Antarctica -- The Lure Of The South Pole

Science: Nowhere on Earth is life harsher than at the South Pole. But the very attributes that make it so difficult to be there also make it attractive to scientists, particularly astronomers. This is the last of a four-part series on life and science in Antarctica.

THE SOUTH POLE - There are two poles at the Pole.

The first is a breast-high post striped like a candy cane, topped by a reflective-metal sphere and surrounded by the fluttering flags of the nations that research Antarctica.

This is the politicians' pole, the picture-taking place for VIPs who stagger in the thin air and shocking cold of the 9,300-foot-high polar plateau, quickly posing before clambering back aboard a military transport plane.

Then there is the real geographic pole about 100 yards away, its position roughly marked by a modest sign and a stake. The position is approximate because a nearly 2-mile-thick cap of ice rolls across the Pole at a rate of about 33 feet per year, requiring the exact spot in the snow to be resurveyed every January. A row of stakes marches across the plateau to show where the bottom of the world used to be.

The juxtaposition is ironically appropriate to the dual approach of humans to Antarctica.

The first pole is symbolic of Antarctic politics, a continent where wary nations stake their claims yet cooperate in the world's last great wilderness. The United States has never made a formal claim to Antarctica - even though an American whaler, Nathaniel Palmer, made a dubious report of having seen it first - but Americans are the ones who operate this most remote of all the world's scientific stations.

The U.S. flag flutters atop a geodesic dome that shields a cluster of buildings from wind and snow, Old Glory emphasizing the obvious point that there is only one nation on Earth that has the fleet of ski-equipped airplanes, money and will to sustain such a place.

Logistics are a nightmare. Airplanes consume as much as 1.5 gallons of fuel to deliver a gallon of fuel to the South Pole.

The second pole, with just a single American flag, is symbolic of science at the bottom of the world: a place where ideas count, instead of nationalities.

Here, at the axis of the Earth's rotation, where the air is the cleanest in the world and the planet's spin effectively thins the atmosphere to an elevation equivalent of 10,600 feet, astronomers from different nations are erecting an ever-more impressive suite of instruments to study the sky. The goal is knowledge, not Southern Ocean protein or Antarctic minerals.

The most consistent set of infrared pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter last summer were taken here and made possible because the planet remained above the horizon 24 hours a day at the Pole. One of the longest-running studies of the dynamics of the sun, which in the southern summer orbits the horizon but never sets, continues here. Some of the observations that confirmed the background echoes of the big bang that allowed galaxies to form were made here.

It is a plain, bleak, other-worldly, unsettling place.

Unlike the North Pole, which is on the Arctic Ocean, the South Pole is a flat plateau of ice built up from snowfalls dating at least tens of thousands of years. It buries land that, if uncovered, would be near sea level.

"Ski the South Pole," a T-shirt reads. "Two miles of base, half an inch of powder."

Except for wind-sculpted frozen ripples in the snow called sastrugi, the plateau is as featureless as a sheet of paper. When American Richard Byrd became the first to fly over the South Pole in 1929, he described it simply as "the center of a limitless plain. One gets there, and that is about all there is for the telling. It is the effort to get there that counts."

To a person standing on the ground, the horizon is only about seven miles away. The haze is light ice fog, not pollution. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a station to measure what it calls "the cleanest air on Earth" in order to make base-line measurements of man-made changes in the overall atmosphere, such as rising levels of carbon dioxide. CO2, a greenhouse gas, has risen here from 313 parts per million in 1957 to 357 ppm last year.

Overhead, an ozone hole blamed on man-made chlorofluorocarbons opens each Antarctic spring in September, leading to an increase in ultraviolet radiation, and then closes by late November.

GETTING THERE IS COMPLEX

Disregarding the problems of altitude, weather and cold, getting to the South Pole is complex. The military transports must dispense with compass and rely on gyroscopes, satellite-positioning systems and a geographic grid based on the Greenwich meridian. The south magnetic pole is more than 1,500 miles from the geographic pole and wanders up to nine miles a year; it is now in the Southern Ocean, south of Australia.

