Science: Fist Clench Under Ice

Icecaps can be cozy. Last week Arctic Expert Robert Philippe, recuperating in Alexandria, Va. from an airplane crackup, told how the Army engineers make themselves comfortable in Greenland’s icy interior. Instead of fighting polar blizzards on the surface of the icecap, they dodge them by burrowing into the ice, just as many Arctic animals find shelter under the snow.

The principle of the Army’s Greenland Research Program, with which Philippe has been working since 1953, is to use what it finds on the icecap. What it finds is snow, which gradually turns into solid ice about 15 ft. below the surface. Treated properly, both snow and ice are useful structural materials, easy to excavate and excellent insulators. They melt when exposed to heat, and deform slowly from their own weight, but the engineers have learned to minimize these failings.

Dug-ln Base. During the coming winter, the first under-ice base will get a thorough test. Named “Fist Clench” (officially Site 2), it is high on the icecap, 200 miles east of the Air Force base at Thule

(G.I. pronunciation: Tooley). Around it is nothing but a featureless white plain, and Fist Clench itself looks like almost nothing. Only low chimney tops show above the snow.

Fist Clench was “built” by digging trenches with a Peters plow—a 13-ton, Swiss-built monster that chews up ice and snow and blows it over its shoulder. Twenty-four insulated Jamesway Huts. 20 ft. wide and 40 ft. long, were set up in the trenches. Then the trenches were roofed with timber trusses and covered deep with snow. The 60 scientists and military men who spend the winter at Fist Clench will have a!1 reasonable comforts, and they will hardly feel it when the 100-m.p.h. gales start blowing overhead.

Putting the buildings under the ice, the Army figures, will save an enormous amount of fuel, which accounts for three-quarters of the cargo carried to an Arctic base. This alone is a big advantage, but to have military value, any installation on the icecap needs good supply routes to the outside world. Airlift is too expensive and dangerous, and weather on the icecap is often too rough for surface transport. So the engineers are putting roads under the ice too. With a Peters plow they dig a long trench 20 ft. deep. They roof it temporarily with curved, corrugated sheet metal, and cover the metal with snow. After the snow has had a few days to pack and harden, the metal can be removed, leaving a firm arch of snow like the roof of an Eskimo’s igloo. One hundred miles of under-ice highway are now under construction between Thule and Fist Clench, and no blizzard that blows will stop the trucks that use it.

Ice Warehouse. Even more ambitious is a chamber 65 ft. square and 25 ft. high that the engineers have dug with coal-mining machinery in the face of a glacier near Thule. It is 150 ft. from the top of the ice and 500 ft. back from the face, and it would make a fine warehouse, invisible from above and with built-in refrigeration. The engineers figure that much bigger chambers can be dug without danger of the roof caving in. What they do not know so far is how long their ice structures will last. Ice behaves in some ways like a very thick liquid. It flows slowly, eventually filling any open space. The engineers hope that their under-ice dwellings, roads and storerooms will remain useful for about ten years.

The goal of all this research is active military use of the Greenland icecap, whose strategic position dominates most of the U.S., Europe and the U.S.S.R. Major air bases on the ice are not likely, and in any case, the Army is not much concerned with air bases. More likely it is interested in icecap missile bases, which could be ideal places to station giant rockets in ready-to-go position. Temperature and humidity would be low and constant, deep under the ice, and this is good for delicate mechanism. Under-ice supply routes would lead invisibly in from the coast, and over the base itself would spread a smooth, white plain, showing no faintest sign of human activity.