Cold Rush (continued 3/4)

But these tactics were intended to handle only slight changes, says Brooks. The latest movement discovered by Marty's team will require a substantial face-lift to the foundation. For that, Brooks presents a more robust solution, one he'd incorporated into the station's design but hadn't expected to implement for at least 10 years. He explains: "At each of the 36 columns, we've placed a mechanism for installing a manual hydraulic system. We put in a jack, and on the word go we all lift at once." In 10-inch increments, the entire 65,000-square-foot structure can be raised off the snowpack, a process equivalent to hoisting a Costco warehouse a full story off its foundation. Each day for a month, crews repeat the brutish cycle, sliding new cylindrical segments of steel into the gaps. When they've added enough clearance, workers will bolt new legs into place.

Ferraro Choi's design cleverly dealt with the environmental gremlins that had tormented previous stations. Yet before construction could begin, planners had to figure out how to get nearly 40,000 tons of building materials to a site that might as well be on Mars. They considered constructing the station with prefabricated pods shipped whole to McMurdo Station, the Pole's nearest supply point, where they would be loaded onto a tractor train and hauled across a thousand miles of crevassed glacier to be pieced together at the Pole. At one point, the NSF asked whether it would be feasible to build the station remotely. "They wanted robots to weld the whole thing together," laughs Ferraro, "with scientists sitting in a lab back in the US controlling the machines via joysticks." Eventually, architects, NSF managers, and project contractors at Denver-based Raytheon Polar Services agreed on the present scheme, which delivers building components aboard military transport planes, then requires workers to assemble the parts at the Pole in what the Ferraro Choi team calls a "giant Tinkertoy project." Planners estimate it will take more than 1,500 LC-130 flights over a 10-year timeline to deliver all the materials.

When Raytheon signed on Jeff Thompson, founder of IT Design Build and former counterterrorism expert for the Navy, to implement the computing infrastructure for the new South Pole station, the company couldn't have chosen a more exuberant geek. Thompson, who recently launched a line of ultra-durable nail polish concocted from high tech military enamels, practically leaps from his chair as he details his vision for the new complex. "We're designing a network with 300 percent redundancy," he shouts over a meal of rare filet mignon in a noisy Denver steakhouse.

Thompson, 39, is going to tremendous pains to attain this level of reliability. In August, he'll begin assembling the entire network - cables, servers, computers, wiring closets, routers, and hubs in a 2,000-square-foot lab at Raytheon's headquarters. Once everything is functioning properly, he'll dismantle the whole system, box it up, then do it all over again, just to make sure it really works. Only, the second time, it won't be Thompson making the connections but a stand-in with no computer skills, rebuilding the network from instructions spelled out in a step-by-step how-to manual. Should there be a catastrophic system failure at the Pole and an IT person isn't on hand, Thompson wants to guarantee that even the cook can reconfigure the network. He also wants sysadmins to be able to configure the network remotely, without physically touching the servers or routers. "The dry climate means static is very bad," explains Thompson. "There is no humidity and when there's wind, static gets worse. You can blow a monitor just by touching it."

Thompson's brief inventory of new technology planned for the station is staggering. "We are putting a fiber backbone between every facility," he says. "We'll remotely monitor the power plant, water purification, heating, and electrical systems, so if something goes wrong, a tech support person in the States can make adjustments over a virtual private network; we can do tele-medicine, voice-over-IP, video-on-demand, and stream live TV."

At this point, Thompson gets a bit carried away: Video-on-demand and streaming TV are wish-list frills to be added years down the road. More immediately, though, Thompson's team will complete a full-service infirmary stocked with ultrasound and digital microscopes linked over secure networks to hospitals in the States. With the memory still fresh of thePole doctor who treated her own cancer in 1999, physicians now will work with specialists in real time. And Thompson guarantees plug-and-play connectivity that includes gigabit Ethernet ports spaced every few feet along the walls of the compound and 802.11b Wi-Fi in sectors where wireless transmissions won't interfere with radio astronomy.

All of these services, though, will function only during periods when the station has data access to the outside world, and right now that's just 10 hours a day. The trouble is that geosynchronous communications satellites orbit above the equator, out of the station's range. Over time, these orbits decay and begin to drift into an elliptical pattern that swings far enough south for Earth stations at the Pole to "see" them as they pop up over the horizon. The current system uses three abandoned birds, one formerly operated by Comsat for maritime communications, one previously used for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observations, and another once programmed to monitor orbiting spacecraft for NASA. Still, with all three satellites online, the South Pole gets just a half day of Internet access.