On my arrival, the South Pole is an initial physical jolt of altitude, dryness and cold. When I stepped off an LC-130 transport in late Antarctic spring, the temperature was 35.1 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; the wind chill pushed that to minus 69.5 degrees. Any exertion left me short of breath, and the first evening I was so giddy it was hard to think. I struggled through interviews and then wandered off while leaving my notebook behind.

The warmest temperature ever recorded at the Pole was 7.5 degrees; the coldest was 117 below. Even that is not an Antarctic record: The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth is at Russia's Vostok station in Antarctica, which reached 129.3 degrees below zero in July 1983.

Potential dehydration and cold are constant companions.

"Welcome to the South Pole," a galley sign reads. "Because anybody can do sea level."

The place teaches lessons fast. Tired of cumbersome "bunny boots," I once followed the example of Pole veteran John Lynch, the National Science Foundation's science-program manager, and hurried 100 yards from one building to another in wool socks and jogging shoes. I did not repeat the experiment.

Usually a neck gaiter or balaclava and goggles shrouded my face, my breath freezing on the cloth. Without such covering, exposed skin began to hurt in a matter of minutes.

The aluminum geodesic dome that is the base centerpiece - 165 feet in diameter and 55 feet high - is unheated and draped in icicles. It is being buried by accumulating snow at a rate of 8 to 9 inches a year. During storms, snow blows through the dome entrances and never melts; it drifts against the buildings inside as a dry, tan powder.

A ramp leads down to the dome's chilly interior. Inside, heated, orange metal boxes delivered by transport planes house the galley, offices and some living quarters.

The heated quarters are entered through thick refrigerator doors, but even these cannot keep the cold fully at bay: Their interior is rimed with frost. It is so cold that the galley refrigerator has to be heated. When vegetables are flown in, Pole personnel have to form a human chain from the airplane to move them rapidly enough to prevent freezing.

Except for one new blue housing unit on stilts dubbed the Blue Bayou, neither the living quarters nor the galley have windows. Despite constant summer daylight, the overall impression is of claustrophobic night.

In summertime, when calm weather usually permits walking from one building to another, most of the approximately 140 people stationed at the South Pole live in insulated canvas, quonset-shaped structures called Jamesways.

Low, dark and heated unevenly by a noisy duct (a water bottle can freeze on the floor while the ceiling is roasting) the Jamesways are partly curtained by plywood and tarps into dim cubicles with a single bed and sagging mattress. The bulbs are too dim for reading but too bright to avoid bothering sleeping neighbors.

The bathrooms are located in separate buildings that are a frigid walk across the snow. There is a limit of two two-minute showers and one load of laundry per week.

Because newcomers are urged to drink prodigious amounts of water to combat altitude sickness and dehydration, and subsequently spend much of the first "night" urinating it away, the common advice is to obtain a washed-out food can from the galley to serve as chamber pot. The alternative is a night of laborious dressing and undressing to reach a toilet.

Water is obtained by a front-loader that fetches snow from a "mine" (simply a pit in the plateau) to be melted at a rate of about 1.2 million gallons a year.

Unlike the situation at Lake Hoare, where all human waste is flown out, sewage here pours into an ice cavity where it melts enough space to contain its own volume and then refreezes into a sterile brown bulb. There are five of these pools now of about 250,000 gallons each. Over the next 300,000 years they will migrate toward the sea, be shattered into fragments by a coastal glacier and eventually melt into the Southern Ocean.

Other garbage is flown out, with Mark Furnish of Seattle's Burlington Resources on base to ensure it is packaged and labeled properly.

The Pole is so cold as to be utterly sterile. Nothing lives there without human intervention: no animals, no plants, no insects, no bacteria. A fly once hitchhiked from New Zealand on a transport aircraft and dropped like a stone when it ventured out the door.

Nothing rots. The air and snow are so dry that new furniture such as office chairs are casually left outside until construction is completed, mummified by the cold. Lumber splits in the aridity, however, and because of the lack of moisture and water, fire is a prime concern.

