Sunday, May 2, 2010

Ice Station Omega

Antarctic Station

Antarctic exploration gets little attention in warmer climes, but it is the nearest human experience to deep space travel, isolated in a wondrous but hostile environment for a period of months. Commenter 'Thucydides' tipped me off to this coolific photo essay of Antarctic stations in Wired.

(When I was in high school there was a car in the neighborhood with an Antarctica license plate. I never learned the story, but it looked 'real,' with an expedition number, and was presumably handed out to those who took part.)

My prior mental image of Antarctic habitation, it turns out, was entirely wrong. I vaguely pictured semi-underground (or under-ice) facilities, an image I probably got from 50s or 60s vintage Arctic operations, or perhaps from The Thing. Instead they are on stilts, so snowdrifts won't pile up around them. Some can be jacked up to higher levels as needed.

Belgium's Princess Elizabeth station seems to have rocketed to Antarctica straight from the future of 1957. The Franco-Italian Concordia station, in contrast, looks the most like space hardware, landed and converted into a station. Appropriately, the European Space Agency designed much of the technology, and is studying the effects of living there.

Germany's Neumeyer III might be the stranded superstructure of a cruise ship, and South Africa's Sanae IV - first of the modern generation of Antarctic bases - looks like enormous picnic ice coolers, which seems sort of backwards. The US Amundsen-Scott station is architecturally bland, but that aurora is magnificent.

Then there's Britain's Halley VI:


'Imperial Walker'

An early generation design for an Imperial walker?

15 comments:

Soren said...

I think the Halley VI design looks like something you'd see Daleks herding.

Anita said...

And who says the British don't have a sense of humor.

Ferrard Carson said...

During the Falkland Wars, they did hang banners along their ships saying, "The Empire Strikes Back"...

~ Ferrard

Anonymous said...

Antarctic habatats...add airlocks, make it air tight, and add the life support from the ISS and a hyroponic garden...you've got a ready made colony hab! Just have to figure out how to get it off-planet...

Ferrell

Anonymous said...

And radiators, Don't forget the radiators.

Geoffrey S H said...

plus radiation defenses- either British style magnetic shielding or a more conventional storm-room.

Cityside said...

I imagine the antarctic habs are air-locked and airtight for heat retention purposes.

kedamono@mac.com said...

There's airtight and there's airtight. You put a partial vacuum on the outside of those habs, and you'll see windows and paneling go sailing. :-)

Cityside said...

Good point.

Roger M. Wilcox said...

I'd think submarine travel would be more akin to deep space travel than Antarctic exploration would. You have to bring along your own air, and keep yourself completely sealed off from the world outside your hull lest disaster befall you.

Oh, and you get to say "pressure" a lot. (Although phrases like delta-v and A.U. will be conspicuously absent from your dialog.)

Sabersonic said...

Though similar, space travel and the submarine culture have some radical differences. Chief among them being the limited endurance.

Submarines are able to process their own air and water through the medium, manage their waste heat through the medium, propel through the medium and are only limited by the amount of food brought aboard.

Spacecraft have neither of those endurance luxuries. Of course there are lifestyle similiarities that can make the transition from under the sea to out in orbit. One of them being the inability to know the time of day without a point of reference.

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Rick said...

Welcome to a new commenter!

There are a lot of 'lifestyle' similarities between subs and spacecraft, but the biggest difference is that (unless things go really pear shaped) a sub can surface in a couple of minutes and be in an Earth surface environment, albeit a soggy one.

Admittedly Antarctica IS an Earth surface environment, but implacably hostile in winter, and - most of all - cut off from any support or rescue for a period of months.

Bernita said...

Your post reminds me of a thriller by Alestair MacLean...Ice Station Zebra...a very good book, btw.

Rick said...

That was the inspiration for my title. ('Zebra' was the old military mnemonic for Z, IIRC, though it had become 'Zulu' by the time I was in.)

Anonymous said...

Ice Station Zebra...a great spy story! I wonder what it would have been like if he had set it on Titan or Callisto?

Ferrell