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By Peter Rejcek
It was never supposed to hang around this long. Ten years,
maybe 15 at most.
Perhaps that’s why the South Pole Dome — a
modestly sized structure spanning 164 feet and topping
out at about 52 feet high — has loomed so large in
the lore and legacy of polar history.
The final chapter in that story will be completed 35
years after the U.S. Antarctic Program’s most iconic
research station was officially dedicated in January 1975.
The dome, the second research station built at the geographic
South Pole, is coming down.
“That means [that] icon will no longer be there,
and it’s really sad to know that it’s coming
down, and I won’t be there this year to be part of
it,” said Jerry Marty.
A longtime Polie (as South Pole residents are called),
Marty retired earlier this year from the National Science
Foundation (NSF) after devoting the last 15 years of his
life to the construction of the third and latest South
Pole Station . He had also been involved in the final
year of construction on the station during the 1974-75
season, mainly attending to the last-minute fixes before
the first crew moved in that January.
The new station, a two-story structure built atop stilts
on a moving ice sheet, officially entered into service
on Jan. 12, 2008. But even before then the geodesic dome,
erected by U.S. Naval Construction Battalion 71 (the Seabees),
had been relieved of duty.
Civilian construction crews had finished disassembling
the modular buildings under the protective aluminum shell
a couple of winters ago after all operations had moved
to the elevated station. More recently, the dome had been
used for cold storage. Completion of a new logistics facility,
an arched building near the elevated station, over this
past winter means all those frozen goods now have a dedicated
warehouse for storage.
Several panels were first removed from the dome entrance
to make room for work inside the building.The dome, half
buried by drifted snow and empty of everything but memories,
must go as part of the South Pole long-term modernization
plan. Veteran Polies like Paddy Douglas are sad to see
it come down.
“I have been around long enough to have lived under
the dome … While the new station is grander, the
old station had more character,” said Douglas, South
Pole logistics supervisor. “The new station has yet
to develop its own character.”
Building at Pole
Navy Seabees built the first South Pole Station during
a frenzy of scientific activity known as the International
Geophysical Year (IGY) . A global effort of research during
1957-58, IGY particularly focused on the polar regions.
The United States eventually built seven research stations
to support scientists for their work in Antarctica.
A Navy Seabee installs a panel on the dome.Navy Seabees
assembled the first South Pole Station in less than two
months over the 1956-57 field season for what was to be
a temporary science campaign. In reality, IGY never really
ended. And no one had predicted the collection of hastily
built Jamesway tents and connecting tunnels would need
to last nearly 20 years.
Snow quickly buried the first station, commonly referred
to as Old Pole. Eventually, the crushing weight of the
snow on the ice-entombed structures meant time was running
out before the station would become uninhabitable.
The Navy Facilities Engineering Command had determined
that a new design was required for continued research
by the National Science Foundation at the South Pole,
according to a 1977 document published by the dome design
and manufacture company, Temcor of Torrance, Calif.
A dome “would be large enough to enclose and protect
three buildings for quarters and operations, two of them
two stories high. All these buildings were supported above
the snow floor of the dome for cross ventilation,”
wrote Temcor vice president Don L. Richter in the 1977
dome design document.
“The dome was to offer shelter from the wind and
snow, but not the cold. The need is to keep the inside
temperature below 0 [degrees] F to prevent deformation
of the snow support and settlement destruction of the
buildings. Five vent holes were opened in the top of the
dome to bleed off warm air.”
Lee Mattis was the Temcor project engineer who designed
the specialized erection equipment and the scheme of how
to build a geodesic dome on ice. “I was the guy who
said, ‘OK, here’s the dome, but here’s
how we’re going to put it up,’” said Mattis,
who spent two seasons at South Pole during the dome construction
between 1971 and 1973.
Why a dome? Mattis said a dome is a very efficient structure
in terms of stability and the protection it offers from
the snow. “The problem was the snow build-up [with
Old Pole]. They felt if they could keep the snow off the
buildings, they could extend the life, and that turned
out to be true.
“The dome is a unique structure. It is very strong.
