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S Pod~~s new home for scientists and a multitude of support personnel is taking shape at the South Pole, to be completed in four years. Those working their stint in Antarctica are called "Polies." Life at the South Pole takes on many challenges. Before receiving food and cargo, these items must travel 10,000 miles by ship from California to an American station on McMurdo Sound on the coast of Antarctica. lfiere, supplies are transferred to cargo planes for the fina1850 miles to the South Pole. The grocery and supply list must be made out two years in advance. Supported by the federal Office of Polar Programs and the National Science Foundation, the University of Wisconsin is heading up the construction and operation of the new facility for polar research `trough its Space Science and Engineering Center in Madison, WI. The new home is replacing a 60 year- old geodesic dome that is much too small for the advanced research personnel of 200 who need an updated place to live and work. The Polar Research Program involves a wide variety of important scientific experiments, including research on the deep freshwater lakes beneath the ice sheets. Seventy percent of the world's freshwater is locked up in Antarctica's ice, which has a maximum thickness of 18,803 feet, with an average thickness of 8,504 feet. There is a great and growing concern about the increase in the rate of melting of the ice at both the North and South Poles. After all, if these vast ice sheets melted, sea level would rise as much as 200 feet. A recent Lindblad Expedition Tour to the North Pole disappointed its passengers -the North Pole was water, not ice, for the first time in the memory of the ship's Captain. Instead of walking over the North Pole, ie tourists traveled by boat_ The North Pole in the Arctic is ice surrounded by the land of Europe, Asia, Alaska, and. Greenland. The South Pole in the Antarctic is land surrounded by ice-a stable ice cap over mountainous s' ~ ThPrP i~ .; t'~- QrP.i 1~~ i n ~ 1 ,, territory with ice sheets around its edges. The South Pole area is vast, encompassing some 7,200,000 cubic miles of ice. Think of it as two parts: an ice cap which changes little from year to year, and an ice shield fed by gravity from the glaciers of the cap. The shield loses some of its ice every year to climate variations, but 480 cubic miles of ice are added during the colder season. Antarctica is a "living' structure of freshwater added to the land mass in the form of ice, constantly in motion. Huge snow storms add material to the mountain's glaciers, the glaciers move downward to supply the ice shields, the ice shields shift every which way with the winds and currents, and icebergs feed the oceans with freshwater as they melt when they float into warmer dimes. Recently, a huge portion of the Larsen ice shield broke off, 650 feet thick, an area of 1,250 square miles. "A profound event, an ice shield that has endured many climate variations over many thousands of years, the size of the state of Rhode Island, and now it's gone" said a geologist from Portland State University. This event raised further concerns about global warming and the changing climate. As a general statement, the .~ waters around the ice shields are found in three layers_ the top 600 feet is glacial-melt freshwater; the next 5,000 feet is typical seawater; the bottom layer is cold, very dense and extremely salty water. One of the massive freshwater lakes beneath glacial ice, Lake Vida contains water seven times saltier than normal seawater and remains liquid, even at -10° C. Lake Vida is most interesting to the scientists. It is the first example of an "ice-seated" lake with no contact with the overlying glacial ice, new melt water, or the atmosphere. One of the many research projects at the South Pole is to investigate the waters of Lake Vida for new, uncontaminated forms of life. The story of deep-core drilling and some of the results of the studies of about Lake Vida and other projects at the poles is grist for the next Passwords. ~`~G ~r~ FACETS Spring 2003