icebreaker ARA Almirante Irízar. In order to continue asserting Argentine sovereignty over the area while carrying out the planned scientific activities, and after the Argentine Army had conducted detailed studies on alternative locations, it was decided to lay the new facilities on solid land on a new base called Belgrano II. The glacier upon which Belgrano I was standing was continuously drifting towards the sea; eventually it would become a tabular iceberg afloat in the Southern Ocean. On 26 January 1988 a helicopter from Almirante Irízar confirmed that a tabular iceberg about long containing had split from the ice shelf. It contained Belgrano I's remains, the Salta Refuge, two beacons, and the abandoned Shackleton (British) and Drushznaya (Soviet) stations. This time Almirante Irízar reached 78° 21' 02" S in the Weddell Sea, a new world record. Another helicopter flyby in January 1989 showed that the iceberg had split into several smaller pieces, which made location of the remains unpractical. The iceberg continued drifting through the Southern Ocean, where the base's remains have presumably been lost. Description During winter this desolate region is almost totally devoid of animal life. In summer, seals, petrels, skuas and emperor penguins can occasionally be spotted. The landscape comprises only white plains. Due to heavy snow precipitations, Belgrano I was almost totally covered by snow and ice. Only the launching platform for weather balloons, the aurorae observation tower and chimneys and antennae stuck out on the surface. The base also had a system of tunnels dug in the ice and further buried by the copious snowing: some of them were more than deep. These passages provided a safer means of walking across buildings without exposure to the exterior freezing temperatures and whipping winds; they were also used as temporary deposits. Scientific activities Being placed in the auroral zone, Belgrano was ideal for studies of the upper atmosphere, characterized by constant magnetic and ionospheric disturbances. In 1970 a new facility was built: the LABEL laboratory (LAboratory BELgrano), dedicated to further study of these phenomena. It was located some from the main house and other dependencies of the base, and it housed scientific instruments for aurora australis observations, This activity ran across the penumbra and total darkness periods, from 15 March to 10 October. A tower equipped with all-sky cameras photographed the whole celestial hemisphere every minute in order to compose a continuous record of aurorae evolution. Behavior