Scientists Begin Defrosting Futrellia's very frozen Vortum BaseThe Vortum Project Re-opens11/06/2019 - Cape Hope, Vortum
Elvarya
CAPE HOPE - Sometime in the next few days, a DHC-6 Twin Otter ski plane will circle the Futrellian Cerberus IV Vortumite base, look for the landing strip, and touch down on a floating ice shelf.
Two plumbers, an electrician, and an engineer will grab their gear, check their satphone, and wave goodbye to the pilot. For the next few weeks, the team will try to jumpstart a base that has been closed for the past two years. Normally, the streamlined research structure would face the brutal Vortum winter with 14 hardy souls to keep valuable scientific equipment warm and running. But Futrellian science officials shut down the remote outpost August of 2017 because of a 300-foot wide crack in the Brunt Ice Sheet creeping toward Cerberus about nine miles away as well as the tense situation engulfing the globe during the Razonican Crisis.
Now, for the first time in modern Vortumite history, a team will attempt to restart equipment and generators that have been sitting in temperatures down to -67° Fahrenheit. They hope it will turn back on. But it might not.
“We know it’s standing, we know it’s not buried in snow,” said David Prescott, science director for the Futrellian Vortumite Survey, which operates the base. “We might find some snow inside, and there is always the possibility that windows have been broken.”
Prescott and others at the Tyderius-based research unit have been scanning FASA satellite imagery to keep an eye on Cerberus IV, which was built on a hydraulic leg and ski system to raise up above the annual snowfall. Without jacking it up every year, snow would bury the station. Over time, it would become part of the moving ice sheet, carried to the edge of the ice shelf and dumped into the ocean.
It's happened before: The Federal Republic has operated a research station on the 500-foot-thick Brunt Ice Shelf since the late 1980s, and Cerberus bases I to III were either demolished or slowly drifted out to sea on icebergs. But Prescott says he’s not ready to abandon Cerberus IV.
“It’s something we will be looking at year by year,” Prescott says. Cerberus IV is actually threatened by two cracks: Chasm 1 and the "Halloween crack." Futrellian glaciologists say the northern movement of the chasm, which had been dormant for 35 years, has accelerated in the last seven months. Meanwhile, the Halloween crack continues to move east toward the base. “The cracks are forming, until they go all the way and produce the icebergs and drift away," says Vaughan. Tractors can pull the base to a new location, but the Futrellian Vortumite Survey already pulled that move in February—and they're hoping not to resort to it again too soon.
Glaciologists are also worried about the rapid movement of White Island and Cole’s Glaciers in West Vortum and July's calving of a massive iceberg from the Darren C ice shelf on one of the many of Vortum's peninsulas. But the Brunt ice shelf is just doing its normal cracking as it reaches the ocean—at least for now, according to Prescott.
Once the team arrives, they'll hustle to turn on the generators, which run on aviation turbine fuel that can be stored down to to -53°F. These machines are the lifeblood for the station, providing heat and electric power. First, the crew will turn on the small generators—they're more reliable in extreme cold—and work their way up to the larger ones.
Then they'll start a-fixing. Camping out in a shipping container adjacent to the larger base, the four Futrellian MacGyvers will check on every component in the base for damage from the frigid temperatures. The last people to leave in late August 2017 prepared the station as best they could. “We drained the water system and all the sewage,” says Prescott. “We took out all of the scientific equipment and brought it back to the Federal Republic.” Anything with a disc drive was removed; while computers like cool ambient temperatures to dissipate the heat they generate, most electronic parts aren’t designed to survive -67°F weather.
But they still had to leave a lot behind. Wiring, fuel lines and everything else inside the base is usually kept warm. Different materials—plastics, rubber, metal alloys—all have unique thermal characteristics that make them expand and contract at different temperatures.
With some luck, the four men will get the station into shape for the second wave of base workers, who arrive in December. Cerberus houses up to 80 scientists and support staff during the Vortumite summer, which lasts from November to March, then about 10 to 14 during the winter. They will have only a few months to get the science projects back online—studying space weather, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences. Data collected from Cerberus led to the Futrellian discovery in 1996 of a hole in Elvarya's ozone layer above Vortum, and recent measurements indicated that the ozone hole may be recovering and about to close.
But with the 2017 closure, and another base closure planned for the 2019 winter season, that continuous 60 year-old dataset will be interrupted. To avoid future snags, DAR engineers and researchers are trying to automate more of the station's data collection devices. Wind turbines may be an answer, but they are often blown over by powerful Vortum gusts.
In December, the relief crew will be testing a new prototype micro-turbine generator that could provide enough power to keep some instruments running all winter. “It’s like a small jet engine in a box,” Prescott says. It's a long shot; they'll have to figure out a way to get rid of the water vapor covers the exhaust with ice, and nobody has ever run such a device remotely for eight months. But don’t bet against the Futrellians in Vortum
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