Every year, American and New Zealand supply trains travel to remote camps and research stations across Antarctica.
Convoys of tractors haul fuel and supplies for hundreds of miles across the barren landscape.
On their journey across the Ross Ice Shelf they cross the McMurdo Shear Zone, an area full of dangerous crevasses.
Just a three-mile section of the Shear Zone has dozens of crevasses the drivers must navigate around.
But crevasses are hard to spot – they’re often buried by a bridge of snow several feet deep.
So drivers detect cracks in the ice with a radar beam mounted to the lead tractor.
When the GPR spots a crevasse, team members probe how deep its snow bridge goes.
Sometimes they rappel down into the crevasse to see the finer details of its shape.
[1:40: This is crevasse C-31. There’s the exposed roof. All the blocky bits underneath the bridge. And it extends down to the south.]
[Shear Zone blasting… now. Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole 2:07].
If the crevasse is too large to drive around, the traverse team removes the snow bridge with dynamite.
The blasting process follows strict safety standards and environmental regulations to minimize its impact on the environment.
Once the snow bridge is removed, the team fills in the crack with fresh snow.
The entire process takes about 4 to 8 hours.
The traverse can then continue onward across the vast, frozen continent.
Imagery provided by
Kathy Kasic, Billy Collins and the SALSA Science Team
Zoe Courville, U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory
Dan Price, University of Canterbury/Antarctica New Zealand
Polar Geospatial Center/University of Minnesota/ESRI
Music
Black Snow by Airtone
Produced by
Lauren Lipuma for the U.S. Antarctic Program