Shipping

 
This is a floating ice pier. It is almost impossible to get a normally constructed pier to survive the constant crushing ice that occurs during the winter. The American engineers designed a floating pier made from ice. Every 5 to 7 years they build a new pier by going out on the new sea ice during winter and making a small wall around the area of ice they want to use. Then they gradually fill this enclosed area with fresh water from the RO plant (reverse osmosis plant that filters the salt out of sea water ). They build it layer by layer and put steel reinforcing (like you do with concrete) in between each layer.

The ice/snow wall around the pier is constantly built up to keep the water in and as the weight of the ice builds up it slowly lowers into the water (but never goes below it. The reason for using fresh water is because fresh water floats on top of salt water (i.e. it has greater buoyancy) and it also takes a higher temperature to melt it so that during the summer it doesn't just melt away as quickly as the sea ice which has a very high salt content. They make the pier about forty feet deep and then put soil on top of it, to stop the sun from melting it during the summer. It also stops it from being too slippery to drive on. The pier is also held to the shore with large wire ropes, so that it can rise and fall with the tide. Every year it is inspected by divers for erosion due to melting and ships rubbing against it. Often cracks will appear and these are fixed by putting fresh water into them and letting it freeze. When the pier gets too damaged to repair, they cut the ropes, and then drag it out to sea so it can melt away into nothing just like any other iceberg.

This is a picture of the Green Wave. It's the cargo ship that carries all the large supplies down to us. It has cargo from both America and New Zealand and makes one trip a year to see us.

Just to divert from the subject of ships for a while as I want to explain a bit more about the bay.

The ice pier for the McMurdo base is built at Winter Quarters Bay, just beside Discovery Hut, which you will see in the background of some of the pictures. Winter Quarters Bay was, at one time, renowned for being one of the most polluted bays in the world. Today, I don't think you would find that the case. In the old days, things being as they were, nobody cared about what they did with their rubbish. This goes for a lot of the civilized world, not just Antarctic. So they used winter quarters bay as a dumping ground, among other places. Even though they have been extremely industrious in there efforts to clean up the place over recent years, you will still see old equipment, vehicles, etc. under the water if you look hard enough. Im told there are even old drums filled with toxic chemicals which litter the sea floor but this rumor is unsubstantiated and it would take an ecological disaster of one of these drums bursting before any proof could be obtained. This dumping no longer happens. In fact the Americans have made huge efforts to clean up their act when it comes to the disposal of rubbish. I would like to think that many of the other international bases around the Antarctic could say the same, but from what I have heard from other people, I know this is not true. I'm not saying that every base is polluting the environment, but I have heard stories of a few countries that do not seem to care about the pristine environment they live in. A friend of mine once said that "if you don't want to pollute Antarctica then don't come down here". That's true, but there are ways to limit the pollution we cause to our environments, where ever we may be !. It's good to see that the American and NZ programs are now doing their best to leave the least possible impact on the environment. Enough said I think. ( I might do a section on pollution and environmental impact later.)

The American Coast Guard Ice Breaker.
The ship we had down this year was called the Polar Star. During other years it has been her sister ship (the Polar Sea) which has been the one to come down. These ships break up the ice and allow other ships to come into port. They hang around for a while and make sure that the ice doesn't come in and trap any of the boats that have to dock.

We all got a chance to ride out on the Polar Star and do a bit of ice breaking . This shot is taken from the top deck and shows you how the boat deals with the ice.
 
I just had to put penguin photo in. The ice breaker has decided to stop in the ice (for whatever reason) and people are just walking around the base of it. The Adalie penguins are taking advantage of the tourist attraction, and two are going to have a better look while the other two have already seen it and are going home to tell their mates.

 
This is a picture of us tourists taking advantage of the trip out to the ice edge and back on the ice breaker, The Polar Star. The people in the red coats are Americans; blue coats are New Zealanders. As you can see, we are slightly outnumbered.

 
This is the fuel tanker that comes in and delivers all the fuel we require for the next two years. The fuel supplies both the Americans and us Kiwis. We buy it off the Americans and then transport it around to our large fuel tanks once a month. The ship is unloaded with large flexible fuel hoses. It carries JP8 which we use in all the large equipment, airplanes, vehicles and helicopters. Kerosene is used instead of diesel because diesel turns waxy in low temperatures. The ship also supplies all the Mogas (New Zealanders call it petrol) for all the light equipment and vehicles.

 
This is the Nathaniel B Palmer. It's mission is as a science vessel. It constantly hops around Antarctica and does many of the oceanographic sciences and studies that we are unable to do on shore. I got a chance to have a look around it and found that it was a very compact ship. It is only an ice strengthened ship and has to be careful about the situations it puts itself in. The definition of ice strengthened ship is that it has, 'maybe,' a slightly thicker steel plating at the front of the boat and a slightly rounder hull than a normal boat. A proper ice breaker on the other hand is purpose built for ice and it has to meet certain criteria of rounded hull shape, hull steel plate thickness, maybe even a double skin hull.  The term 'Ice Strengthened' is a bit 'hit and miss' when it defines the actual capabilities of a ship.   Anything less than an a true ice breaker is unreliable in an ice floe area.
 
 

 
The Marko Polo is another ship that frequents the Antarctic but it didn't come into Scott Base or Mactown because the ice was to unpredictable and with close to 900 people on board the Captain didn't want to risk the boat or the crew. As it turned out he made the correct decision, as the piece of ice he was concerned about did end up blocking the McMurdo entrance later on in the day.

  This is the Kapitan Klebnikov. Or as one of my T shirts says (which I bought on board when we got a tour around it). AHTAPKTNKA, KAIINTAH XJIEBHNKOB.

Tourism is starting to become a more prominent issue in today's economic times, and during the last part of the summer some of the regular visitors to the Antarctic visited us once more.

The Kapitan Klembnikov is an old Russian ice breaker that has been converted to carry tourists. They came and toured around Scott Base and McMurdo on both its summer visits to the Antarctic. The Scott Base staff were privileged to be shown around their ship after showing them around our base. I had a preconceived idea that it would be an old heap, but when I arrived on board I was truly impressed by its space, cleanliness and professionalism - a very nice ship!!. The patrons on board (about 150 of them) were able to get off frequently with the use of two helicopters, and because it was a true ice breaker ship (not just ice strengthened like some of the others) it was able to go safely where other ships couldn't. Most of the patrons on board were Australian or American.
 
 

There was also another ex-Russian ice breaker (turned tourist ship) that came into the McMurdo Sound, and I think its name was the Academic Kresnikov. It only carried about 80 passengers and was a bit smaller in size than the other ships. The people on board seemed happy enough with the ship and the adventure they where on. The outside visual condition of the ship meant nothing to the people living on it. It also toured Scott Base, and we soon became reasonable tour guides of our home with the people from all the different ships wanting to know everything about us and the history of Scott Base and its surroundings.

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This page last updated 16 November 1998     Edited by Shirley Baston Fred - [email protected] - ICQ # 15167279