|
By Peter Rejcek
McMurdo to South Pole. South Pole to AGAP South. Byrd
Surface Camp to Pine Island Glacier. WAIS Divide field
camp to McMurdo. McMurdo to Whillans Ice Stream.
Paul Thur rattles off the different combinations of possible
routes that a fleet of tractors may some day make across
the Antarctic continent, to shuttle cargo and fuel to
remote locations in support of science.
“There are a lot of traverses planned, and who knows
what else people have been talking about that I haven’t
even heard of,” said Thur, Traverse Operations manager
for Raytheon Polar Services Co. (RPSC) , the prime contractor
for the National Science Foundation (NSF) .
The thousand-mile haul between the U.S. Antarctic Program
(USAP) research stations at McMurdo and South Pole is
already a reality. The traverse delivered nearly a million
pounds of fuel, cargo and equipment to South Pole in 2008-09
— the culmination of nearly a decade of work to establish
a safe route across a Texas-sized ice shelf and up a glacier
that cuts through the Transantarctic Mountains. [See previous
articles: Ready to roll and Budget freeze.]
Other traverses, such as one planned from Byrd Surface
Camp to the dynamic Pine Island Glacier, are deep in the
planning stages and on the books. [See previous article:
Byrd Camp resurfaces.] A few others are ideas still in
need of study and development.
Rolling back the clock
Bladders on sleds are used to transport fuel.But one thing
is clear: The use of tractors and sleds — once a
routine method for Antarctic logistics by the U.S. Navy
in the 1950s and 1960s — is back in vogue.
“This is the way they did it before. It’s come
full circle,” agreed Thur, who has made two round-trips
between McMurdo and South Pole over the last two field
seasons.
“It’s about the same — just improved technology,”
he said of today’s method of moving over snow-flattened
routes by Caterpillar and Case farm tractors. “[The
Navy men] got in their tractors, had all of their support
gear with them, and drove as far as they could. The basic
principle hasn’t changed.”
The NSF sees the traverse as a cheaper, more efficient
method for supplying the South Pole with fuel and materials,
as well as oversized cargo that doesn’t fit in the
belly of a ski-equipped LC-130. Flown by the New York
Air National Guard , the LC-130 has been the workhorse
for the USAP, with literally hundreds of flights between
McMurdo and South Pole each austral summer.
“The introduction of heavy ski-equipped aircraft,
in particular the LC-130, allowed the USAP to range widely
on the continent, and caused surface traversing to fall
into hibernation,” explained George Blaisdell, NSF
Operations manager for the USAP. Blaisdell noted that
the ski-equipped airplanes have their own limitations,
such as surface roughness and sloping terrain.
In fact, a Twin Otter that landed on Pine Island Ice
Shelf in 2008 found the terrain too tough to return, forcing
the science team to delay their plans for studying the
region until a traverse can be organized next year to
establish a helicopter field camp. [See previous article:
Pine Island Glacier.]
The aircraft limitations, “coupled with recent research
interests in Antarctica needing access to access a very
wide range of areas, [means] some projects are better
prosecuted from a surface traverse platform,” Blaisdell
said. “Thus, a revival of science traverses has occurred
in the USAP.”
Last year’s traverse team delivered 115,000 gallons
of fuel to the South Pole, the equivalent of about 36
LC-130 flights. It costs nearly triple as much to fly
cargo to South Pole on an aircraft versus hauling it overland.
“The science community has been a big advocate of
USAP re-developing its traversing capabilities,”
Blaisdell said. “ Not only do researchers understand
that logistics traverses like the McMurdo-South Pole swing
produce economies with [NSF] funds, but they see that
these traverse routes create new corridors of access for
scientific exploration.”
Driving forward
Thur said the team is still learning how to maximize both
the load and the speed. Last year, the tractors hauled
too much, requiring the operators to shuttle cargo over
steep or uneven terrain. That meant for every mile traveled,
the machines actually logged three miles. It took 39 days
to travel between McMurdo and South Pole, a trip Thur
estimates should take 23.
“We’ve got to be light and fast, and we have
to average a lot better than we did this year,” he
said, adding that the team will cut back on the number
of fuel bladders it carries to South Pole this upcoming
season.
That’s because the long-term plan is to make two
roundtrip deliveries each season to South Pole, each trip
taking 50 days. The total traverse season is only about
110 days, so there’s little leeway in the proposed
schedule.
One improvement should be the switch from white- to black-colored
sleds that hold the fuel bladders. Engineers with the
U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory
(CRREL) hope the black sheets of high-molecular weight
(HMW) polyethylene will absorb sunlight and heat up enough
to self-lubricate the sled.
“If these sleds can retain heat better, maybe we
could go back up to a full 62 bladders,” Thur said.
“That would be great, because we want to go as heavy
as possible but still be fast.”
However, next season’s schedule isn’t too tight,
with only one traverse planned to South Pole, with a second,
shorter trip to the base of the Leverett Glacier, which
serves as the welcome mat to the polar plateau for the
long-haul cargo train. On the second trip, a nine-member
crew will stage and cache about 50,000 gallons of fuel
for future traverses or use by scientists in the field.
Meanwhile, Thur will be busy at the end of the 2009-2010
season overseeing the receipt of an entire new traverse
platform on the annual re-supply vessel that visits McMurdo
each January. The additional tractors, HMW sheets, living
modules, fuel bladders and other equipment were purchased
using about $7.5 million in stimulus money from the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act .
The second train should be ready to roll for the 2010-11
summer field season. Its first mission will be to widen
the snow route over a short, crevasse-ridden area dubbed
the Shear Zone. It will then make a trip to South Pole
later in the season.
To prepare for the future, Thur will sit out this year’s
fieldwork. “It’s hard to let go and turn the
reins over to someone else,” he conceded. “It’s
exciting the first time you do it. It gets monotonous.
Still, you can’t complain.”
-
Antarctic
Sun -
|
