UMUC Professor Crafts Course on Polar Exploration

Carl Berman Jr. sits on the stern of a long-line fishing boat at a working marina in Chincoteague, Virginia.

By Alita Byrd
Special to FYI Online

Students who sign up for Carl Berman Jr.'s BEHS 398M Polar Exploration: History and Psychology of Polar Exploration course this spring may learn a few more things than they expected—like how pemmican tastes (it's made from dried berries and meat from an old North American Indian recipe) and how it feels to slide fingers into woolen gloves that have been soaked in water and then frozen solid.

"It will give them a little idea about what it's like to climb into a frozen solid sleeping bag every night," Berman said.

At least they won't have to trek for days over the frozen tundra, blinded by snow and numbed by the bitter cold, as explorers of the Arctic and Antarctic did. But they will certainly have an opportunity to gain an insight into the minds and motives of these explorers, and get some useful college credit in behavioral science at the same time.

Berman, who developed the course and wrote the syllabus, has a background in marine biology and teaches a course in the subject, as well as others in meteorology and environmental change. But he has been passionately interested in polar exploration for a long time and, when the opportunity came to develop such a course, he jumped at it. The course will introduce students to the geology, indigenous peoples, climate, flora, and fauna of the polar regions so they can learn about the natural scenario in which the first explorers found themselves.

Students will also study the most famous explorers, including William Perry, James Cook, John Franklin, Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Scott, and consider the reasons behind their daring expeditions. Berman has invited Gus McLeod, who in more recent history was the first person to fly an open cockpit plane over the North Pole, to give a lecture at the end of the course's Arctic unit. John Bortniak, who wintered at the Scott-Amundsen Station, will be a special speaker for the Antarctic section.

Other projects will include an analysis of Shackleton's management style and a paper concerned with planning an expedition in the 1890s to search for the North Pole.

As far as Berman is aware, there is no other class like it, and students are bound to agree.

Besides teaching at UMUC, Berman served as a commander in the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Corps and as an oceanographer for the United Nations from 1988 to 1991, where he was in charge of Integrated Global Ocean Services System, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean programs. While Berman hasn't yet explored the Arctic himself, he said he is planning a trip for July 2002.