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Design Wanted For Antarctic Base
colonist writes "According to the BBC, The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have begun a major international competition to design a new scientific research station at Antarctica. The old station, Halley Research Station, was built in 1992 and its ice shelf will break off by 2010." According to the article: "The first four bases were built on the surface and gradually got covered with snow and ultimately got so deep they became crushed by the weight of ice and had to be replaced", though the "current base on stilts" fared better until the ice shelf problems.
Kurt Russell and his crew had a pretty nice place in The Thing, why not copy that? Just make sure you don't dig up any... you know.. weird things.
They need a new design because currently, All Your Base Are Belong To Ice.
They can build them above the ground again, only this time use steel beams and concrete, as opposed to cardboard.
Don't get me wrong, good ol' corrugated is a fine building material for forts and tree houses, but for a scientific station that is supposed to get covered with ice, one should invest into some steel.
That's my two cents, anyway...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
1) Put in the water, on pylons. Concrete ice-breaker pylons like they use on bridges.
or maybe..
2) Don't fight the mounting ice. Use a modular, extendable lift system, and build down into the ice. Much like the ice caves they build into glaciers, but with structural reinforcement and climate control + serious bilge pumps. Your computers will love it down there.
Still have the same problem of getting covered in snow and crushed.
I don't think so... I think they would get covered in snow and get stronger. one of the beauties of a dome is that it can take huge loads provided that they are fairly uniform. Getting covered in snow is very uniform loading. Snow, when under enough presure turns in to ice. Ice is the material the igloo is made of. I am pretty sure that the igloo walls would just thicken with time.
You would still have to worry about shifting ice causing asymetric loading of your dome.
Also you couldn't make it one big igloo, it would have to an interconected network of smaller ones. The thickness of wall required to construct an unsuported span (dome in this case) is pretty damn non-linear, and it would not be practicle to build ice walls large enough to support big rooms, when you could just make 4 smaller ones, and get twice the space...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Igloos are made of snow, actually. You just have to find the right snow: a drift at least 60 cm deep and very hard packed by the wind. Then you cut blocks with a snowknife (a saw works surprisingly well, too). And yeah, I've built plenty of 'em.
You're right in saying you can't build them too big, though; I'd guess about 3 metres at the peak would be a practical limit. They're good for storage, and surprisingly warm and comfortable if the cracks are stuffed with snow.
Back to the base - I think the stilts idea is a good one. I'd modify it though, so the stilts terminate in some kind of long, chain-driven, very deeply threaded screws (almost like an ice auger if you're ever seen one). Snow piling up and compacting into ice? Use a very slow gear to back the screws out a metre or two.
In the arctic, OTOH, we used plain old pre-fab panels (plywood sandwich with 10 cm of foam insulation in between) on beams. The beams in turn were laid on a really simple foundation: cardboard boxes placed over exposed bedrock and filled with more foam. Once the foam hardens it stays in place, and you saw all the tops to the same level.
We got snow up to the roof pretty reliably every winter, but it melted in the summer. I guess they can't count on that down south, though. Cheers!
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