Lonely Planet Antarctica by Lonely Planet

Author:Lonely Planet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lonely Planet

SANAE IV

SANAE IV (South African National Antarctic Expedition; www.sanap.ac.za) sits like a long red-and-white millipede atop a nunatak (mountain or large piece of rock sticking up through an ice sheet) called Vesleskarvet (Norwegian for ‘little barren mountain’) on the Ahlmann Ridge, 170km from the coast – hence the station’s nickname ‘Vesles.’ The landscape around Vesles is relatively barren, with only a few lichens and mites on site, but skuas and snow petrels visit regularly in summer. The station perches just 50m from the edge of a 210m cliff, and on clear days it offers dramatic views over the ice sheet and of surrounding nunataks and the Ahlmann Ridge peaks to the south.

About 1km from the station is a 1200m smoothed-snow airstrip; most flights travel via Novolazarevskaya Station.

The first SANAE base was occupied in 1959 and SANAE II and SANAE III followed. The latter, closed for wintering in 1994, was built on the Fimbul Ice Shelf and over the years had been buried by 14m of drifting snow. It thus became unsafe because the snow crushed it.

Controversy over the coloring of SANAE erupted in 2001. The station was blue on the bottom to absorb solar energy and help keep the area beneath it snow free, and the roof was orange for visibility from the air. Because these colors, with the station’s white sides, were the colors of the apartheid-era South African flag, politicians demanded change. The colors were impregnated into the fiberglass panels, so epoxy marine paint was used to paint the blue part of the station ‘alert red’.

Built from 1993 to 1997 at a cost of 64 million rand, SANAE IV is one of Antarctica’s most modern stations – it even includes a two-helicopter hangar, a bathroom with access for people with disabilities and a sauna large enough for the whole winter team. Consisting of three linked double-story units totaling 176m in length, the station is built on stilts 3.5m above the rock. Occupied by its first wintering team in 1997 (which included Dr Aithne Rowse, the first South African woman to overwinter in Antarctica), the station accommodates about 10 people in winter and 80 in summer.

Thanks to its small but excellent hospital, SANAE IV can serve as a surgical facility for the other research stations in Queen Maud Land.

A wide range of research is conducted at SANAE IV, including invasion biology/ecology, geology, geomorphology and atmospheric sciences.

SANAE is resupplied by trains of tracked vehicles loaded from ships at the ice-shelf edge. In 2000 the station lost six empty 8.5-tonne fuel tanks after the calving of the section of the ice shelf on which they stood.

SANAE IV has recorded wind speeds as high as 208km/h, but the wind can blow even harder than that. After an anemometer was ripped from its anchor during a storm in 2006, meteorologists estimated that the wind speed reached 230km/h. A storm in 2003 blew a Ski-doo snowmobile over the Vesles cliff.

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