Driving directions to the South Pole are simple: head out of America’s McMurdo research base, angle across Ross Island’s ice shelf, up a glacier in the transantarctic mountains, then continue south to the pole. The only problem is there’s no road to drive on. Until now.
In October last year engineers working for the United States Antarctic Program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), began bulldozing an unsurfaced ice road to the South Pole. It is known as the Traverse Highway and will create the first permanent road link to the bottom of the world.
Construction of the 1,000-mile road was halted early this year when the Antarctic winter set in, but on Monday last week, with the first signs of austral spring, the team of road builders set out to complete the £12.5m job.
The NSF is reluctant to reveal details of the latest expedition and is sensitive to suggestions that the organisation is threatening the pristine Antarctic environment.
However, the NSF will admit that a road-building project is under way. “We are looking at the possibility of a traverse route in the interest of getting material and personnel to the South Pole,” says Peter West, the NSF’s spokesman. “Right now that is done by aircraft. We are looking to be able to do it overland and the preliminary stages of that have now been completed.”
While the NSF is unwilling to talk specifically about the group that set out last week, details of the project’s progress last season have been made public.
The expedition began well, covering 30 miles without incident before the convoy of trucks and bulldozers ran into difficulty and ground to a halt. The next four miles would take them more than two months to cross.
The problem is known locally as the shear ice zone, an area roughly four miles wide that bridges the gap between two huge slabs of ice 10,000ft deep: the McMurdo and the Ross ice shelves. Both these shelves are slipping gradually northwards, towards the sea, but because they are moving at different speeds, the ice between them is put under enormous strains, causing it to split open in a series of crevasses.
It is, in effect, a four-mile wide, 75-mile long, belt of lethal cracks in the ice, the largest of them 26ft wide and 110ft deep.
The crevasses are particularly dangerous because they are invisible to the engineers. The newly fallen snow forms treacherous bridges over the top of them that collapse like a trapdoor under the weight of a vehicle. In 1991 two researchers discovered this to their cost when a hidden crevasse swallowed them and the tractor they were driving.
John Wright, the project manager, described the area in his journal as a “vast, flat featureless plain of snow”, but he also knew that there was no way around it. “The shear zone is the single, unavoidable obstacle that any traverse outbound from McMurdo contemplating travel on the Ross ice shelf must face,” he said.
Driving to the pole is not a new concept. Captain Scott famously used motorised vehicles in his race against Roald Amundsen, but they broke down in the harsh weather. In 1957 Sir Vivian Fuchs, the British explorer, drove to the pole in a tractor using synthetic fuel that remained liquid at temperatures of -70C. But the American ice road, which will be open for 100 days a year and make the trip from McMurdo to the pole possible in just 10 days, will be the first permanent road along which large vehicles and trailers can travel.
Wright decided that the best route to take across the shear zone was the most direct one. “We’re going to take any crevasse head-on,” he says. “We’re going to gut it and we’re going to fill it and we’re going to cross it.”
After choosing a point where the zone was at its narrowest, the team inched forward at 3mph behind a jeep-sized tracked vehicle known as a Pisten Bully, the same as used in ski resorts to prepare the pistes. A ground-penetrating radar, mounted on a boom at the front, alerted the driver in the cabin when it detected a crevasse. When it did, the whole convoy stopped in its tracks and the hard work began.
An access hole was opened up and a mountaineer descended into the crevasse on a rope to judge the dimensions. “It’s amazing, just the expanse of ice you see, the really blue layers,” says Erik Barnes, one of the mountaineers. “It’s a pretty serene environment down there. You are this little tiny speck in the middle of this huge cavern and you look up and you just have one tiny ball of light above you.”
Sticks of dynamite — 5,700lb in total — were lowered and the ice blown open. Next, the crevasses had to be filled with snow gathered from areas to the sides of the route. Full-sized bulldozers would push snow up to edge of the crevasse they were filling, risking the chance of its edges collapsing under the weight of the machine. “That was the hardest part of the job,” says Wright. “Out there you find crevasses everywhere. It was the cat skinners (bulldozer drivers) who built the road across the shear zone. They were the ones who brought the 83,000lb piece of equipment up to the edge.”
Some of the 32 crevasses found earned nicknames such as Hummer, Strange Brew and Personal Space and took six hours and 12,000 cubic yards of snow to fill. The snow quickly compacted itself, leaving a solid safe bridge for the bulldozers to smooth over.
The route was then marked with flags, because the entire shear zone moves north at the rate of a yard a day, meaning the road will have moved significantly in a year. However, it should remain intact from year to year despite the movement.
Last week, as the convoy of tractors trailers and bulldozers set off, a different challenge lay ahead. Over the next four months they will push inland from the Ross ice shelf and over the transantarctic mountains via the Leverett glacier. They plan then to bulldoze across the South Pole plateau at an altitude of 10,000ft, before hitting the pole itself.
But they will not be taking any chances crossing the shear zone again, and will be sticking closely to the flags that mark the edges of the highway — like a safe path through a minefield. “You’d never know there was a crevasse there if there weren’t a sign saying there was,” says Wright, “but you damn sure better not get off the road.”
A version of this article first appeared in The Antarctic Sun, the newspaper published at McMurdo station for the United States Antarctic Program
