True Stories #427 - The Ice Station

There's a lonely home to 150 people at the bottom of the world. Their lives are science and survival.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. There are no surprises today, but as
the temperatures are dropping with the season, I wanted to
tell you about a place on Earth that just might

(00:22):
make you think twice if you are ever tempted to
complain about the cold and the dark. It is a
scientific research station at the south pole of planet Earth,
and if you lived there, you might as well be
living on the dark side of the Moon. On the
high plateau of Antarctica at nine three hundred and one

(00:42):
feet above sea level, sits Amundsen Scott South Pole Station.
It is run by the National Science Foundation, named in
honor of two of the first explorers to ever reach
the pole in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, respectively, Norwegian
expeditioner ruled Almundson and the British explorer Robert Scott. The

(01:05):
original structure was built by the United States back in
nineteen fifty six. This was the first permanent structure ever
built in that place, made of air dropped prefab modular
panels four inches thick, The interior was aluminum, The outside
was plywood fiberglass in the middle, the tunnels connecting the

(01:25):
buildings were supported by chicken wire. The first residents consisted
of eight scientists and eight Navy support personnel. The temperatures
were brutal, able to drop to minus ninety Fahrenheits. Yet
long before then, if you walked outside, your bronchial tract
might freeze and you could start spitting blood. Now there's

(01:49):
very little snowfall in Antarctica, but there's a lot of wind,
which means blowing snow that collects on any structure. In
just three years after the station was installed, called it
was already covered by six feet of snow. It was
abandoned and relocated in nineteen seventy five with newer, better
modular buildings. It had a vehicle maintenance, weighing of power plant,

(02:13):
post office labs, living spaces, and even the machine for
melting the snow. And an even newer station was dedicated
in two thousand and eight at the cost of one
hundred and fifty million dollars eighty thousand square feet, and
it remains a place where scientists study the world that
we live on as it relates to the cosmos all

(02:36):
around US geophysics, meteorology, seismology, astronomy, astrophysics, biomedical studies, and more.
The Python telescope observes the cosmic microwave background. Experiments discover
new trinos, those nearly massless elementary particles that are so

(02:56):
hard to detect. The changing climate is studied, and all
the while, those very few people, usually about one hundred
and fifty and a third of that in the wintertime,
live in an extreme southern world that few of the
rest of us could even imagine. The sun rises and
sets only once a year. There is no solar time.

(03:20):
Average temperature is minus fifty six fahrenheit. There are no
native plants or animals because they can't survive. The actual
South Pole marker has to be adjusted thirty three feet
every year to account for antarcticas shifting polar ice sheet.
The ceremonial South Pole that spot from the first treaty

(03:42):
that was signed there in nineteen fifty nine. It is
marked with a red and white striped pole and a
silver ball on top. If you do dare to bundle
up and go outside, you will be faced with the
unreal reality that everywhere you look, everywhere, in every direction,
you will be looking north. And this will blow your mind.

(04:04):
Every Christmas, the station hosts a competition where participants bundle
up and go out for a race. They complete a
two mile loop around the geographic South Pole, with those
who finish being able to brag that they literally raced
around the world. Could you take that job? Could you

(04:26):
apply for a position at the ice station at the
bottom of the world. Get hired, Take the long, long
journey toward your final DC three, landing on a sheet
of frozen planet, do your important work, and then try
to relax in the encapsulated TV rooms, wreck rooms, greenhouse

(04:46):
and other carefully sealed quarters, isolated from the cold and
from billions of other people. Henry David Thureau famously wrote,
what fire could ever equal the sunshine of winter's day?
But when the words mean something totally different in the
context of the extreme cold, When you are standing alone

(05:09):
outside of a tent of metal and minus dozens of degrees,
waiting for minus ninety do you think you could watch
a sunset and then wait for the sunrise, wait in
the shivering darkness for the sun to rise again, waiting
for six months. I couldn't do it. My skin and

(05:34):
my heart need the rays of the sun, and I
don't know about you. But that is my true story.
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