THE COMPUTER ROOM IN THE Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station still smells of fresh paint and new furniture. With its gray carpets, soft lighting, and a couple of artificial plants, it could be the lobby of a modestly prosperous law firm. But the brutal white reflection of an ice desert filtering through tiny tinted windows reminds me that I'm at the bottom of the globe, a long way from everywhere.
Even so, I click Send and an email message – with an ego shot of me standing at the metal post that marks the actual pole's location – flits off to the Internet. A year ago, it wouldn't have been so easy. Back then, messages downloaded at glacial speeds. (I know, I know. But that's what passes for humor down here.)
"Now we're transmitting 15 gigs per day, and every room has a data port with Ethernet service," says Pat Smith, manager of technology development for Antarctic infrastructures and logistics at the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the phones were upgraded to voice over IP. "It's been quite a ride. I mean, I was here in 1985 putting in the very first satellite links we had," Smith says. "Then we had a whopping 200 kilobytes a day." That's about 3 percent the size of an MP3 of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Like the rest of us, the 150 people who spend summers at the Pole always crave more bandwidth. They'd sure like to have BitTorrent to help endure winter's eternal night. But really, it's work that's pushing the scientists to build out connectivity at the station – a collection of facilities raised on hydraulic stilts that seems like the prototype for a Mars colony. By 2014, when a 33-foot-diameter submillimeter radio telescope, a neutrino detector, and other equipment come online, researchers expect to be generating a terabyte of data each day. "These telescope numbers are something that we would never have conceived of 10 years ago," Smith says, pointing at a chart of rapidly climbing red bars. "This is really driving what we're doing."
It's not an easy job. The Pole – aka 90 South – is 3,000 miles from the closest submarine cable connection in New Zealand. Amundsen-Scott relies on the aging Iridium communications constellation plus three miscellaneous satellites wobbling far enough out of their geosynchronous orbits to exchange signals with the station. For now, they provide high-speed service some 11 hours a day and low-speed connectivity the rest of the time. "People can check their bank accounts, pay bills, and buy stock over the Internet," says Erik Kawasaki, a network engineer. "In November, the satellite pass begins at around 3 am New Zealand time, so they have to wake up early to use it. That is about the only gripe."
After a three-hour plane ride back to McMurdo Station – the main US base in Antarctica – I settle in at one of 300 workstations to email yet another picture of me on the ice. The furniture at McMurdo is older, and the station is more crowded – less like Mars and more like a state university. But every so often, the same bone-chilling sense of distance seeps in. Clad in his Carhartt parka, laborer Edgardo Alfonso Vega leans over from the neighboring desk: "Once this season, we were cut off from the world for 27 hours. Something happened, and there was no off-continent connectivity. No phones, no Internet, no nothing," he says. "That's when we felt really, really isolated."
– Angela Posada-Swafford
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Icy Reception
