Who could have guessed that Antarctica – the world’s driest desert, where typically it barely snows during the summer months and the sun pounds down with nearly 24/7 predictability from November through February – that this season solar power would be proving a bust.
A Korean snowmobile expedition, hoping to reach the South Pole by machine using batteries charged by the sun, has been stymied by the same weather system that is producing those massive floods in Australia. The resulting heavy cloud cover and the most snow Antarctica has seen in two decades has stalled its efforts.
Options for the Koreans are to abandon and walk to the South Pole, or fill engines with gasoline (more likely), in order to get off the continent before winter sets in.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the crossing of Antarctica by pickup truck as well as the first vehicle to cross Antarctica by bio-fuel, which was judged a success … I guess … though it was followed by massive, six-wheeled, gas-guzzling trucks carrying gear and spare drivers.
Since Australian Douglas Mawson brought the first airplane to Antarctica, and Robert Falcon Scott brought trucks – all of which failed — maybe it’s time to admit that machines don’t belong on the 7th continent at all.
Which even as I type the words I realize is naïve, as each austral season man’s scientific and touristic footprints grow across Antarctica.
How about robots? It’s not far-fetched. The U.S. government is currently building a robot-driven caravan, which it hopes will help ferry fuel and supplies from the coastline base at McMurdo to its base at the South Pole.
The goal? To save human effort and risk and reduce man’s footprint.
The 1,500 mile long supply trip has been done the past two years – thanks to a road bladed by Americans — by a team of ten driving five giant tractors fitted with snowblades and dragging giant bladders of fuel behind. It takes 40 days to reach the South Pole and two weeks to return, obviously burning lots of gasoline in both directions.
The goal is to reduce the numbers of men to two and have the caravan run 24 hours a day, rather than the current 12-hour shift. Operations manager for the U.S. Antarctic Program George Blaisdell says the experimental robotic system, being developed by the NSF with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, should be ready to test later this year.
One current driver, Kristy Carney – who’s done the commute three times – questions how the remotely operated trucks will do in snowstorms and deal with crevasses.
“You get stuck all the time,” she says. “If one gets totally buried (by snowstorms), it will affect the whole line. I don’t know how that would work without enough people to dig it out.”
Maybe it’s time to leave the machines at home and re-introduce dogs to Antarctica; they have been banned since 1991, allegedly for fear of introducing disease to the seal population.
Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.
[Flickr image via rayandbee]