快猫短视频

Vladimir Papitashvili has spent his working life in the Earth鈥檚 most frigid places. But today, as head scientist at the US鈥檚 new 鈥渟tation-on-legs鈥� at the South Pole, he spends his days in comparative luxury. As Antarctic midwinter approaches, he tells Anil Ananthaswamy about his adventures and how he helped remove an appendix on the Antarctic ice sheet

You have recently returned from the South Pole. I understand the US is rebuilding its Amundsen-Scott base there?

Yes, the US Antarctic Program (USAP) is just finishing the new, elevated station which will house 150 people. It is the largest inland station in Antarctica. Next summer we will begin the clean-up, demolishing the old dome which was the previous base.

What was wrong with the old dome?

The dome was a significant improvement from what we had before it. Early stations were mainly wooden boxes, which eventually got buried in the snow. Then you had to go down through the roof. At the Russian station at Mirny, where I used to go in the early 1980s, I lived in a building that had become buried a few metres under the snow. They had to make a hatch in the roof to get in and out. Some people get claustrophobic under the ice but it was okay for me.

There鈥檚 not much snowfall at the South Pole, but there is still almost a foot of snowdrift each year. The snow has almost reached the roof of the dome now, and we had to build a ramp to get down to the entrance.

What鈥檚 special about the new station?

The USAP decided to build the new station on legs to tackle the problem of snowdrift. The snow should blow under the building instead of piling up against the station. Eventually it will though, and then we can jack up the station. Maybe we鈥檒l have to jack it up in 20 years, maybe 10 years, we鈥檒l see.

The station is built so that you really can do everything inside. You don鈥檛 need to go out, unless you have to walk to the telescopes and experiments that are about a mile away. Even the power plant, machine shop and garage are accessible through tunnels under the snow. That鈥檚 very convenient: you don鈥檛 need to expose yourself to the cold and wind unnecessarily. You can even go around the station in your slippers. It is built to support science for the next few decades, with much more comfort than people ever had before. We realised in the 1990s that the dome would be unable to support the new science that we wanted to do at the pole, because it couldn鈥檛 house enough people.

鈥淵ou need never be cold. You can even go round the station in your slippers鈥�

What sort of science will you be doing at the new station?

The South Pole is one of the best places for studying neutrino physics, for cosmic microwave background research and radio astronomy. You can do some of these things from the Atacama desert in Chile, but bear in mind that they only have a few hours of darkness each day. At the South Pole, we have six months of darkness, so you can integrate signals over a long time. That鈥檚 one of the reasons why astronomers think they can do outstanding science at the South Pole. We have built the 10-metre and the is almost complete. The South Pole is the scientific heart of Antarctica. No other national Antarctic programmes can compare in scale to the science we are doing.

The South Pole is also one of the most remote places on Earth. How do you get building materials there?

Aeroplanes. The USAP has only recently developed the capacity to do a land traverse from its coastal base at McMurdo. If we began construction now, we probably would send a lot of material via the traverse from McMurdo, because you can transport the bigger structures by sled. But for the new station, we brought everything in by LC-130 aircraft equipped with skis. A total of 925 flights hauled about 24 million pounds of cargo.

When we built the foundation platform of compressed snow for the South Pole Telescope, we found that the density of that snow exceeded the requirements for wheeled aircraft. Now we can think of building a runway of compressed snow at the pole so that wheeled aircraft can fly straight in from New Zealand.

What is the weather like at the pole?

In summer, it is -25掳C or so. It is pleasant when there are no storms. But now it is winter and conditions are, of course, much more severe. The temperature goes down to -70掳C and there is perpetual darkness. But there are beautiful auroras flashing all the time. Unfortunately, I have always been working in the Arctic and Antarctic in the summertime, so I have never wintered at the poles.

What do you find most difficult about working in Antarctica?

The remoteness. It is comparable to what people might feel working on the moon. But even the remoteness is not so bad these days, with all the communications we have. On my first trip to Antarctica in 1983, we only had radio contact once every two weeks with the headquarters in Leningrad. They would call my family, and you had 3 minutes to talk. The South Pole station is like a big family, with about 150 people there in summer, excluding construction workers 鈥� unlike McMurdo, which houses more than 1000 people in the summer and is like a small mining town.

You were used to the cold even before going to Antarctica?

Yes. In the 1970s I worked in Yakutsk in Siberia, where temperatures are like Antarctica. I was studying the electromagnetic properties of permafrost, to understand the physics of radio wave propagation over permafrost.

When I first went to Antarctica, I was the leader of the group studying geomagnetism. We installed more than a dozen magnetometers between the Russian coastal station at Mirny and 1450 kilometres inland at Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau. It was a trip that took three months with two big tractors, one pulling 30 tonnes of fuel, and the other pulling a wooden shack, which had beds, a kitchen and a power generator. Nine of us, including a surgeon, were on that traverse. I learned how to navigate using the sun. This was in the days before GPS.

There was a medical emergency on your way back?

When we were 1000 kilometres from Mirny, one of our technicians was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. To make a runway for an airplane to reach us, we would have used up all our fuel, so we decided to do the surgery on the ice. The doctor asked me and a mechanic to help. We cleaned up the dinner table and scrubbed our hands. The mechanic held flashlights as the doctor cut open the technician鈥檚 belly, and I had to keep the belly open by pulling it apart with special hooks. The operation went on for two hours or so.

What does Antarctica mean to you?

For the last decade, I have spent every Christmas and New Year in Antarctica, away from my family. If I miss a season, that would be a real loss. Antarctica is a place that if you go there once, you dream of going back.