Old South Pole dome replaced by modern structure

Photos and story by ERNIE MASTROIANNI
Originally published January 8, 2001

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica -- The real South Pole is a 12-foot rod pounded deep into the ice in a new location each year, to account for the steady movement of the ice sheet underneath it.
But the South Pole in the memories of scientists who have done research here in the last quarter-century is a geodesic dome, constructed in 1975.

This year, under the midnight sun of the Antarctic summer, the dome is being replaced under the guidance of a civil engineer who grew up in Monroe, was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and is one of the more rabid Packers fans -- at least in this half of the world.

A steel skeleton is taking shape, 60 feet high, a virtual Sears Tower by Antarctic standards. The new building will sit on stilts to allow drifting snow to blow underneath, but also will have some portions below the surface, to house fuel tanks and garage space.

It's being assembled by workers from Raytheon Polar Services, an Englewood, Colo.-based company that contracts with the National Science Foundation to do most of the construction in this part of the world.

The new building, officially called the South Pole Station Modernization Project, is desperately needed, partly because the dome is literally being buried by drifting snow and partly because the South Pole address is so in demand by researchers and scientists. During the summer, more than 200 people are crammed into the existing dome and temporary shelters nearby.

Wisconsin native Jerry Marty is directing the construction of the $153 million project, which so far is ahead of schedule and under budget.

"This summer," Marty said, referring to the warm months that started in December, "the symbol of the dome will fade away. The new building needs to be a food service center, a hotel, a vehicle maintenance center, an airport and a scientific lab."



The push for improved facilities is coming from scientists, who have huge projects in the works.

Just two examples: A $10 million project named AMANDA, which is designed to detect neutrinos from the edge of the universe, and a $253 million project named ICE CUBE, which will have a similar mission, only on a much larger scale. Both are led by Wisconsin researchers.

This past week, three of those researchers -- UW-Madison physicist Albrecht Karle and grad student Katherine Rawlins, and physicist Jim Madsen from UW-River Falls -- were in a cramped galley at the Pole, discussing adjustments and fine-tuning the icebound detector, sunk more than two kilometers below the ice.




In addition to the scientific pressure for a new facility, there is some political interest as well. As early as 1982, President Ronald Reagan officially declared it to be in the nation's best interest to occupy the South Pole year round. And the State Department, in a 1996 memorandum to the National Security Council, said there were strategic, foreign policy and scientific reasons for occupying the South Pole on a continuous basis.

"If we were to depart the South Pole station, there would be another tenant," Marty said, certain that another nation would fill the void.

Construction of the new station is a marvel of engineering and management. Every piece of material, every tool and every worker has to come in by LC-130 cargo ski planes, flown by the 109th Air Wing of the New York Air National Guard. It is not feasible, Marty said, to bring in supplies over land. The South Pole is 830 air miles from McMurdo Station, and an overland trek would take three weeks and require many people to run the vehicles.

Trades workers stay here all year, and they work inside when the sun goes down for six months and temperatures drop to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Over winter, the station population is 50," Marty said. "There are 20 support people, 20 construction trade workers and 10 scientists."

He said the tradespeople "need to have the ability to fix things without having to go to a store. If something doesn't fit, we try and make it work. We look for someone who can live in a confined circumstance and work creatively."


Marty said the station is expected to be complete by 2005 and will house 110 people -- still cramped, but less than in the dome. The design allows for an additional wing to accommodate 40 more people if more money is budgeted.

Mike Papula, who directs the project for Raytheon, said many components were test-assembled in the United States before being shipped to the Pole.

"We did some test-builds of various different things, such as the fuel tanks, the under-snow garage and power plant," he said.

The steel fabricator erected one bay of the elevated station; a crew of carpenters installed the insulated panel skin; another crew tested the jacking system used to raise the structure onto its supports.

Asked last year how everything would work at the Pole, Papula chuckled and said: "It went really smooth in Little Rock, Ark., in the summer."

The station is being built with the ability to be raised periodically to keep it out of drifting snow, because any object on the featureless plain of Antarctica ultimately becomes drifted over. Marty thinks the station will not need to be raised for 20 years.


"The challenge was to construct a building that is very strong for as little weight as possible," he said. "Weight is key because the load limit for each plane flight is 30,000 pounds."

Another factor to consider was that the station will not stay in the same place. "The entire snow and ice sheet the station is built on is moving at a rate of about 30 feet per year, which could cause differential movement in the structure," Papula said. "We are building on a snow foundation, which will settle differently from one corner of the building to the other over time."

The extreme cold posed other problems.

Waste heat from the diesel-run power plant is recycled to heat the buildings. And an elevator with an exposed rack and pinion mechanism is made from a beryllium-copper alloy to resist temperatures of minus 100 degrees.

