Fiber to the Desk Keeps Scientists Connected on "The Ice"

When it comes to harsh environments, nothing compares to the South Pole -- a mean annual temperature of minus 56° F, constant winds creating snowdrifts high enough to bury a building, accumulating snow that never melts, and an almost two-mile deep glacier that slides 33 feet toward the sea each year.

Despite the environment, the South Pole is the site of the new $153 million Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, an engineering marvel designed to support an array of scientific investigations. This new 65,000 square-foot facility delivers a level of comfort and safety that would have been inconceivable to the explorers who reached the pole nearly a century ago and for whom the new station is named.

The new station is home for 150 people during Antarctica's three-month austral summer and 50 people (known as winter-overs) during the remaining nine months when travel is prohibited. Maintaining a connection to the outside world is critical for sending vital scientific data, enabling communication, and easing the daily life of those that live and work on The Ice. The advanced network cabling infrastructure that delivers fiber to the desk plays a primary role in that effort.

An Engineering Marvel
Under the Antarctic Treaty, no nation owns the continent, and it is reserved as a zone for the peaceful conduct of research. The United States Antarctic Program (USAP), funded and managed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), overseas U.S. scientific interest in the area.

The original 1956 South Pole station long vanished under 30 feet of ice and was replaced in 1975 with a 50-meter geodesic dome. The dome was covered with snow each winter, causing it to show signs of fatigue and no longer be adequate for the growing population of scientists and personnel.

The new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station took many years of planning and design to meet the long-range requirements, withstand the harsh conditions, and gain government approval and funding. The completed station was officially dedicated on January 12, 2008 and is the main facility on a campus that also includes a new power plant, supply areas, storage, research observatories, telescopes, satellite communications facility, airplane skiway, and a summer camp to house an additional 80 people. The old dome is now being removed in accordance with environmental guidelines.

To withstand the harsh Antarctic conditions, the new station is elevated on 36 hydraulic jack columns that can be raised in 10-inch increments. Its airfoil shape forces the wind to travel faster beneath the facility and scour out built-up snow. The station was built with flexible connecting walkways to accommodate the sliding of the glacier, which also requires the marker for the true geographic South Pole to be moved annually.

Unlike the previous dome, the new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is designed to provide lighting, heating, ventilation, and fire protection in accordance with the latest U.S. building and safety codes. The structure is insulated five times the average U.S. residence, includes cold-tested windows, and was designed so that all components could be shipped via ski-equipped aircraft. The 12-year construction effort required 925 flights carrying a total of 24 million pounds of cargo.

The 2-story facility is shaped with four fingers that are approximately 100 x 38 feet in size and extend outward from two main linear sections that are each about 185 x 48 feet. Three of the fingers house the berthing quarters and the other includes a gym. The main sections include dining areas, a medical center, computer room, science laboratories, activity rooms, and space for operations and administration.

Fiber to the Scientist
Raytheon Polar Services (RPS), a business unit of Raytheon Company, is under contract to the NSF to provide science, operations, and maintenance support to sustain the research programs at three U.S. locations in Antarctica and two research vessels in the area. The RPS engineering team of Denver, Colorado, played a critical role in designing and implementing the network cabling infrastructure for the new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

The early cabling design for the station was set up to deliver as high a bandwidth as possible to the workstation, which is typical for an advanced scientific lab environment. The scientists are sending multiple gigabytes of data every day off the station, says Bob Croke, telecommunications engineer. All of the core switches are connected by a redundant singlemode fiber backbone, which connects to a satellite earth station for transmitting data back to the U.S.

One core switch is located in the new main station along with access switches in each of the four telecommunications rooms located on the first floor. A second core switch is located in the new power plant, which is connected to the station by an underground pathway. Each telecomm room serves its immediate area on both floors, including the nearest berthing wing. Most of the cabling runs in overhead exposed trays down hallways and then breaks off into conduit to reach individual workstations.

The horizontal cabling throughout the new station includes copper for data, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system, and some analog phones. The horizontal cabling also includes both multimode and singlemode fiber for various workstation outlets depending on the location and function. A standard workstation outlet in each of the 154 berthing rooms includes two copper and two multimode connections while standard science workstations include three copper, two multimode fiber, and one singlemode fiber connection.

The 551 multimode horizontal fiber connections and 155 singlemode horizontal fiber connections are terminated using AMP NETCONNECT MT-RJ Fiber Optic Connectors. The no-epoxy, no-polish, and no-crimp MT-RJ connectors are half the size of SC duplex and ST-style connectors, feature two fibers in one ferrule, and can be re-terminated. In the closet, horizontal fiber is terminated to MT-RJs loaded into AMP NETCONNECT 24-port fiber optic rack mount patch enclosures. At workstations, the copper and fiber jacks are housed in AMP NETCONNECT Hideaway double-gang multimedia outlets that house up to four front-loading copper jacks and four MT-RJ bottom-fed fiber jacks. Feeding the fiber from the bottom of the outlet allows for flush furniture placement and helps hide and protect the fiber connections.

At science workstations, the multimode fiber connection is being used in some cases depending on what the scientists are working on. The singlemode connections are not being used at this time, but they are there if the application calls for it, says Croke. The multimode fiber connections in the berthing rooms are not currently in use, but they will be in the future. According to Croke, scientists have several options over fiber or copper for transmitting data.

In addition to the new elevated station, the South Pole campus includes specialized sectors for specific research. The Quiet Sector is free from vibrations that could interfere with seismic observations; the Clean Air Sector is free from pollutants for atmospheric studies; and the Dark Sector is free from interference that could hamper radio telescopes. The Dark Sector Lab (DSL) features a new 10-meter telescope for surveying galaxy clusters and the IceCube Lab (ICL) features a telescope designed to detect subatomic particles that originate in far space. Most of of the larger campus outbuildings have a combination of access switches and/or distribution switches to connect to the network.

"Most of the horizontal cabling in the DSL use wall mounted raceways, which we may also implement in the ICL," says Croke. Each raceway typically includes three copper cables, one 4-strand multimode fiber cable, and one 2-strand singlemode cable. The wall-mounted raceway in the DSL is the AMP NETCONNECT 1 1/2 -inch surface mount raceway latching duct that can be quickly and easily installed and features a flexible hinge that can be opened and closed repeatedly without cracking. The raceway delivers fiber into an AMP NETCONNECT 6-port Universal Office Box where it is terminated to MTRJ fiber jacks.

Cold and Research Reliable
The living and working conditions at the South Pole are very challenging, and all USAP program participants are required to pass thorough medical exams. But its not only people that must be tested to withstand the harsh environment.

All the materials that went into constructing the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station had to be cold tested to withstand the extreme cold temperatures that can reach below minus 75° F during the austral winter months. The network components were no exception.

To replicate the outside storage conditions at the South Pole, The AMP NETCONNECT connectors were put through a cold temperature test that involved placing the connectors in a test chamber at minus 112° F (-80°C) for 137 hours. The connectors were found to be free from damage following cold exposure, and the insertion loss measurements were all under 1dB.

The South Pole is an enormously valuable research site, and the new Amundsen-Scott Station is uniquely designed to accommodate scientific experiments, provide comfortable and safe daily life, and ensure communication with the outside world. The advanced network infrastructure with fiber to the desk offers the performance and bandwidth needed to support large-scale experiments and everyday life at this technologically and architecturally advanced facility for many years to come.