Cold Rush
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An obvious fix for this spotty connectivity would be a series of dedicated satellites orbiting the Poles, each handing off the signal to the other as it passes over Antarctica. Waxing momentarily pragmatic, Thompson discounts this scheme: "We would need four satellites at a cost of up to $300 million, plus launch fees," he says. "And there'd be no other users except a few hundred scientists at the South Pole."

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen first reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911. He stuck around just long enough to take a few scientific readings, leaving three days later for his base at the Bay of Whales on the Ross Sea. A British team and its leader, naval officer Robert Scott, arrived about a month later, only to find that Amundsen had beat them to the Pole. On the return journey, the weather turned bad and Scott and his men never made if off the ice alive. Three years later, Ernest Henry Shackleton attempted to traverse the continent, with a stop at the Pole. His expedition ship got trapped in frozen seas before it was crushed to splinters. The crew drifted aimlessly on ice floes for months, until reaching the South Shetland Islands in a whale boat. A baldly explicit help-wanted ad reputedly posted prior to Shackleton's trip says it all: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of absolute darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success."

Only a guy like Carlton Walker would have answered that ad. Walker is the supervising manager for Raytheon Polar Services and directs all aspects of construction for the new station. Trained early on as a pipe fitter and plumber, he first came to the Pole in 1991. "I was shootin' the shit with a guy in a bar in Mississippi, where I was living at the time, and he asked me whether I wanted to work in Antarctica," recalls Walker, now 41. "A few weeks later I stepped off a plane in McMurdo." This fall, he'll make his 13th trip to the Pole, taking up residence in a tent pitched near an overflow area dubbed Altie Meadows, after NSF administrator Altie Metcalf. "The tent's heated," he says, "but I can still freeze a water bottle on my floor."

He's also probably the hardest-working guy in Antarctica. While Jerry Marty acts as the NSF government liaison with design and engineering teams, Walker is the go-to guy - the one person always on the ground who has his hands in every aspect of construction, from opening day of building season until the station closes in February. He gets up at 2 am and often toils past midnight, grabbing catnaps when he can. The long hours let him keep a close eye on outdoor crews that carry on 24 hours a day in overlapping 10-hour shifts. It's his job to ensure that workers meet daily deadlines, completing phases on time and within budget. Before heading home to Denver at the end of each season, Walker inspects building materials and sorts supplies in preparation for the 22-member winter crew, who'll spend eight dark months at work on the station's interior: walls, insulation, electrical wiring, and plumbing.

The particularly dramatic conjunction of outside and inside is what makes this project unique, and it's what Walker, more than anyone else, understands. Here, the difference between backyard and dining room can be more than 110 degrees. The Pole's ambient air is far too frigid to pump directly into the station's heating system. Instead, it's first forced over a coil filled with a heated glycol solution, where it's raised to room temperature before entering a traditional air-handling network. "We are building a walk-in freezer in reverse," he says. "The outside doors are made of 400 pounds of stainless steel." Airlocks at each entrance thwart heat loss, and the interior is pressurized to keep out biting drafts.

If all goes well, he'll be done in 2006, about the time the Amanda and IceCube neutrino detectors become fully operational. The next year, demolition crews will begin tearing down the obsolete aluminum dome. ("It'll end up as beer cans," a manager on the project declares.) They'll haul out construction equipment, empty old storage depots, break down tents, and strip the site of detritus and gear that's collected over three decades.

Ultimately, visitors to the Pole will see nothing but the sleek, elevated station perched above a stark plateau once described by Antarctica explorer Stephen Pyne as a "vision of an immutable nothingness." The complex will embody a sublime aesthetic that Peter Wilkniss, former NSF polar programs director, asked architects to incorporate into the design. "He felt that a pristine environment deserved a pristine station," says Ferraro. The new look might even have compelled Robert Scott to reconsider the first words he spoke when he reached the Pole in 1912: "Great God," he exclaimed, "this is an awful place!"