In addition to his other duties, Marty acts as a spokesman for the National Science Foundation when tourists come. The cost, he said, is anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000, but the people who make the trip "are well-to-do, and this is on their list of things to do in life."

"It's been a much more busy place," he said. "If they arrive on a Sunday, we'll bring the group in the dome for half an hour and explain the world-class science that goes on here. We do this because it is important to market National Science Foundation science, it's important to represent our country, and most importantly, -- if they are Americans -- they see their tax dollars at work, and they should see where their money is going."

THE PROJECT

-- The South Pole station structure was needed because the geodesic dome, constructed in 1975, is being buried by snow. The station is being built with the ability to be raised periodically to keep it out of drifting snow. See updated photos of the deconstruction of the old dome at Bill Spindler's unofficial South Pole website.

-- The construction also is needed because the South Pole is so in demand by researchers. During the summer, more than 200 people are crammed into the dome and temporary shelters nearby. The new station will house 110 people. The design allows for a possible wing that could hold 40 people.

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Photojournalist Ernie Mastroianni visited Antarctica as a guest of the National Science Foundation. His photographs and reports originally appeared in several sections of the newspaper in early 2001.

Copyright Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

AMANDA at the South Pole

ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff
Originally published Jan. 15, 2001

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station -- About a year ago, University of Wisconsin graduate student Katherine Rawlins was working 12-hour shifts at the South Pole.
Outside.

Jet heaters kept the 30-below chill at bay while she double-checked the electronics of basketball-sized spheres that would soon be lowered into holes 2 kilometers deep.

She was part of the team building AMANDA, the $10 million neutrino detector made by an international consortium led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This year, AMANDA is complete, Rawlins gets to work inside, and an increasing number of researchers and scientists from all over the world have joined her.

Their goal? UW-Madison physicist Robert Morse, the principal investigator for the project, puts it simply: "We're trying to understand the evolution of the universe."

The crystal-clear ice below the South Pole is an ideal place to place AMANDA, which looks for traces of violence on an unimaginable scale from the far reaches of the universe.

"Neutrinos," says UW-Madison physicist Francis Halzen, "are produced only by very violent processes."

Inside AMANDA


If you could see through the ice, AMANDA would be a cylinder, 200 meters wide and nearly 2 1/2 kilometers deep, made of hundreds of light-sensitive spheres. AMANDA is based on a theory by Halzen, who believed the idea would work even before the first schematics were drawn.

When galaxies collide, it's thought that the black holes in their centers are merging, according to Halzen. A black hole is matter so dense, that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational pull. A cubic centimeter might weigh as much as the Earth.

So, envision two of these heavy objects colliding, and you get an idea of the amount of energy that could be released. Neutrinos are thought to be products of such a collision.

AMANDA also has the potential to discover mysterious dark matter particles, which are thought to make up most of the matter in the universe. It can search for the birth of supernova explosions and the birth of super-massive black holes in the center of distant galaxies, according to Morse's proposal to the National Science Foundation, which pays for this unique research project.

Neutrinos are nearly massless atomic particles that carry a lot of energy in small packages.

But there's a problem detecting them. They have no charge. They don't react with anything and are nearly impossible to track. But they head out in a straight line from whatever violent reaction produced them. Billions of them pass through the Earth every day. But every once in a while, a neutrino will hit a molecule's nucleus. If that molecule is in ice or water, the collision will create a dim blue wake of light called a muon.

This is what AMANDA sees, and the hope is that with a proposed detector 10 times larger, called ICE CUBE, scientists will be able to pinpoint a distant neutrino source, which will help solve some conundrums that face today's astrophysicists.

"We don't really know what we are going to see," Halzen admits. He draws an analogy with photography.

"Suppose you have a camera, and it is capable only of black-and-white pictures. If black-and-white images were all you knew, trying to make a camera that would take color pictures would be hard.

"But we have to think of certain possibilities before we build."

Practical matters

While the theorist Halzen postulates what might be, it is up to UW-Madison's Morse to stage-manage the brain power and hardware at the South Pole where the massive project must first be calibrated, then put into operation.

Some have called it an ice telescope, but a clearer analogy might be to call it a giant antenna, with dozens of the world's most creative astrophysicists working hard to tune it in, to reveal the clearest picture possible.

The AMANDA project has already taken over an entire wing at the South Pole station's Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory. Incoming data is sifted through powerful computers, running programs that sift out the noise from the signals. Morse travels to the South Pole every year, to oversee the exotic work that goes into calibrating this one-of-a-kind detector.

This is a big year for AMANDA. All the holes are drilled, the photo multiplier tubes are in place, and Morse has been coaxing the detector to life, fixing broken things and calibrating the instrument.

Rawlins explains that the summer includes three stages of work.

