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South Pole to Get Highway
tetrad writes "The New Scientist magazine reports that the US is building a road to the South Pole. The "highway" would cross the Ross Ice Shelf and then pass through the Transantarctic Mountains (map here). Convoys of tractors will be the only traffic on the road, bringing fuel and heavy equipment to the South Pole, as well as enabling the installation of a $250M fibre-optic communications cable (discussed previously)."
If there's going to be a permanent presence on the South Pole, this kind of infrastructure is necessary. I worked on a satellite communications system that talked with the NOAA polar-orbit spacecraft. At the poles, you'll see the spacecraft every 90 minutes. Near the equator, you'll only see them 3 times a day for about 10-20 minutes (usable time) per. The polar research stations use the NOAA satellites as a primary communications store-and-forward service, as they can't see the geostationary satellites. Makes communicating with the research stations difficult.
Don't go expecting an asphalt two-lane road. Calling it a "highway" is misleading. A "conditioned ice-road" is more appropriate.
how many millions (or billions) of dollars will be spent for this?
...as you would have known if you had RTFA. All they are doing is pushing the snow aside and flattening out the ice. No blasting, no rocks, no pavement, no paint.
Twelve
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The slashdot summary is oddly misleading, I think there would be a lot fewer 'wasted tax dollars' complaints if it was written this way round:
Plane for One Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope Goes Ahead
IceCube is a one-cubic-kilometer international high-energy neutrino observatory, located deep under the ice at the south pole, where the effects of the eath's magnetic fields will inferfere less with the observations.
Because the cost of flying all the necessary materials in by air is prohibitive, $12m of the $204m budget will be spent on pushing some ice out of the way so that the components can travel overland.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
And..how about the poor soul that has to actually WORK at that station!
Well, it ain't that bad. I work for the Amanda/IceCube experiment. I did not yet go there myself, but a colleague just returned and she found it absolutely great there. For several reasons: the natural phenomena there are quite special, for instance the halo of the sun. Also the working atmosphere is very different from normal, the "level of enthusiasm" among the few hundred researchers (of several different sciences) there is much higher, either because of the oxygen levels (?) and/or because of the adventurous feeling as if you are on a different planet. It seems to be also refreshing to be so far away from (the rest of human) civilization for a while. The place is even addictive, she (my colleague) is still feeling very homesick to that place.
To be there as a winter-over (8 months, from Februari till November) is a different matter. Then there are much less people (between 50 and 70), typically the only activities are maintainance and routine data taking and you'd better not be somebody like me who gets depressed by longterm lack of sunlight. Still, winter-overs are volunteers and there are actually people taking this job for several years.
Next winter (that is, during the austral summer) I will also go there for a 5 week stay, I am really looking forward to it. It is actually one of the reasons why I joined this experiment...
Antarctica is jointly managed by several countries. The purpose of this "road" is to move scientific equipment to the research station that cannot be moved by C-130. See the below links, we are building a telescope.
t ml
The cost of any commercial interest in antartica would far exceed the gain. Why on earth would the USA dig for coal, minerals, etc. at the south pole when we can get it cheaper elsewhere?
See:
http://www.wisconline.com/UWMadisonNews/IceCube.h
or
http://icecube.wisc.edu/
Brought to you by the following countries:
USA, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Sweden.
Flame if you must,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.