March 4, 2003
At South Pole, New Home for a New Era
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE


AMUNDSEN-SCOTT SOUTH POLE STATION, Antarctica — The "polies," as they call themselves, are getting a new home.

Residents of the South Pole — astronomers, chemists, technicians, cooks, construction workers — are carrying their possessions 100 yards across snow and ice, bidding farewell to the windowless geodesic dome that has served for three decades as a symbol of polar exploration.

On March 4, they begin taking up residence in a huge enclosure on stilts that resembles an economy motel, complete with windows. When the new station is finished in four years, the dome will be chopped into pieces and shipped to aluminum scrap yards.

Everyone who works here knows it is time to replace the old station. The dome was built to house just 33 people. Scientific research at the pole has become so important that the National Science Foundation, which oversees polar programs, has committed $133 million to build the new station, which can house, feed, entertain and otherwise support 200 scientists and other workers.

Still, reactions to the move are mixed.

"I think the dome is amazing," said Shayne Clausson, a computer network technician from San Francisco. "Working and living in someplace this remote, this bizarre, it's only fitting that your habitat should resemble the set of some 1970's sci-fi thriller."

Of the 60 people who plan to stay through the Antarctic winter, which starts in mid-February and ends around Halloween, Mr. Clausson is one of 20 who have chosen to remain in the old station. "I want to see what it's like to live here throughout the winter while I still have a chance," he said.

By contrast, Andrew Logan, a computer network administrator from Bailey Island, Me., is moving into the new station, where he will have a private room with a window.

Right now "it has a nursing-home feeling," he said. But having wintered here three times before, Mr. Logan said he could not wait to watch spectacular auroras in the night sky, perhaps from the comfort of his bed.

"They are not describable," he said, "nor can the feeling of seeing them be captured in a photograph."

Monique Gerbex, a work order scheduler from Wolcott, Vt., will be scheduling maintenance work in unfinished parts of the new station — perhaps the most challenging building site on earth, where work never stops and ingenuity is a job requirement. Living there, she said, "will be like applying the first brush strokes to a blank canvas, mixing all the personal colors of the first winter-over crew."

Life at the South Pole engenders powerful emotions. It is the most remote inhabited place on earth. Communication with the outside world is possible only 10 hours a day, when satellites skim the horizon. The station sits atop a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that is drifting 1.1 inches a day toward South America. (No comparable installation exists at the North Pole, where the shifting ice cannot support permanent occupation.)

The view in all directions is an immense featureless flat plain of snow and ice. In summer the sun twirls high overhead, 24 hours a day. Ice crystals drift out of a clear blue sky like powdered diamonds. In winter, the sun vanishes completely for four months. Temperatures plunge below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Through every extreme, polies never forget they are standing at the earth's spin axis, where all longitude lines converge. They can hop around the world in three or four steps. In dead of winter, most have joined the 300 Club by sitting in a 200-degree sauna and then running from the dome into 100-below weather, naked except for rubber boots, around the geographic pole and back.

The sense of community is palpable. Thrown together in such an isolated place, polies are bound together by an invisible glue of good will and cooperation. Many say they do not enjoy living anywhere else.

Entering the dome involves walking down a steep ramp of packed snow to a dark shadowy portal that gives no hint of what lies beyond.

Then comes an ice-encrusted tunnel leading to the 50-foot-high dome, which is no more than a dimly lit shell.

It is stunningly cold. Ice stalactites hang from the ceilings. Three buildings are nestled inside the dome, like Hobbit houses hung with lanterns. Interiors are worn and festooned with funky objects.

The new station rises from the ice like a shiny spaceship. Atop 36 columns, it is composed of two C-shaped pods connected by a walkway. Eventually it will enclose 65,000 square feet of heated space, including offices, laboratories, a medical clinic, a kitchen, a volleyball court, a band room and private living quarters with windows for nearly every resident.

