Cold Rush

Long hours. Subfreezing winds. Months of absolute darkness. Welcome to the South Pole, where the coolest science outpost on earth is being built atop 9,000 feet of solid ice.

After a grueling 18 hours on the ice, Jerry Marty wanders into the communications center at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and collapses on a tattered sofa. It's midnight and the place is quiet. As the National Science Foundation's representative for the station, Marty is, in effect, the mayor of the South Pole. A lanky 55-year-old with fair hair and a broad mustache, he is overseeing construction of a $153 million research facility that will replace the Pole's current structure - a 27-year-old geodesic dome that is slowly being buried under mounting ice and snow. The sleek new station will have it all: from private rooms outfitted with Ethernet and telephone hookups to modern labs and medical facilities - plus a cozy bar where researchers can host their time-honored Slushy Night in style. By 2006, after 15 years of planning, design, and construction, South Pole scientists and support staff will have a home fit for the 21st century.

But building the new station is a tremendously complex endeavor that demands precision choreography among 85 onsite construction workers, contractors in Denver, architects in Honolulu, administrators in Washington, DC, and a 10,000-mile supply chain that begins aboard a cargo ship in Port Hueneme, California, and culminates at the Pole six weeks later with the daily arrival of up to seven ski-equipped cargo planes. Hence, Marty sleeps by the radio in the "comm center" - if any one of these variables goes awry, he needs to be the first to know.

At 5 am, he rouses himself and hikes a quarter mile across the ice to reach his office outside the dome. It's located in a plywood shack called the Cheese Palace (Marty, a Wisconsin native, has a spirited penchant for cheese-themed decor). Just as he enters, the phone rings. It's a conference call patching together four time zones and two continents. Pole engineers have finished crunching data collected over the previous winter, and they've discovered that the half-built South Pole station - at this point a colossal steel and wood frame partially enclosed with siding and insulation - is settling into the snowpack at a rate nearly four times faster than originally predicted. In a single year, the data shows, the station's overall foundation has sunk 5 inches into the 9,000-foot-deep ice. Marty's counterparts on the phone have no choice but to put off plans for connecting the plumbing, electricity, and data conduits between the complex andthe adjacent utility tower. Otherwise, the sinking would soon shear them off. Marty hangs up the phone. How do you stay on schedule when your building is slowly going the way of the Titanic ?

For a small-town mayor, Marty faces some daunting challenges. There are the 185 days of stygian darkness that prevent resupply planes from landing on the unlit runway, and temperatures that plummet past minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, seizing up heavy equipment. Blinding whiteouts roar in with little warning and can halt construction for days. The ice floor shifts steadily, creeping 30 feet across the underlying continent each year. Heaters, generators, bulldozers, and hot water all vie for portions of a finite fuel supply; showering is limited to a brief twice-weekly spritzing. Patchy telephone service makes outside lines a luxury; occupants are allotted five-minute "morale calls" on Sundays. Internet access isn't much better. Uplinks rely on discarded satellites positioned in eroding orbits, and the local network is a jumble of hastily wired computers and servers.

In spite of these obstacles, Marty and the NSF are pushing ahead with new dormitories, administrative offices, galley, dining room, rec center, research labs, and medical clinic all under one roof. Why? Simple, say those steeped in Antarctic science: With depleted oxygen at its 9,355-foot elevation and so little moisture that metal never rusts, there's no place on earth that matches the environmental purity of the South Pole. This makes the area a benchmark for monitoring the health of the atmosphere and an ideal site for studying astronomy. "Science-wise," declares Patrick Smith, the NSF's polar research technology manager, "it's almost as good as being in space."