Halley VI
July 11th, 2005
Jonathan Glancey wrote an article earlier this year about the competition to design a new base for the British Antarctic Survey’s research station on the Brunt ice shelf. It’s a very challenging environment, to say the least. As if the extreme cold and wind conditions weren’t enough, the building will also have to cope with being buried in ice. Not to mention the fact that the ice shelf itself is moving horizontally. Glancey described the various approaches being taken to making a building that could survive such conditions, from a modular design that could easily be dismantled and relocated to a “walking building.”
What I didn’t grasp when I read the Glancey article was that because of this horizontal motion the earlier bases, having been abandoned and then buried by ice, are liable to emerge again as the ice they were built on reaches the edge of the shelf and breaks off to form icebergs. Simon at 75 Degrees South points out a photograph of the Halley III base emerging from the ice a dozen years after it was abandoned.
When you think about it, it’s perfectly logical that the bases should pop up again like this, but it does underline what a bizarre environment the Antarctic is. With the exception of the occasional abandoned church’s steeple breaking the surface of a reservoir during a drought, we don’t generally see buildings reappear once we’ve abandoned them to their fate because if they’re buried in a mudslide or overwhelmed by a lava flow not much survives. It’s the way the Antarctic preserves the buried building that’s so strange. (Interestingly, the current base, Halley V, won’t suffer this fate as it’s due to be dismantled once Halley VI has been built.)