The weather is monotonous. It never rains, and snow is rare, as are blizzards of drifting snow. Almost every weather station on Earth has recorded higher wind speeds than the calm vortex at the South Pole, even though at the edges of Antarctica winds can reach 200 mph.

There are no smells, except for galley food, which tries to compensate for everything else: I enjoyed a steak and lobster dinner, shared by laborer and senior scientist alike.

There is no color, except the buildings, and nothing to see - no peaks or crevasses or visual relief - for hundreds of miles. Breaking the monotony are walls of packing crates in the snow and lines of flags that mark roads and walkways to prevent disorientation in poor visibility.

There is a gym, but the 11-foot ceiling means the basketball hoop is set 8 feet high instead of 10. "Volleybag" is played with rags stuffed in a pillowcase. There is a small library, a smaller bar and a weight room.

Yet the isolation, the camaraderie and the subtle beauties of a winter sky of aurora color or blazing stars become infectious for some. Katy McNitt, a lieutenant at NOAA's air-monitoring facility, fell in love last polar winter and became engaged to co-worker Rod Jensen.

"It's like a big family," she says of the small winter crew that will number 27 this year. "It is a magical place."

"It's a little shocking at first, but you get used to it," shrugs Michelle Hartford, a carpenter from New Zealand spending her fourth summer at the Pole in the last five years.

Some scientists are lured by the extremes.

"The more extreme the better," explains astronomer Jim Jackson of Boston University, who uses the Pole to see the coldest, darkest matter telescopes can detect. "The higher the altitude and the worse the cold, the better. It freezes out all the water and leaves it on the ground instead of the air."

"I want to build a station so high on the polar plateau that you have to pressurize it," Lynch said. "It would be a stepping stone to a lunar observatory on the moon."

`I HATE IT, BUT I LOVE IT'

Many things in Antarctica seem to be named for dead people: an airfield where a bulldozer operator slipped down a sea ice crack and into the cold ocean, a peak for a pilot who slammed into it, tents for their inventor who froze in one.

The Pomerantz Observatory, the name for a new cluster of telescopes probing the universe in ingenious ways, is named for an astronomer still very much alive. Martin Pomerantz may be 77 and may be officially retired for the past seven years - he now runs a car dealership - but he still comes to the Pole each summer to monitor the most obvious and yet one of the most mysterious objects in the sky, our sun.

Pomerantz, who first came to the South Pole in 1960 and has returned regularly since, does not like the cold, the altitude, the flatness or the confinement.

"To come down here you have to have a damn good reason," he says. "I like what you can do at the South Pole. In science, if you're not at the cutting edge, you're nowhere near it, and this is the place to be at the cutting edge. I hate it, but I love it."

The advantage of the Pole is obvious: Because of the tilt of the Earth's axis, the sun never sets in the summer. Pomerantz and colleague Jack Harvey are "helioseismologists," or scientists who study subtle vibrations in the sun to understand what is going on inside. They track a kind of solar symphony of 10,000 harmonies and make deductions about the solar interior the way seismologists use tremors to study the Earth's interior.

The pair's observatory seems modest to an extreme: a small solar telescope to track the sun and an insulated wooden shed buried in the snow nearby. The shelter, barely big enough to turn around in, allows researchers to watch the orb on a TV screen and study its vibrations.

The $200,000-a-year price for this project is cheap compared with the simplest kinds of observation in space, and the payoff has been significant.

"We found the theories all wrong," says Harvey. The sun's rotation is different than predicted; its temperature behavior is also different, and the understanding of its core has evolved.

Ideally the pair would like to be able to predict solar flares that can interfere with Earth radio communications or the solar cycle that influences our weather. Understanding the birth and death of the sun would also shed light on the entire universe.

"The sun is the only star you can resolve with existing telescopes," notes Pomerantz.

AN ODD SET OF TELESCOPES

On the opposite side of the South Pole base are the Pomerantz Observatory scopes, a collection of odd instruments with colorful names (two are called Python and Cobra, and their cluster of computers is called The Snake Pit) that look at things human eyes are blind to.

