Explore the USGS Library’s Antarctic Cachet Collection
The U.S. Antarctic Resource Collection is located at the USGS Library in Reston, VA.
Formally established in 1879, the USGS Library is one world's leading earth and natural science libraries. The U.S. Antarctic Resource Collection is located at the USGS Library in Reston, VA. This collection contains materials from the former interagency U.S. Antarctic Resource Center, which maintained the nation’s most comprehensive collection of Antarctic aerial photography, maps, charts, satellite imagery, and technical reports.
Library staff recently rediscovered both the 2’x2’ prints and original rubber stamps from a collection of philatelic cachets commemorating the USGS’s early decades in Antarctica. For the non-stamp collectors among us, a cachet is a pictorial design, stamped on a postcard or envelope, used to commemorate a postal or philatelic event.
The first USGS-specific cachet was created for the 1960-61 austral summer field season by USGS scientists Art Ford and Peter Bermel, to fulfill a philatelic requirement of the National Science Foundation’s United States Antarctic Research Program (USARP). The USGS subsequently created annual cachets over a 60-year period. Due to the popularity among stamp collectors and historians in receiving correspondence from Antarctic explorers, these people would send self-addressed, stamped envelopes to each of the scientific and logistical staff working on the continent to have them postmark the collectors’ envelopes from the stations on the ice.
Featuring cachets printed from 1946 to 2006, the USGS collection includes original stamped envelopes, metal stamp dies, and acrylic prints from those first 60 years of research. This collection of cachet prints, stamps, and other ephemera was on display in the USGS National Center Art Hallway between July 1 and July 31, 2024. The Library also has a digital collection of the Antarctic Cachets featured in the USGS Library catalog.