A Three Hour Tour: A drive in the country.

Where do you go when you want to go on vacation when you are in MacTown? Well you go for a nice drive in the country. And since we are in the mountains here the only place to go for a drive is on the sea ice. There are three main traverses that originate from here in McMurdo. They are the South Pole Traverse, the traverse to Black Island, and the Marble Point Traverse.

The South Pole Traverse is a new operation that was completed for the first time last summer. For three summers in a row a crew set out towards the Pole to survey and build a road to the pole. This route will become a major fuel re-supply for the South Pole starting next year. Currently all of the fuel for the station is flown in on C-130’s for the NY Air National Guard. The figure that I have heard is that they burn 3 gallons of fuel to every gallon that they deliver. And so it is a costly process to get fuel there. The overland traverse will make this a much more economical operation. However there was no south pole traverse this year for various reasons and they are getting geared up for the first season of fuel traverses next year.

The Black Island traverse is a common traverse that happens during the summer. Black Island is our communications hub for McMurdo. All of our information is sent from town to the Black Island facility and then is shot up to the satellites and out to you people in the rest of the world. The reason for this is because McMurdo is in the shadows of Mt. Erebus and we are in a satellite dead zone. I can’t figure out why they didn’t think about this when they built the station back in 1956. So the Black Island traverse takes out food, drinking water, fuel, and any parts needed for the station there. The station is staffed by three people in the summer and the live in basically a ranch size house.

Marble Point is on the other side of McMurdo Sound to the north and it is the only field camp run by Operations. All of the other field camps are science based. Marble Point is a fuel supply depot for helicopter operations. This extends the range that the hellos can fly into the Dry Valleys which is a major science area. Marble Point holds 144,000 gallons of JP-8 or in other words high grade diesel fuel. And they are normally re-supplied buy the fuel ship that comes to McMurdo every year. While the fuel tanker is docked at McMurdo the ice breakers cut a channel to Marble Point for the re-supply. But the sea ice conditions have been very poor for ship traffic the last few years. This is because the iceberg B-15 has been blocking McMurdo Sound from the open water for the last five years. And so the sea ice has not gone out in the McMurdo area for eight years now. And sea ice does become thicker as it gets older, but it gets much tougher and that makes it much harder for the breakers to get through.

Since there was no Pole traverse this year and because of the sea ice conditions they decided to refuel the Marble Point station by traverse over the sea ice. It was an easy choice because they had all of the new Pole equipment here and not committed and the price of fuel has gone up so much that it was more cost efficient to truck the fuel than to ship it. Each of the four traverses to Marble Point consisted of one CAT Challenger with a grooming sled towed behind, two Deltas, and two Case Quadra tracks each towing four 3000 gallon fuel tanks. All four of the traverses this year were successes with no mechanical breakdowns or weather problems. They took a total of 96,000 gallons of fuel to Marble Point.

Here is the pumping station at the ice edge. They cannot drag the tanks up onto the land and so they will pump all of the fuel from the tanks up to the holding tanks.