The oddest is Amanda, or the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array. Designed to detect muons and neutrinos, tiny particles theorized to be emitted from distant astronomical objects, Amanda is a new kind of telescope that uses the clean ice of the Pole to help spot objects so small that solar neutrinos are passing through your body at this moment without your noticing.

University of Washington astronomers are working on a similar telescope in the ocean off Hawaii but have been delayed by the early failure of instruments. "We think the Pole is a better place," said Per Olaf Hulth of Stockholm University, one of the scientists involved in the project.

Holes more than a mile deep are being drilled with hot water, and strings of detectors are lowered and frozen into place. How useful such telescopes will prove won't be determined for several years.

Nearby is the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, or Cara, which includes a number of different telescopes. Included are Spirex, a telescope that uses the infrared part of the light spectrum to observe distant galaxies and produced an excellent set of photographs of the comet collision with Jupiter; Cobra, which maps the "wrinkles in time" of cosmic background radiation produced by the big bang that started the universe; and the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, or AST/RO.

A submillimeter telescope uses that part of the light spectrum where radio meets the infrared. Because this area is subject to interference, "There are very few places on the Earth's surface that you can do submillimeter," explained Tony Stark, the lead astronomer from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Boston.

Usually the things astronomers see outside our own solar system have to heat up enough to shine. The advantage of AST/RO is that it can look at cold, dark gases in our Milky Way galaxy. That in turn "could shed light on the current outstanding problem in star formation," Stark explains. "Once you have a molecular cloud in space, formation of a star is inevitable (as gravity collapses the gas together). But it is not known how you create clouds."

The telescope, being assembled this season, should also be able to observe the ozone layer and annual ozone hole over Antarctica, eliminating the need for frequent balloon flights.

"Consider it a satellite in very low orbit," Stark suggested in trying to explain the advantages of the South Pole. "To try to do this in space would be comparable to launching another Hubble Space Telescope."

RACE TO POLE LED TO TRAGEDY

Science dominates Antarctica as it does nowhere else, but things could have been very different.

The race for the South Pole in 1911-12 was in part a race for national prestige. After learning that American Robert Peary had become the first to reach the North Pole, Norwegian Roald Amundsen announced in 1910 that he was switching his goal to the South Pole, telegraphing his intentions to the British who had already set out.

That produced a match between meticulous Norwegian planning and romantic British pluck, and planning won. Amundsen, four companions and 18 dogs reached the Pole on Dec. 14, 1911, left some tents and letters for Britain's Robert Falcon Scott, and returned to their base at the Bay of Whales without mishap.

Scott had erred in choosing ponies over dogs, the horses rapidly giving out. He arrived at the Pole on Jan. 18, 1912, after having to man-haul sleds up the 124-mile-long, 14-mile-wide Beardmore glacier. Exhausted, starving and crushed that he had arrived second, Scott dismally retreated.

He and four companions froze to death on their way back, Scott and his last two men dying in their tent just 11 miles from their next food depot. "Great God, this is an awful place," he recorded in his journal.

That has not deterred nations as viewing Antarctica as the last great frontier and a potential colony. In January 1939, for example, Nazi Germany decided to add its name to the growing roll of countries laying potential claim by sending a secret seaplane mission to the continent. Alfred Ritscher photographed nearly 100,000 square miles and dropped aluminum darts engraved with swastikas on the ice.

Germany never followed that with a formal claim, but other nations have asserted title to pie-shape wedges of the continent. It started with a British claim in 1908, and subsequently Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and South Africa all put in bids. The U.S., Russia, Japan, Germany and Belgium have cited discoveries as historical precedent for activity here but have not made formal claims.

The claims are not academic. Biologically, the Southern Ocean is a rich source of protein, already heavily fished for krill. Geologically, Antarctica contains valuable minerals and possibly oil, though retrieval is not economically feasible.

In 1959 the world forestalled an Antarctic land rush by signing the Antarctic Treaty. First proposed by the U.S. in 1948, this suspends all claims in favor of maintaining the continent as a wilderness open to all nations for scientific research or other peaceful purposes. Since then proposals have been made to designate the continent a world park.

