  
|
 |
| April 2008 |
Feature |
|
Artists and scientists collaborate on Antarctica’s challenging terrain
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
CAPE TOWN (WCN) - Antarctica is a barren, windswept, ice and snow-bound rock at the bottom of the world, with no infrastructure to speak of.
It is far from any continent and it takes up to a month to get there across icy waters by ship from Cape Town.
But despite its inaccessibility and inhospitable climate, it is a hub of scientific research with over 15 research stations established by seven nations on the polar continent, including South Africa’s SANAE IV base.
It is thanks to research conducted at the UK’s Halley station in Antarctica that the depletion of the ozone layer due to the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was discovered, and the fact that Antarctica has no borders results in a melting pot of international collaboration, an example being Russian and US scientists drilling 3700m down into the ice at the Vostok base to discover climactic data going back over half a million years.
While the neutrality, isolation, undisturbed nature and even the extreme weather of the continent has its benefits, there are also drawbacks.
For instance there is no power network, each base having to generate its energy needs through the use of generators or renewable energy sources, restricting research to the base itself.
But research possibilities have recently been given a boost by an unusual collaborative project headquartered in Cape Town and utilising expertise from both the arts and the sciences.
It’s a collaboration which is producing benefits for scientific researchers, and also creating some interesting ‘artistic’ spinoffs.
Registered in South Africa as a non-profit organisation but with a coterie of about 30 engineers, scientists, designers and audio-visual artists scattered across the globe, the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation (I-TASC) has, over their latest Antarctic summer expedition, developed a mobile renewable energy unit which would allow researchers to move beyond the immediate confines of the base.
They have also laid the groundwork for a polar community radio station which plans to serve the 15 geographically dispersed Antarctic bases and will power the new Alex FM in Alexandra, Johannesburg with the solar and wind powered unit tested near the South Pole.
One of several official projects of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, I-TASC is described as a “decentralised network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively” toward the “interdisciplinary development and tactical deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems, sustainable architecture and open-format, open source media.
|
While this description covers a broad base, the achievements are encapsulated in their Umthombo Womlilo (well of fire) renewable energy unit, which is not only mobile, but doubles as a bivouac in which researchers can shelter, and even live for days at a time should they be caught in a vicious polar storm.
As proponents of open-source technology, the unit may also be replicated by anyone who might have a use for it.
And it was a Capetonian filmmaker and Jo’burg music producer who were tasked with braving the sub-zero temperatures and unending sunlight to get the unit up and running and tested.
Still feeling slightly dislocated after spending over a month in the Antarctic and weeks travelling there and back on board the SA Agulhas, filmmaker Siphiwe Ngwenya said getting Umthombo Womlilo operational was just one facet of I-TASC’s programme.
Although his time at the SANAE IV base in January was his first time in the Antarctic, Ngwenya said it was the third I-TASC polar expedition.
He said during the 2006-2007 summer an automated, wind and solar powered weather station named Groundhog was set up to relay weather information to an internet website, and Radio SANAE IV 90fm was initiated by Ntshingila.
While the radio station broadcast only in the SANAE IV base and has yet to expand to its full polar capacity, Groundhog, which was anchored outside and left to see if it would survive the winter was still functioning perfectly when Ngwenya and Ntshingila returned a year later.
This gave them confidence in the design and robustness of the equipment, said Ngwenya and he and Ntshingila enthusiastically began the next step of assembling Uthombo Womlilo with help from engineers and technical experts from the Universities of Stellenbosch and KwaZulu-Natal, the Department of Public Works and the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory.
While it stood up to the ravages of the weather and they lived in it for three days, they still needed to “pimp it up” by, for instance, adding a toilet, so they wouldn’t have to make a one kilometre dash back to the SANAE IV base every now and again.
Producing 2,4 kW of power through its solar panels and wind turbine, the unit generated sufficient electricity to power all required appliances – although perhaps not all at the same time.
Head of the thermal fluid division at the Stellenbosch University department of mechanical and mechatronic engineering Professor Thomas Harms, who provided technical assistance in setting up the unit in the Antarctic, said the I-TASC experiments with renewable energy were particularly appropriate to research in the Antarctic where there was no energy network, and also resonated with the current energy situation in South Africa.
Harms said although the technology I-TASC was using (photo voltaic cells and a wind turbine) were not new, the fact that it was mobile (fitted with runners for the snow and towed behind a snow ski) and could be used as a bivouac, made it particularly useful in the Antarctic where even in summer, storms could descend quickly and shelter needed to be found.
On the mainland it could be adapted to suit some applications, such as roadbuilding, he suggested.
But an important part of what I-TASC was doing was creating awareness about the need, and possibilities of renewable energy, as well as promoting the scientific research being conducted in Antarctica, and “promoting science per se”.
This, said Ngwenya, was being done by exchanging the unit’s sleigh runners for wheels and taking it on a tour of schools and universities, and to the national science festival, Scifest Africa, in Grahamstown in April.
It would also to be used to power Alex FM, creating a platform to create public awareness around IPY and I-TASC, with the end goal being to establish an international network of solar and wind powered community radio stations.
Ntshingila said groundwork linking community stations around the world had already been done by I-TASC directors Thomas Mulcaire and Marko Peljhan who linked under-resourced radio stations and music studios in England, Jamaica, Canada and South Africa together via a project called SkintStream in 2005.
“That’s how I originally got involved in I-TASC,” he said.
And while there last season with I-TASC Mulcaire, “computer whiz” Adam Hyde and Amanda Alves Rodrigues who documented the expedition, he and Hyde recorded ambient sounds and turned them into a 6-track house album called ‘Pulsation Magnetometer’.
With plans to return to the Antarctic during summer seasons to come, the establishment of the first Antarctic radio station may just the first of many things to come in what is proving to be creative marriage between the sciences and the arts.
To keep an eye on them, go to www.interpolar.org - WCN
More information:
Article
and images copyright WCN.
Contact: Steve Kretzmann
Editor, West Cape News
Email: editor@westcapenews.com
Copyright Science in Africa, Science magazine for Africa CC. All Rights Reserved
