Townships Under The Ice

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30586, 31 October 1964, Page 15

Townships Under The Ice

(N.Z. Press Assn—Copyright) HOBART, October 30. Mines working through the long winter months and underground townships with simulated sunshine were part of the picture of Antarctica in 1984 painted by Dr. Philip Law in the Sir John Morris memorial lecture at Hobart today.

Dr. Law is director of the Antarctic division of the Aus-

tralian Department of External Affairs. He envisaged jet aircraft from South Africa, South America, New Zealand, and Australia landing on airfields of compacted snow to discharge passengers and cargo, and supersonic aircraft flying at altitudes of about 70,Q00ft linking Australia and South America. He also pictured conventional summer ports for ships, and atomic ice breakers clearing shipping lanes for the vessels.

He suggested that mining townships hollowed out of

rock and irradiated simulated sunshine generated from nuclear power would be established and they would be independent of surface meteorological conditions. Airports, incorporating queer spider-like villages on the surface of the ice plateau, would provide the main transport links to the outside world, he said.

Navigational and approach aids would be erected on stilts 30ft above the snow, and hangars and workshops would be buried beneath the level of the snow surface. Other innovations Dr. Law envisaged were:

Small, fast beetle-like hovercraft transporting passengers and stores to waiting jets. Heavy tractor-trains hauling mineral concentrates from the mines to the coastal townships. Plankton-catching fleets in trails of giant nuclearpowered submarines able to pursue plankton swarms in three dimensions.

Dr. Law said these things might come to pass or might not, but they certainly would not come to pass unless men worked to make I them possible.