. . . and from Below

Beneath the South Pole Station is a series of interconnected underground tunnels. These passages are not designed, as one might suspect, for efficient, easy travel between buildings, but as a means of transporting the station's water and sewage.
One pipe carries drinking water in and the other carries sewage out. The mechanics behind it all are actually quite interesting.


These tunnels were built over a decade ago with a one of a kind piece of equipment. The snow on the surface is dry and compact, perfect for shoveling and manipulating. As you dig deeper, however, the snow changes into what's called fern. Fern is the stage between fluffy snowflakes and solid ice. The Pressure of the weight of the snow above has removed about half the air from between the H20 molecules. The bend in the wall is not an illusion - the weight of the precipitation above is slowly collapsing the tunnels. Fern is rigid and crystalline, and is manipulated with a chainsaw, not a shovel. Large chunks of fern are good for snow sculptures.


As the tunnels descend into the surface snow, fern begins to appear at a depth of about 20 feet. The tunnels are evenly graded to a depth of 35 feet below the surface snow. The temperature in the tunnels is a constant -60 degrees F.



Along the main line tunnel there are several off-shoots. These side tunnels all lead to a past, present, or future Rodriguez well. Waste heat from the generators is captured in glycol and then cycled underground in the sleeves of the water intake pipes.


These intake pipes span the tunnels and then reach underground, warming the fern and ice below. After a year of cycling waste heat into the ground via the tunnel system, a vast balloon of liquid water, up to four hundred feet deep, forms beneath station. This is what's called a Rodriguez Well, and will provide water for the station for a couple years. Once the liquid water is consumed, and the resulting cave begins to encroach upon the danger of collapsing, we close the 'Rod' well down and fill it with our sewage. At that point, the station will begin drawing water from the a different side tunnel, which will have been 'prepped' or warmed with waste heat during the previous twelve months.

Pictured below is a building constructed over a Rodriguez well.

The picture above illustrates the process of draining a Rodriguez well. You can see the water being sprayed out in the foreground. A question may pop into your head, "Why would we drain that a well that we spend a year's worth of waste heat to create?". Well, that is a wonderful question. Here's the answer. The underground piping laid between this particular well and the station, was rated to -20F. The constant temperature underground is -60F. Oops. So the well became useless, and was drained to make way for all of our poop. No biggee, just a couple hundred thousand dollar mistake. But look on the bright side of things - the draining process created some really cool snow mounds . . .








Whew! Hopefully that all makes sense to you. And hopefully it doesn't make sense to you that we spray Benjamin's onto the polar plateau and drop our waste in the ground. In 10,000 years, a massive, ten-ton poop-sicle is going slide into the ocean. It will be a good day for geologists, and a very bad day for an unsuspecting penguin.

This is Scott, our tour guide through the tunnels. He helped construct the tunnels, so many years ago, and had a corresponding depth of knowledge about the tunnel system matched by no one.