"Beginning this summer, there is a huge calibration effort. In the middle of the summer, we fix problems. At the end of summer, we'll prepare the detector for a winter of running."

Rawlins is here for the middle part. "I'm going to be spending a lot of time looking at signals coming out of the ice," she says.

Rawlins' boss is UW-Madison physicist Albrecht Karle, who is directing the multinational AMANDA effort this month.

Karle has published one of the first scientific papers on AMANDA, which establishes the sensitivity of AMANDA as a detector for the more common atmospheric neutrinos, which originate from the sun.

On a recent Friday night, he was meeting in a galley at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station with Rawlins and Jim Madsen, a UW-River Falls physicist who is participating in AMANDA as part of a National Science Foundation outreach program. With them were three other researchers from Germany. They were discussing if it was better to use AMANDA as it has been set up or to make some difficult adjustments that would likely improve its performance.

Said Rawlins, "Some people want to work under the hood, and some people want to drive the car."

Bigger things

Soon, though, they may have a much bigger vehicle to drive.

Halzen says that AMANDA is a 10% prototype for the much larger ICE CUBE, a plan to put nearly 5,000 sensors in a cubic kilometer of ice beneath the South Pole. And it may take ICE CUBE to accomplish what Halzen and Morse want to do.

But ICE CUBE will not come cheap. Its cost has been estimated at nearly $250 million -- an amount that will need to be approved for the budget by President-elect George W. Bush. If it passes muster, it will be, by far, the largest project ever seen here.

Prospects for approval seem good, according to some in the science community.

Robert Gehrz, an astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota and past chairman of the American Astronomical Society, calls the AMANDA experiment -- with which he has no association -- "a technical marvel."

"It has a chance to get funding," he says, "because the physics community is behind it."

But, Gehrz adds, "It is so expensive, it can only be done by national will."

TRACKING LIGHT

THE TELESCOPE THAT LOOKS DOWN

Most telescopes look up. AMANDA, (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) looks down. It seeks to capture light from high-energy neutrinos coming up through the Earth. This telescope goes to extremes: It is buried in more that a mile of ice at the South Pole, where it seeks muons that emit a dim blue light when passing through AMANDA. Using this device, the light can be tracked back to a source in deep space.

200M

Snow layer

Heating plant

Depth 50 METERS

-- AMANDA detects high-energy neutrinos from distant sources deep in the universe. Twenty-three strings of widely spaced photoamplifier tubes are placed into deep, water-drilled holes in the South polar ice cap.

-- To drill the holes, water is heated to 190 degrees and pumped at a rate of up to 200 gallons per minute through a sophisticated nozzle that melts the polar ice and bores straight down.

-- About 10 tons of equipment goes into each of 23 holes.

-- More than 2,400 feet of crystal-clear ice rests below. Earth acts as a filter to block out any other cosmic noise from the north.

PHOTOAMPLIFIER TUBE

-- Photoamplifier tubes encased in clear glass spheres, larger than a bowling ball.

-- Tubes can detect the light from just one photon and amplify the signal one billion times.

-- Each photo detector sees the muon at a different time and brightness.

High-energy neutrinos coming up through the Earth will occasionally interact with ice or rock and create a muon; such a muon emits a dim blue light when passing through AMANDA, where it is detected and tracked back to a source in deep space.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Forecasting weather in Antarctica

UW's automatic weather stations help guide, save lives of those in harsh climate
By ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff
Originally published: January 22, 2001


McMurdo Station, Antarctica -- George Weidner was riding a helicopter in the blue Antarctic sky, skimming above a white layer of ground fog, hunting for a 10-foot tall metal beam with weather sensors and electronic equipment attached. The device, one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's automated Antarctic weather stations that dot the frozen continent, was not easy to find back then -- January 1989, before the days of global positioning satellites. The fog was making his job more difficult.

Weidner, a UW research scientist, recalls that the pilot, looking for a place to land, tried to set the chopper down slowly, but was disoriented by the lack of a horizon.

Suddenly, the chopper caught a skid in the snow, and the aircraft slammed down violently.

"We felt a powerful jerk, then we hit again, and the plexiglass windshield blew out," Weidner recalls. "It jammed the throttle, and the rotors could not turn off. We had to exit under spinning rotors."

No one was seriously injured, but the team was stranded 25 kilometers out from McMurdo Station, completely exposed to the elements. And although they were rescued, the crash was a reminder of the treacherous nature of Antarctic weather -- and of the reasons for the UW weather stations in the first place.

UW involved since 1980

Since 1980, a UW-Madison group has been installing and maintaining more than 60 automatic weather stations in Antarctica. The stations measure air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure. They are powered by heavy-duty batteries that last through the Antarctic winter and are recharged by solar cells in the summer.

