Bentley made at least 15 trips over seven decades to the ice. He celebrated his 80th birthday on his last trip to Antarctica in 2009, nearly 50 years after first setting foot on the continent. In Antarctica, Mount Bentley, the highest peak in what are now known as the Ellsworth Mountains, and the Bentley Subglacial Trench, an ice-filled trench the size of Mexico, are named in his honor. "I claim to be the only person with a hill and hole named after him," Bentley told an interviewer in 2008.
"Charlie was one of our most esteemed faculty and a giant in geophysics and glaciology," says John Valley, a UW-Madison professor of geoscience. "His students are leaders in studying climate change."
Bentley was a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Polar Research Board for nearly 20 years, chairing the panel from 1981 to 1985. He received numerous awards for his work, including the Bellingshausen-Lazarev Medal in 1971 from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the Seligman Crystal from the International Glaciological Society in 1990. He was an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the Arctic Institute of North America.
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1929, Bentley received his undergraduate degree in physics from Yale and was awarded his doctorate from Columbia University in 1959, nearly two years after successfully defending his thesis. He learned of the delay — the result of failure to pay a $50 dissertation fee — after spending two austral winters at Byrd Station.
Bentley joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1961 and was the A.P. Crary Professor of Geophysics. After arriving at Wisconsin, he turned his sights "first and foremost on training generations of glaciologists and geophysicists," recalls Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a Penn State professor of geosciences and another of Bentley's former students.
Over a long career, Bentley published more than 200 scientific papers and, in addition to characterizing the three-dimensional structure and physical qualities of the ice sheet, he showed that the fast-moving ice streams that lace the ice are lubricated by soft till at the base.
After retiring from the Wisconsin geoscience faculty, Bentley assumed leadership of the Ice Drilling Design and Operations program based at UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center in 2000, a program he oversaw until 2013. The program builds and deploys drills to recover ice cores and other samples from Greenland to Antarctica.
