- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
[Here is something very special. A blog kindly sent in by TFFer @nev12345 and featuring some ostensibly agricultural machinery working hard in a very different application. See the footnotes to follow Mike Neaverson's progress. He tells me he has further short film footage "if anyone is interested" - as if he has to ask JP1]
Halley Research Station is one of the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS’s) four permanently manned stations in the Antarctic region. Its situated at 75 degrees south on the Brunt Iceshelf, an enormous expanse of what is effectively a floating glacier. Whilst access by light aircraft is perilously possible during good weather in the three months or so of summer, the majority of people and the vast majority of supplies are brought in on BAS’s own ice-breaking supply ship the RRS Ernest Shackleton from Cape Town or the Falkland Islands - a voyage of between 7 and 14 days each way depending on how much sea ice is present in the area - see time-lapse video.
There’s no dock or port on the ice shelf - instead the ship finds a site where the ice shelf is low enough to moor alongside and the process of resupplying the station begins - an operation called ‘relief’. From the relief site on the coast, it’s a 50km haul inland across the glacier to the station itself, a journey currently accomplished using two John Deere 7820’s on Soucy track conversions and two PistenBullys, taking around eight hours for a round trip and running in shifts covering 24 a day - not that it really matters as the sun never sets at that time of year. The supplies - some of which are containerised - are craned off the ship straight onto trains of sledges pulled by the prime movers. At the other end they are unloaded by Nodwell hi-abs or Sennebogen cranes that are new for this season. Waste and empty fuel barrels are backloaded for recycling or re-use in the Falklands. Emperor and Adelie penguins are common on the route.
When relief is finished, a more traditional routine begins with jobs for us vehicle operators including moving snow to level off the snow with the Pistenbullys, craning and lifting supplies, jacking the whole station up above the new snow level on its own hydraulic legs and building mounds of snow known as byrmes. The station receives around 6ft of snow annually and because it never gets above 0 degrees, it never melts and leads to a massive build up. To avoid equipment becoming buried over the long months of winter, a 6-8ft byrme is constructed using the Pistenbullys and bulldozers and machinery parked on top of it - the idea being that the snow drifts behind this new mound and does not burry what is on top of it.
The station is manned by 13 people over the winter, including a vehicle mechanic who this year is an agricultural engineer and contractor from Devon - Phil Cummings. They’ll be in antarctica for 15 months and won’t see any other person outside of the station until the first flight in, eight months after the last ship leaves. During the short three month summer season, the station houses a total of 50 people, with around ten of them involved in the vehicle operations. The majority of these ten are from agricultural or agricultural engineering backgrounds. I only had three months in Antarctica but loved every minute. BAS frequently advertise for vehicles operators and mechanics and I’d thoroughly recommend applying if you like a bit of adventure.
For some great video footage and updates follow @nev12345 on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MikeNeaverson
Time lapse footage here:
https://twitter.com/MikeNeaverson/status/700673009003024384
Halley Research Station is one of the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS’s) four permanently manned stations in the Antarctic region. Its situated at 75 degrees south on the Brunt Iceshelf, an enormous expanse of what is effectively a floating glacier. Whilst access by light aircraft is perilously possible during good weather in the three months or so of summer, the majority of people and the vast majority of supplies are brought in on BAS’s own ice-breaking supply ship the RRS Ernest Shackleton from Cape Town or the Falkland Islands - a voyage of between 7 and 14 days each way depending on how much sea ice is present in the area - see time-lapse video.
There’s no dock or port on the ice shelf - instead the ship finds a site where the ice shelf is low enough to moor alongside and the process of resupplying the station begins - an operation called ‘relief’. From the relief site on the coast, it’s a 50km haul inland across the glacier to the station itself, a journey currently accomplished using two John Deere 7820’s on Soucy track conversions and two PistenBullys, taking around eight hours for a round trip and running in shifts covering 24 a day - not that it really matters as the sun never sets at that time of year. The supplies - some of which are containerised - are craned off the ship straight onto trains of sledges pulled by the prime movers. At the other end they are unloaded by Nodwell hi-abs or Sennebogen cranes that are new for this season. Waste and empty fuel barrels are backloaded for recycling or re-use in the Falklands. Emperor and Adelie penguins are common on the route.
When relief is finished, a more traditional routine begins with jobs for us vehicle operators including moving snow to level off the snow with the Pistenbullys, craning and lifting supplies, jacking the whole station up above the new snow level on its own hydraulic legs and building mounds of snow known as byrmes. The station receives around 6ft of snow annually and because it never gets above 0 degrees, it never melts and leads to a massive build up. To avoid equipment becoming buried over the long months of winter, a 6-8ft byrme is constructed using the Pistenbullys and bulldozers and machinery parked on top of it - the idea being that the snow drifts behind this new mound and does not burry what is on top of it.
The station is manned by 13 people over the winter, including a vehicle mechanic who this year is an agricultural engineer and contractor from Devon - Phil Cummings. They’ll be in antarctica for 15 months and won’t see any other person outside of the station until the first flight in, eight months after the last ship leaves. During the short three month summer season, the station houses a total of 50 people, with around ten of them involved in the vehicle operations. The majority of these ten are from agricultural or agricultural engineering backgrounds. I only had three months in Antarctica but loved every minute. BAS frequently advertise for vehicles operators and mechanics and I’d thoroughly recommend applying if you like a bit of adventure.
For some great video footage and updates follow @nev12345 on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MikeNeaverson
Time lapse footage here:
https://twitter.com/MikeNeaverson/status/700673009003024384