And they provide the thousands of people who work at the bottom of the world with information crucial to their survival.

This year [in 2001], UW-Madison atmospheric scientist Jonathan Thom, 29, of Madison is in Antarctica, installing and repairing the weather stations along with Rob Flint, 60, an electrical engineer from California who has worked in Antarctica since 1974.


On a recent Sunday here, Thom and Flint drove a truck loaded with new weather station equipment out to Pegasus Field, an ice runway on the Ross Ice Shelf about an hour's drive from McMurdo. They had to move a weather station 1,500 feet to accommodate turnaround space for aircraft.

Because Thom and Flint's truck couldn't negotiate an ice rise near the runway, they had to haul the heavy equipment by sled to the new site.

The work was backbreaking. Four plywood boards, measuring about 2 feet square, had to be buried in the ice, at the end of long chains that anchor the weather station in place. About three hours after the two started their work, the weather station was up and broadcasting information to polar orbiting satellites.

Their work, officially called the Antarctic Automatic Weather Station Climate Program, is a UW project under the leadership of professor emeritus Charles Stearns. It is funded by a National Science Foundation grant and is based at UW's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

A vital service

The weather stations provide critical information to weather forecasters in Antarctica, where thousands are at the mercy of the harsh climate.


Art Cayette, the meteorology department manager at McMurdo Station, says the stations are a critical piece to the forecasting puzzle. To prove his point, he calls up a satellite image of Antarctica on a computer. It shows a storm brewing near the Ross Sea.

"I can see a low-pressure system, but I don't know anything else about this storm, from the image," he said. "You need surface reports."

In the United States, he says, there is a network of weather observers, but in Antarctica, aside from the widely scattered stations and camps, there is no one. So the surface reports come from stations placed by the University of Wisconsin.

Lt. Col. Daniel Dunbar is the operations officer for U.S. Air National Guard Detachment 13 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He helps coordinate the flights that take people and material to the Antarctic continent for the National Science Foundation, and weather information is critically important to him. Satellite coverage of the continent is not continuous.



Flights from New Zealand to Antarctica are so dependent on up-to-the-minute weather information that there's a slang term -- "to boomerang" -- for flights that leave for McMurdo but are forced to turn back to Christchurch.

Stearns and Weidner have made these decisions easier by figuring out a way to predict dangerous wind conditions at a McMurdo Station airfield many hours in advance, using data from their weather stations.

"We go through periods where we don't have satellite coverage. That's where the automated weather stations come in," says Dunbar. "They're giving us more accurate and timely information."

Stearns' work instrumental

It is Stearns' work that brought this important Antarctic weather responsibility to UW.

By the late 1970s, Stearns had been working in experimental meteorology for more than a quarter-century, with projects as far-flung as Peru, and as close to home as a proposed power plant in Portage, Wis. His expertise caught the attention of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, which asked him to lead the automatic weather station project in Antarctica.

Since 1980, Stearns has made 16 trips here to put weather stations in place. Weidner has made 14 trips since 1982 and Matthew Lazzara, a PhD candidate with the program, has been here four times since 1995. Thom is on his second trip.

The weather stations, scattered widely across the continent, are marvels of ruggedness, simplicity and a 1980 version of high-tech. Powered by lead acid batteries and solar cells, these weather stations transmit data to polar orbiting satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Weidner fabricates the stations in his ninth-floor lab at UW's Space Science and Engineering Center in Madison. He uses vintage computer parts made in the 1970s -- to conform to the original design -- but is in the process of upgrading the stations to use more efficient components.

The stations, he said, cost about $15,000 each. "We made about 60 or 70," he says. " We service about 20 to 22 per year."

After installing a weather station, Stearns says, the next problem is finding it again.

"You look out, it's everywhere white and not a feature to be seen."

Weidner jokes about early efforts to find the stations on servicing missions. The first stations, actually made by Stanford University, were 2-foot square boxes, "painted white" he says.

Iceberg discovered


UW's weather reach goes far beyond the surface weather. Lazzara runs the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center in his ninth-floor lab at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. It was from here last March that the stunning satellite images of huge icebergs calving from the Ross Ice Shelf were released to the world on the center's Web site.

Lazzara first saw the huge iceberg calve from the Ross Ice Shelf from high-resolution satellite images that are constantly fed to his lab.

The amount of weather information stored in Lazzara's lab is astounding. One wall is filled with more than 200 CD-ROMS that show a continuous display of all weather patterns from 45 degrees south latitude and farther south since 1992.

"A lot of researchers have looked at this data," says Lazzara.

Lockheed used his data to build a composite weather model for use in designing a new plane. When his grant money from the National Science Foundation ran out for a few months last summer, he went off-line; the Australian weather service complained.