It has a low profile,” added Mattis, who returned
to the South Pole in 2005 to advise the NSF about possible
ways to bring the dome safely down.
Going up
Putting up the dome certainly wasn’t an easy task
in the brief Antarctic summer, where ambient temperatures
rarely reach 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The foundation proved
to be the trickiest part because a crucial piece of machinery
couldn’t handle the harsh conditions.
The Seabees used a Peter Snow Miller, a Swiss snowplow
used to clear roads in the Alps, to process the snow and
work it up to the firmness necessary to support the dome’s
wooden foundation footings. The same machine did double-duty
in cutting a circular trench for the dome foundation and
a trench for the “utilidor” for utility and
sewage lines.
The hydraulic machine constantly broke down and was “always
a mess,” Mattis recalled. “The Peter Snow Miller
was a major problem.” He said little of the dome
actually went up in 1971-72.
Most of the erection occurred the following season, 1972-73.
“Basically, we went back down and did it,” Mattis
said.
During this time, the Seabees were also busy constructing
a new power plant and arches to serve as a garage. Work
on these structures and the interior dome buildings continued
into the 1973-74 and 1974-75 seasons. Civilian contractors,
including Marty, with the company Holmes and Narver Inc.,
mainly worked on the utilities.
On Jan. 9, 1975, a group of dignitaries dedicated the
new station, including Ruth Siple, wife of Paul Siple,
the first South Pole winter-over leader in 1957.
Bill Spindler worked as the South Pole station manager
for a year in 1976-77, during the dome’s third year
in service, and has been involved with the U.S. Antarctic
program on and off for more than 30 years. An engineer
by trade, Spindler also wintered twice more, in 2005 and
2008.
The unofficial historian of the South Pole , Spindler
was matter-of-fact when asked about its imminent disassembly.
“When I showed up at Pole in 1976, the dome made
the new station seem state-of-the-art,” he wrote
in an e-mail. “No more collapsing snow tunnels, lots
of storage space, and an instant icon for the U.S. Antarctic
Research Program.
“But snow happens, things get old, drifts build
up and structures get stressed,” he added. “As
an engineer, my feeling at this point is that the dome
has outlived its usefulness at Pole and needs to go away
before it becomes a structural hazard.”
Time to go
During the late 1980s, the NSF started preliminary planning
for a new station, and at the time, the dome was sacrosanct,
according to Spindler. “All plans for the new station
included it, either as a cover for buildings, as it was
in the existing station, a storage space, or perhaps even
an insulated and heated structure. Some of the designs
even included building another dome to match the original.
“All of this suddenly was to change as a result
of a loud noise heard by the 1988 winter-overs,”
he explained. “They reported that it sounded like
something broke.”
A computer analysis at about the same time indicated
that some of the aluminum dome foundation base ring beams
might be overstressed, Spindler said. “The next summer
the entire base ring was dug out, and yours truly got
to crawl through the trench and inspect every node and
every beam. Sure enough, I found cracks and broken beams
at the predicted locations.”
The damage was repaired, but the dream of keeping the
dome in some capacity was broken. The winning design would
call for a 65,000-square-foot building capable of sleeping
about 150 people, elevated above the polar plateau and
capable of being jacked up twice during its lifetime.
The Antarctic Treaty , an international agreement among
nations with scientific interests and operations in Antarctica,
requires obsolete structures like the dome to be removed
where practicable.
The dome would have to go. But how?
In 2005, to assess how the dome could be deconstructed,
Mattis said he returned to the South Pole at the behest
of the Navy Civil Engineering Corps (CEC)/Seabee Historical
Foundation , which would like to save the dome for posterity.
What did he think after seeing the dome for the first
time in more than 30 years? “My first thought was,
‘wow.’ Why did I become a civil engineer? Because
I wanted to see what I built, and here was something that
lasted for much longer than it was designed to last. It’s
still functional. It’s still working. It’s still
providing its intended use. It was a feeling of pride.
Just to go back and see it was great,” Mattis said.
“It was in good shape,” he added. His recommendation
to disassemble the dome is basically to reverse the order
of construction — taking it apart from the top down.
