Last week ten people in eight specialized tractors (see below) left McMurdo station with hundreds of tons of fuel in bladders on sleds in tow.
The traverse is nearly 1,000 miles crossing a very dangerous shear zone with deep crevasses and vast tracts of land that rise in altitude and have no traces of human civilizations. Last year was the first complete round trip to and from the Pole.
By making this 60+ day return trip, the South Pole station can get a delivery of valuable fuel for a fraction of the cost that it would take to fly fuel in by C-130 cargo plane.
All traverse crew are equipment operators/mechanics/fuel specialists with multiple years of experience working in Antarctica. Pretty impressive.
Ice Trucker has been the big show up here the past few seasons as you probably know. That is hairy enough for me, and I figure one has to be slightly off to make those ventures.
ReplyDeleteCost effective seems a trivial excuse for sending people on a trek like this. Are there stops along the way? What happens if they get stuck out there...convoy style- we got each other Attitudes> got to wonder why veterans would take this risk. What shelter do they possibly have in a breakdown? do they pack camps with the convoy? I have so many questions now that you have opened this up. I am conjuring up nightmares even thinking about it.
Having just been on the traverse to the South Pole for the 2009-2010 season I have a few things to say about it. First of all it's a 2,100 mile round trip that took just 27 days to get there. The trip back took another 22 days but that included a side trip of about 450 miles. To answer some of Berry's questions there are no "stops" along the way. We pull a living module along with us and simple stop for the night and camp. Eight of us eat and sleep in the LM as we called it. When one of the tractors would get stuck another one would pull it out and we would be on our way.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few risks involved but they are slight. We had trained medical personal (EMTs) with us during the whole trip. We also pulled a fully stocked tool shed with us full of spare parts to fix anything that might brake down during the long trip. The two yellow tractors shown in the photo did not make the trip but four other Caterpillar tractors did.
All told the traverse delivered just over 95,000 gals of fuel and one D-6 dozer to the Pole this year.
Oh also last year was not the first round trip to the Pole. It had been done three other times before this year.