Meanwhile, research facilities continue to grow and evolve. The first American South Polar base has been abandoned and is now a dangerous, off-limits warren of rooms beneath about 24 feet of snow. The second base with its distinctive dome, completed in 1975, is nearing the end of its useful life and is scheduled for replacement by 2004 or so.

The new base, built on stilts to avoid being buried again, would increase in size from 81,000 to 140,000 square feet. The dark, depressing Jamesways would disappear. Pole population in summer would remain about the same - 140 now, up to 150 in the new base - but winter population would almost double, to 50, because of the increasing emphasis on astronomy that would take advantage of the six-month polar night.

The new polar base may have another part to play in space exploration. Each summer scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center near San Francisco arrive at Amundsen-Scott base to work on the Antarctic Analog Program, an idea to use the South Pole as a testing platform for future interplanetary bases.

Hazardous waste flown out of the Pole in 55-gallon drums could be cut up to 90 percent just by removing its water, says Michael Flynn, a NASA researcher at the Pole. Plant greenhouses could supply fresh produce, consume excess carbon dioxide and transpire water that could be recaptured and reused.

America's dumping of raw sewage into the Antarctic ice cap "is like taking moldy bread, sticking it in the freezer and forgetting about it," says Christian Straight, another NASA scientist. He proposes to recycle the stuff into drinkable water and organic waste that could be consumed as fuel.

"If you're stuck out on Mars for two years, your waste starts looking better and better as a source of resources," says Flynn.

Antarctica is too precious as wilderness to make it a frontier of resource exploitation. Instead, its raw harshness, strange adaptations and unique challenges make it an intellectual frontier, demanding the kind of human ingenuity needed not just to survive in space but to sustain civilization on our own planet.

Why learn to subsist in Antarctica? "Because it has all kinds of implications for what goes on worldwide," says Straight.

-------------------------- THE PATHS OF THE EXPLORERS --------------------------

The modern hunt for a fabled southern continent began with the epic voyages of English explorer James Cook. While pack ice kept Cook from ever sighting Antarctica, he was the first to sail across the Antarctic Circle, in 1773.

Historians dispute who first sighted the Antarctic mainland, but Russian Thaddeus von Bellingshausen appears to have the strongest claim, sighting hills in 1820.

Exploration of the mainland languished until 1895, when the International Geographic Congress focused on Antarctica and touched off a race to the Pole.

After Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott reached the Pole in 1911-12, humans found no compelling reason to return until U.S. aircraft landed in 1956 to scout a site for a permanent base.

On the coast it was a different story. The Argentines occupied an abandoned British base in 1905 on Laurie Island and have kept it ever since, making it the longest continuously staffed base on the continent. Other nations followed suit.

Modern American activity on the continent began in 1929 when Admiral Richard Byrd flew over the South Pole from a base at the Bay of Whales. In 1934 Byrd became the first person to winter in interior Antarctica, nearly dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning in his cabin during the ordeal.

In 1935 American Lincoln Ellsworth became the first to fly across the continent.

The largest Antarctic expedition yet, led by Byrd in 1940, established the Little America III base. In 1947 the U.S. trumped its own efforts with Operation Highjump, a Navy expedition of 13 ships, 23 aircraft and 4,700 men.

Cold War tensions pushed the U.S. to establish a permanent base at the South Pole before the Soviet Union did. Americans did so in 1957, establishing it as a research site in conjunction with the International Geophysical Year. In the size of its commitment, the U.S. has dominated Antarctic research ever since.

------- CREDITS -------

Reporter, photographer: Bill Dietrich.

Editor: Mark Watanabe.

Designer: Celeste Ericsson.

Photo editors: Angela Gottschalk, Fred Nelson.

Graphics: Christine E. Cox, Randee S. Fox, Paul Schmid.

Graphics researcher: Karen Kerchelich.

Copy editors: Ave Delph, Don Kirkpatrick, Bill Kossen.