Station Interior Part 4 - Inside The Arches and Under The Ice

Today was by far the coldest day I have experienced at the South Pole. Pressure has dropped, making the felt altitude also a challenge when walking around. And the sun hasn't even set yet! The sun is currently at about two degrees above the horizon still spiraling downward ever so slowly. The mother of all sunsets.

Several posts ago I covered the exterior of the station. In one of the pictures there were two huge arched structures under the ice and snow. These arches hold other buildings and storage areas within them. One arch is the vehicle maintenance facility entrance and the other is the logistics and storage arch. The vehicle maintenance facility is well heated and used for storing certain tracked vehicles during the winter. There is also another bay for working on other equipment. Behind the VMF are welding and utility shops.

The logistics arch is where all incoming material and supplies are sorted and stocked in the appropriate location for later use. Some items can not be frozen and are located in the heated building within the arch.

 The arches are very cavernous and provide plenty of square footage for storage of all kinds of items to include our frozen food items. Temperatures outside of the heated building hover around -55 F. Toasty compared to the -82 F outside today! 

  

Beyond the the arch seen above there is yet another arch of roughly the same size that holds all of our fuel in forty five 900 gallon tanks. Lots of fuel to get us through the winter. More on those in a later post. Connecting the main station to the arches is an under ice utility corridor. From this corridor one can access the main power plant and ice tunnels. Yes, ice tunnels.

Next Post? The Ice Tunnels