Coming down
That’s pretty much the plan, according to Brandon
“Shaggy” Neahusan, construction manager for
Raytheon Polar Services Co. (RPSC) and the lead person
for the deconstruction project. RPSC is the prime contractor
to the NSF for the U.S. Antarctic Program. RPSC’s
crew also built the new $150 million station over the
past decade.
“The overall method we will be using is to start
at the top and peel it like an orange,” Neahusan
said via-email from Antarctica. “In other words,
we start at the top and move around the dome, panel by
panel, clockwise disassembling until we get to the foundations.”
The job — which also includes taking down Skylab,
a separate, orange, boxy tower that housed different science
experiments near the dome — will require a six-person
crew.
First, the piece to be removed will be rigged to a crane
and then two people working from a lift will use abrasive
saws from the inside of the dome to cut partially through
the structural members. Once that team is safely out of
the way, a second two-person team working from the exterior
of the dome will finish cutting the piece free. The crane
will then lower the pieces to the ground, where the other
two workers will continue to disassemble the panels for
eventual transport from South Pole by plane or tractor
train.
Neahusan said the primary challenge for such a job is
safety. “Demolition is inherently dangerous work,
so we take every action possible to mitigate the risks
associated with it,” he said. “This is a handpicked
crew that I’ve worked with for several seasons now,
and as this is a very high-profile project, it’s
my responsibility to not let my crew feel any of that
pressure and just allow them to do their jobs.”
Time and weather are the other obstacles. The project
started in mid-November by clearing out the dome and moving
snow away from outside perimeter for the heavy equipment
to operate. Temperatures need to remain above minus 40
degrees Fahrenheit for the cranes and mechanical lifts
to work properly — not always a guarantee, even in
summer.
“We plan to have both buildings down and packaged
for shipment off continent by end of season,” Neahusan
said.
For posterity
The crown of the dome and the next two rows of polygonal
panels will be saved for display at a new Seabee museum
in Port Hueneme, Calif.
“Disassembly will be accomplished by removing the
bolted connections and using a tool called a collar cutter
to snip the heads off the existing rivets and removing
each component of the dome, documenting it for reassembly
and crating the components for shipment to Port Hueneme,”
Neahusan said. “The rest of the structure will be
cut up and shipped off continent and be recycled.”
Neahusan said that the NSF had tried to figure out a
way to send the whole dome back to the United States for
display at the Seabee museum or other locations interested
in its history. However, the labor costs alone would have
been six times more expensive, and “the amount of
time it would take to do so would not fit into the Congressionally
mandated end date of the South Pole Station Modernization
effort, which is March 31st, 2010.”
Marty, who has been working with the CEC/Seabee Historical
Foundation the last few years on bringing the dome to
Port Hueneme, said the entire dome likely wouldn’t
fit in the new museum based on its current configuration.
“It’s the old story of when you start to put
things in a museum, it fills up pretty quick,” he
said. The new museum’s concept is to suspend the
dome near an exhibit focused on the polar history of the
Seabees, according to Marty.
The current museum, converted from two Quonset huts,
displays various Antarctic artifacts, such as a 4-foot
by 8-foot sheet of plywood with braided rope around the
edges. The Seabees who built the dome burned their names
into the wood, which a forklift tine had damaged at some
point. A demolition crew discovered the memento while
taking apart the buildings under the dome, Marty said.
The new museum itself will be a “virtual” walk
through of Seabee history. Visitors will follow in the
Seabee’ footsteps, starting with basic training and
then on to conflicts from World War II and the Korean
War to Vietnam and the modern conflicts in the Middle
East. Finally, the tour ends with a look into their humanitarian
and civil projects.
“The military campaigns are one thing, but the Seabees
are unique because they’ve got this Antarctic-IGY
piece of their historical background,” Marty noted.
It would seem the dome is no longer for Polies alone.
“I think it hit us harder when we saw the galley
and all the buildings inside go away,” said Doug
“Dog” Forsythe, a RPSC construction manager
involved in the construction of the new station from the
beginning in the late 1990s. “I hate to see it go,
but I guess that’s progress.”
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