antarctica.[7]
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