Mobility In Antarctica‘s Future

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30793, 3 July 1965, Page 18

Mobility In Antarctica‘s Future

Year-round access, survival and mobility are the Antarctic’s principal problems for which the General Motors’ Futurama at the New York world fair proposes solutions. The organisation offers no timetable but contends that development of the area will be contingent upon the urgency of man’s needs. The Futurama designers have forecast what Antarctica’s future as a source of scientific information and natural resources may hold. They feel that improved mobility is the key which will unlock them. In Antarctica the GM designers forecast the creation of an international community devoted to observation and research. They also have foreseen the day when man may win his way to the minerals, chemicals, metals and other deposits believed to lie be-

neath the continent’s icy crust. They believe, and the experts with whom they have consulted agree, that by improving the existing technology man can someday live and travel throughout the Antarctic while developing and exploiting^—instead of deploring—its geographical location. Visitors to the Futurama can see a model of an allweather harbour. The harbour is a hole; several hundred feet in diameter, cut through the ice shelf to the unfrozen waters below. A translucent plastic hood partially covers the harbour to help keep the open water from freezing. The port, located just offshore from the land mass which forms the continent, serves atomic-powered submarine trains which sail beneath the ice-shelf and surface within the protected port. During the Antarctic winter, when temperatures as low as 127 deg below zero extend the ice shelf far into the sea, the sub-trains can unload directly on to the land mass and save heavy laden transporters long and sometimes dangerous trips over the shelf.

The transporters proposed by the General Motors designers would be a multi-purpose, double-deck vehicle some 80ft long. It would be powered by a fuel cell, electric drive engine and would travel on spherical, ribbed tyres. Fitted as a freight hauler, it would contain compartments for standard freight containers, its own cranes and conveyors to handle the containers, and: quarters for a four-man crew. The same basic vehicle could be used to transport a nuclear reactor power plant, laboratories, barracks or other structures. Several such transporters could he joined together to form a train. Fuel cell electric drive motors —used to reduce the problem of supplying conventional fuels—could also power another vehicle which would cut roadways through the ice. A sub-surface excavator which bores holes in the ice for the installation of various facilities is also suggested. Run by a three-man crew, it would draw electric power from hydrocarbon fuel cells. A lightweight gas turbine would propel a two-man. personnel carrier.