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By Michèle Gentille, South Pole correspondent
It’s safe to say many visitors and temporary residents
at the South Pole Station have sentimental feelings about
the Dome that served as the second U.S. research station
at 90 degrees south for more than 30 years.
Navy Seabees painstakingly assembled the geodesic structure
in the 1970s after it arrived in crates as a “kit”
of precut beams and aluminum pieces. For 30 years, a tiny
village of moveable buildings sat under its protection,
a vast umbrella measuring 164 feet wide and 52 feet high.
Now that the Elevated Station is completed and fully
functioning, the Dome is scheduled for disassembly and
removal, in accordance with the Antarctic Treaty, which
requires that a minimum of human “footprints”
be left on the most remote and undeveloped continent of
our planet.
What will happen with this magnificent structure is still
under discussion. One possibility involves preserving
the top layer for a museum display in the U.S. Navy Seabee
Museum at Port Hueneme, Calif. At this time, however,
no final decisions have been made.
In the past few years, the Dome has functioned as a warehouse
— in effect, a freezer unit for construction goods
and food. Where will all these crates and boxes go when
the building makes its final journey off the Ice?
A gigantic metal arch sits next to the Dome, built in
preparation for this eventuality. At its apex, the structure
is 30 feet high. Until this winter, it was virtually a
shell, an unfinished structure awaiting customization.
Now a skeleton crew of two carpenters and two electricians
is transforming the arch, locally referred to as the L.O.
(logistics office), into an enormous warehouse fitted
with lighting and shelving to handle the stores currently
in the Dome and more.
The winter ambient temperate in the L.O. is minus 60
degrees Fahrenheit — extreme cold to be sure —
but the arch provides an environment the craftsmen can
feasibly work in, as it keeps out the wind.
Still, the job is challenging. Fiddling with thousands
of nuts and bolts to erect shelving while wearing insulating
liners under bulky leather gloves can be frustrating.
Regular breaks are needed to warm frigid fingers inside
the warmth of the small office that sits at one end of
the building.
Todd Adams, one of the winter-over carpenters, describes
the racks that will line the arch. Like the Dome itself,
they arrived unassembled in wooden crates, basically a
collection of steel beams and vertical supports that require
expert handling.
“They are the kind of pallet racks you would see
in a big shopping warehouse such as Costco,” he says.
“The difference here is they are designed to slide
back and forth on bearings and can be stored two deep.
The highest shelf will be 16 feet above the ground and
each will hold a crate about the size of a tri-wall, or
four- to five-foot cubes.”
Bill Stiner, also wintering at Pole as a carpenter this
year, describes how he goes about assembling one of these
racks, which are nine feet wide, eight feet deep, and
the equivalent of nearly two stories high.
“It’s like putting together a gigantic Erector
Set,” he says. “Some parts clip together and
other parts need to be bolted together. The units work
like a set of drawers installed on angled hardware for
efficient movement.”
But even before the carpenters could address this task,
there had to be light inside the arch. At the beginning
of winter, the only source of illumination was a 20-foot-square
doorway that let in sunlight. Plans called for installation
of 150 overhead lamps, a task that many construction professionals
familiar with the challenges down here doubted could happen
over the long, dark, frigid season.
Nevertheless, Monty Myrtle, the main electrician on station,
has nearly finished wiring and hanging all the lights, working
on 24-foot-high scaffolds in full extreme weather gear to
accomplish the task. He also thought of a way to improve
the original wiring concept to conserve energy, a precious
resource at Pole, where we are completely reliant on expensive
fossil fuel to survive.
“The lights are installed in three rows down the
length of the arch,” he says. “The original
idea was to wire 14 lights to one switch so you could
turn on just one row as needed. However, these are pretty
powerful units; each bulb is 300 watts. I put in 50 light
switches so you can now turn on between three and seven
lamps with just one switch.”
The logistics of running insulated wire along a 300-foot
portion of the building in sub-zero temperatures is mind-boggling,
and Myrtle needed the assistance of volunteers to complete
the “wire pulls.”
Groupings of five wires are pulled through protective
piping that can run between 75 and 250 feet each. No one
person is strong enough to manage such a task, so Myrtle
employs a special “tugger” machine. One person
feeds the wire into the pipe while applying lubricant,
and several more helpers control the remaining length
of wire to ensure there are no kinks or knots.
Work has to happen steadily but quickly, since such low
temperatures make the wire very rigid and, of course,
have an effect on the hands that work with it. In the
end, it takes between six and eight workers to complete
one wire pull, which will last 2 1/2 hours from beginning
to end. The L.O. arch required 14 pulls altogether.
One of the simplest but most confounding mysteries is
how a thin shell of glass that makes up a light bulb can
survive months of extremely low temperatures.
Robert Dragonfly, the winter-over foreman electrician
and fire technician on station, explains, “It is
the fast change of temperature that poses any real problem.
As long as the bulb has time to heat up on its own, it
will work fine, although the added stress will cut the
life of the bulb down considerably. The tragedy happens
when a warm, lit bulb is exposed to cold snow or ice falling
on it. That creates an explosion. But this is not an issue
in the L.O., where there is a roof to protect the lights
from extreme elements.”
The transfer of cargo from under the Dome to the L.O.
will occur at the beginning of summer, paving the way
for the demolition of the Dome. The end of an era.
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Antarctic
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