Air Antarctica: New York Guard unit delivers for scientific mission on the South Pole

National Guard, Apr 1999 by Bullock, Bob

It's morning in McMurdo Station, Antarctica. The mid-summer temperature at this lonely coastal outpost on the bottom of the world hovers around 20 degrees and breath hangs in the air.

On the volcanic cinder and dust-covered streets that cut through the National Science Foundation's base of operations, an assortment of vehicles moves slowly. Some shuttle workers and cargo between austere buildings, others head the 40 minutes down to the Williams Field Ski Runway and the Air National Guard's LC-130s. In February, the ski-- equipped C-130s became the only aircraft of their kind in the world when the Navy completed operations in Antarctica.

Behind McMurdo's buildings, a solid white expanse punctuated by the 14,000-foot-high peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains serve as a barrier to the unprepared. It is the South Pole, the coldest place on Earth, where temperatures can dip to 50 below in the summer. The cold isn't a hindrance, it's lethal. The world's lowest temperature was recorded here at minus 128.6 degrees. Storms whipping up to 200-miles-an-hour winds can freeze-dry a creature in minutes.

Few have ventured here. New York National Guardsmen are among them.

Until the U.S. Navy the U.S. Air Force and now the New York Air National Guard opened the continent to scientists - making possible the discovery of answers to hundreds of scientific questions -- researchers probably thought the area was inaccessible.

The 109th Airlift Wing from Schenectady, N.Y, took over the mission from the Navy last fall. Deployments began in September and continued until the beginning of March when the sun sets and the NSF ceases operations for winter until the following September. During that time, Guardsmen provide air transport and maintenance.

In short, they make the scientists' research possible.

he NSF believes answers to Earth's past and its future may be buried in Antarctica's trillions of tons of ancient ice. The continent holds 90 percent of the planet's ice, and 70 percent of its fresh water. If even a modest fraction of that mass were to melt within a couple of decades, it would raise sea levels several feet, possibly evicting many of the 3 billion people who live within 50 miles of the coast.

About 200 million years ago, says the NSF, Antarctica was joined with South America, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand in a single large continent called Gondwanaland. There were no ice sheets, the climate was warm, and trees and large animals flourished. Today only geological formations, coal beds and fossils remain as clues to Antarctica's temperate past.

Some of the current research includes studying the ozone hole, the stability of the Antarctic ice sheets and the dynamics of the southern ocean. Antarctica scientists last year discovered that unstable ice sheets could raise world sea levels more rapidly than now.

Antarctica was also the spot in 1996 where researchers found the famous Martian meteorite indicating possible ancient primitive life on Mars. And it was at McMurdo Station in 1986 that scientists established chloroflurocarbons as the probable cause of the Antarctic ozone hole.

Much of the deep-ice research is conducted at the snow-buried Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at Antarctica's center, about 729 nautical miles north of McMurdo on the coast. There is only one way to get there: aboard a New York Air Guard LC-130. The 109th's journey into the cold began in 1975. The upstate Guard unit decided to use its proficiency in airlift operations to bid on an Arctic polar mission supporting the Defense Early Warning DYE sites -- military radar facilities spread across the Greenland ice sheet.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the 109th traveled the nearly seven hours from upstate New York to Greenland during the summer months. In that time, missions beginning at the former U.S. Sondrestrom Air Base would carry personnel, food and fuel, and, later, construction materials as the radar sites needed to be moved due to the stress of the shifting ice sheet.

Many current unit members were on those first flights to the center of Greenland.

Chief Master Sgt. Mike Christiano, now head of the flight engineer's section, recalls the sensation of leaving the austere beauty of Sondrestrom Air Base and passing into a cold, forbidding environment that offered no natural landmarks, only whiteness. His first flight was in 1980.

"It really took my breath away," Christiano said. "You would leave Sondrestrom] going toward the ice cap over green and then pass over the glacial edge onto a sheet of white as far as you could see."

In 1978, the NSF approached the 109th for assistance in its polar ice-coring, climactic and other research on the Greenland ice sheet. Relationships and science operations that began in those early years continue today.

In 1988, the NSF, pleased with the assistance it was receiving in the north, invited the 109th to make the long trip south to augment the U.S. Navy's specialized Antarctic flying unit, VE6, in missions supporting the U.S. Antarctic Program's scientific research.