The Ice Tunnels

CHAPTER 10

Most of the time living here at the Pole, things seem pretty similar to life in the real world- we brush our teeth, do our laundry, watch movies, complain about work, eat ramen, read books, etc. etc. But every so often, actually quite often, we’ll overhear a conversation, or catch a glimpse out of the window, or turn around an unfamiliar corner and be confronted with some as-yet unknown to us THING that exemplifies the absurdity of life in Antarctica.

One example would be when we heard two of our veteran Polie friends talking about a problem with the “ice pier” at McMurdo. “Ice pier?” I asked, “What in the world is an ice pier?” “Oh” he answered, “They usually construct a huge floating pier made of solid ice, 17ft thick, to allow the annual resupply ship to dock and offload its cargo of fuel, equipment and food stocks. But this year, due to bad weather, they were only able to make it 8ft thick, which isn’t nearly enough. The ship is already on its way, so now they are going to have to jettison the pier into the ocean, and come up with some other way to offload the cargo.” Only in Antarctica would the whole success of the program rely on a giant floating ice-cube. We hear of crazy things like this every day, and it’s hard to take people serious when most of the stories they tell you could come right out of a movie.

Well, this next one does come right out of a movie, specifically Star Wars II (the old number II). Do you remember at the beginning of the movie when Luke and Han Solo are running around through the icy tunnels of their base, trying to repel the invasion? Well, we have those. Ice tunnels. Over 3000ft of them, cutting out a maze right through the solid ice, fifty feet below the surface. Ours are used more in a utility sort of way, rather than as the main corridors of the base, but they are still very impressive nonetheless.

When we first arrived on station, we had the importance of conserving water hammered into us repeatedly: 2 minute showers, one load of laundry per week, flushless urinals, and for god sakes, turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth! We all understood the basic reasoning behind this miserly attitude towards water use (it takes a lot of expensive fuel to produce the water), and didn’t question these self imposed rationing measures. But it did get me thinking about where our water actually comes from? We are, after all, surrounded by 70% of the world’s fresh water (in the form of ice), a seemingly convenient source for the station, but I certainly didn’t see people outside shoveling snow into a big pot and carrying it into the kitchen, to heat it on the stove. So where exactly are they melting all of this ice? The answer turns out to lie at the end of those 3000 feet of ice tunnels.

Far below the surface, the station engineers have constructed a series of deep wells that supply the community with water. Each well, or rodwell as they are called, starts off with a bore hole, maybe 12 or 14 inches in diameter, “drilled” by an extremely hot metal probe, which melts through the ice like butter. Once the initial hole is started, a constant flow of warm water is pumped into the well, which melts more of the surrounding ice. The flow of warm water is controlled so that it, and the ice it melts, is pumped out at a rate quick enough so that it doesn’t freeze in the well, thereby producing an output of cool water greater than the input of hot water. Some of this water is reheated by excess heat from the station’s power plant and returned to the well to melt more ice, and the rest is provided to the station as fresh water. Each well starts off small, but over the course of five or six years can become an enormous cavern, 100 feet in diameter and more than 500 feet deep. The water made from the melted ice at this depth is over 10,000 years old, and is so pure that they actually have to add minerals and salts to it before providing it to the station for consumption, else it would leach these substances out of your body when you drank it, leading to severe health problems. It isn’t practical to continue the well past 500 feet, so when this depth is reached, the next rodwell is drilled and the process starts all over again.

And now for the slightly more gross aspect of the ice tunnels… after we drink all that fresh water, and use it to cook our food, our bodies natural biological processes take over, and eventually, everything comes out the other end. Well, all the station’s sewage, not just the toilets, but including everything from the sinks and showers as well, is collected, treated, and pumped down to the ice tunnels and into one of the empty rodwells, essentially making it the world’s biggest latrine. As the well fills up with sewage and invariably freezes, you are ultimately left with a, well there is no polite way to say this, a 500 foot long frozen piece of poop. It is said that in about 100,000 years, the slowly moving ice-sheet under the station will reach the edge of the continent and slide off into the ocean, along with all of our frozen rodwells of sewage, thus making for some ugly, and I imagine quite stinky, icebergs. But, in reality, the actions of the moving ice, and the extreme pressures caused by thousands of years of snow accumulation on top of the surface, will undoubtedly destroy and dissipate any remnants of our presence here in Antarctica.