McMurdo-South Pole highway

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This article contains information about a planned or expected future road.
It may contain information of a speculative nature and the content may change as the road's construction or completion approaches and more information becomes available.

Image:Autoroute icone.svg

McMurdo-South Pole highway is a 900-mile (1450 km) planned road in Antarctica to link the United States McMurdo Station on the coast to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It will be constructed by leveling snow and filling in crevasses, but not paved. Once finished, caterpillar tractors will be able to drive to the South Pole, which will take 10 days.

The construction started in late 2002, and is expected to be finished in the southern summer of 2006-2007.

The McMurdo Ice Shelf and the Antarctic Plateau are relatively stable. Most crevasses occur in the short, steep shear zone where the road would climb to over 2000 meters above sea level; this section of the road would need maintenance each season. The section has caused much more construction work than planned, since two different ice sheets move against each other here.

The project is funded by the United States National Science Foundation to provide a lower cost, potentially more reliable method of supplying the South Pole Station. Bad weather at McMurdo some summers has reduced the total number of supply flights the NSF could make to bring in construction supplies and scientific equipment.

Such a road would also facilitate the heavy equipment needed to implement its proposed South Pole Connectivity Program, a planned optical fiber link between the South Pole and the French-Italian Concordia Station located at Dome C at the edge of the Antarctic Plateau; Concordia has 24-hour access to geosynchronous satellites. Most such satellites cannot be used at the poles since they are below the horizon; the South Pole now uses a few older, low-bandwidth satellites that dip sufficiently south of the equator to be usable for several hours daily. These satellites are near the end of their life. A new road to McMurdo might provide a regularly maintained alternate route for such a link; however, opinions vary as to the shear zone section's suitability for a long-term cable. It's also possible the NSF may choose to deploy several special purpose satellites in polar orbits.

A February 7, 2006 NSF press release stated that 110 tons of cargo had been successfully delivered overland to the South Pole Station in a "proof of concept" of the highway.^[1]