Unlike the galley in the dome, the new dining room has windows. Cozy behind three feet of insulation and commercial-size freezer doors, new generations of polies will seldom have to set foot outdoors.

The station is 10 feet off the ground so that it will not become buried in snow, as happened with the dome and an earlier station built in the late 1950's, said William D. Brooks, an architect with the firm Ferraro Choi & Associates in Honolulu, which designed the complex. Nothing ever melts or thaws at the pole, he said, so blowing snow accumulates relentlessly.

"In 20 years, any building on the surface is under 20 feet of snow and ice," Mr. Brooks said.

To overcome this problem, the front face of the station faces prevailing winds and is beveled like an airplane wing. Snow will blow under the building to form a meteorlike tail 1,000 feet behind the station. When the snow eventually builds up, leaving the station in a snow crater, the building will be jacked up a full story. The columns are designed to be raised and extended twice over the next 45 years, he said.

Heat, electricity, fuel and all other services are buried in nearby tunnels under the ice and connected to the station by lines that run through an adjacent tower that polies call the beer can.

Two men are in charge of building the new station. Jerry Marty, the National Science Foundation manager on site, is responsible for bringing 36 million pounds of material and equipment to the South Pole.

Ordered two years in advance, the material is shipped 10,000 miles by sea from California to McMurdo Station, the main United States coastal base on Antarctica. From there it is flown 850 miles to the South Pole in cargo planes fitted with skis. Each plane can carry 26,000 pounds of material stacked on pallets.

Of 323 flights scheduled in a recent 17-week period, half carried construction material. But because of bad weather, the project is short by 40 flights and a million pounds of material. Sometimes when a cargo plane lands, work crews stand by, tools in hand, ready to use the newly delivered materials.

Carlton Walker, the construction chief, assigns daily tasks to 110 workers — carpenters, electricians, iron workers, pipe fitters, plumbers, sheet metal workers, painters and heavy equipment operators who are building the station. They work in three shifts around the clock, six days a week.

Much of the heavy work is done outdoors, where temperatures are often 30 degrees below zero even during the Antarctic summer. Protective clothing weighs 35 pounds. Workers eat at least 5,000 calories a day, including lots of butter and steak.

There are no hardware stores to turn to when something breaks.

"We have a mantra," Mr. Walker said. "Refuse to lose."

When a hydraulic filter for a crane broke recently, workers fashioned a new one from three filters taken from two different pieces of equipment. Such ingenuity paid off when some columns for the partly built station began sinking into the snow faster than expected. A few sank six inches, others less than than an inch, and "the beer can" did not move at all, leading to large cracks where it hooked up with the station.

Some of the snow under the building is firm and some is soft, perhaps because the site has been used for half a century and includes an old runway, said Dennis Berry, a structural engineer with BBFM Engineers in Anchorage, who is studying the problem.

To repair the problem, Mr. Walker and his crews dug out the base of the columns, jacked them up and placed wooden shims under them to relevel the station. Then they cut the support columns inside the beer can and fitted them with a sleeve. By moving the sleeve, they will be able to keep stiff utility lines level with the station for many years.

On Feb. 5, the South Pole chef, Jon Emanuel, known as Cookie Jon, served a farewell meal in the dome — beef Wellington. "It may be a dinosaur," he said, "but it's everybody's favorite."

On the menu for the first big meal in the new station will be New York strip steak and Alaskan king crab legs, he said. "We chose that meal to wow the crowd and try out two brand new pieces of equipment — our fancy-schmancy Alto-Shaam ovens for the beef and our tilting skillet for the crab," Mr. Emanuel said. "My, oh my, the new kitchen is beautiful."

Soon, the winter-over polies will have a view from their dining room like none on earth. On March 21, the sun will reach the horizon, where it will circle for three full days, a fiery ball visible at the boundary of earth and sky.

Sunsets will continue glowing in the sky for a few more weeks until the sun disappears and darkness reigns. That is when the Southern Lights start dancing.