okay, how did this one slip past me..

[cowhead]

Ice Highway? ICE HIGHWAY!?!?! to the South Pole!??! huh? what? when did this start happening.. apparently a couple of years ago... I uh.. uh.. am at a near total loss for words about the sheer insanity of this.. why the F*CK waste that much money that much time on something that seems so frivolous? (okay, are we really in that bad of a shape oil wise?)... I mean, I'm all in favour of exploration of this little planet and all... but SWEET CRAP!

sorry needed to vent in some sort of public forum... anyone else?

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) - New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest and the first to drive a vehicle to the South Pole, described a U.S. highway to the pole as "terrible."

Work on the 1,020-mile "ice highway" from the Antarctic coast south of New Zealand to the South Pole is currently in its third season.

The project will enable hundreds of tons of supplies and equipment to be hauled across the world's most inhospitable wilderness to Amundsen-Scott Base, a U.S. research station. It's planned for completion by the end of the 2006 polar summer.

Currently, cargo planes fly in scientists and supplies during the four-month summer.

Hillary, who's revisiting Antarctica this week, was blunt about the project: "I think it's terrible," according to local media reports.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff said the road is environmentally acceptable, but he understood Hillary's objections to the project.

"He spent weeks battling against the elements to get to the pole and it was an enormous achievement," Goff said.

"Now you've got the concept of a marked route that takes away the challenge and the adventure of getting there and that is anathema to Ed," he said.

Hillary led a small team 1,250 miles from New Zealand's Scott Base on the Antarctic coast to the South Pole by tractor as part of the first trans-Antarctic crossing in 1957.


......................
stop the world I want off
*screaming and banging head on desk*

[jaguar]

I'm with Hillary, all roads across the US should be destroyed too, what's the fun in driving when you can spend 6 dangerous months trekking from coast to coast? For that matter we should get rid of those silly airplane things, it's just not the same as spending 6 months on a leaky wooden boat, where's the adventure?

That said I'd be curious about the environmental impact of this on an already unstable ecosystem.

[glatt]

I saw one of the tractors that Hillary used to make his trek from the coast to the pole. It's amazing that he would do such a thing on such tiny little tractors. This one fell into a hidden crevass.





Hillary is a really amazing guy and has done a lot of good in Nepal, but he has not tread lightly on this planet. Driving tractors across fragile polar ecosystems, jet-boating up the Ganges from the sea to the source, dropping oxygen bottles all over the side of Everest. He has done more than many to open up the wild regions of the planet to the teeming masses. He has little right to complain that others have followed him.

[Roosta]

Will they be jamming a Drive-Thru at the 500 mile marker?

I wanna know how much its gonna cost to maintain the thing and keep it open. Wouldn't it be cheaper and more reliable just to continue to fly stuff down there? What? Is there a city the size of Denver down there that we don't know about? Sounds like another Bush administration fiasco to me. Maybe New Zealand is another country with no WMD's and we're positioning ourselves to invade them.

Jag, are you kidding about the environment? The last time we had an environment was around 1956. I was a tiny child but I remember it fondly. There was air and trees and everything! Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi

[Kitsune]

why the F*CK waste that much money that much time on something that seems so frivolous? (okay, are we really in that bad of a shape oil wise?)

You hit it on the head. Pretty soon, the treaty that dictates the property use on the South Pole (currently restricted to research and non-impact studies) will run out. When it does, the US is ready to drill. There's supposedly a massive amount of oil down there.

[cowhead]

oddly enough.. just yesterday when I was looking up info on this moronic idea... there was a .gov page that turned up with links to the enviromental impact/estimated costs etc. (adjusting my tinfoil hat) but today it's gone... I have the day off so I'll keep poking around... ( I should have bookmarked it!... yeah hindsight and all that)

[Radar]

REAAAAAALLLY LAST CHANCE GAS STATION!!! That will be $15/gallon please.

[Roosta]

$15 a gallon? that's cheap by british prices!!!

[Elspode]

You mean that 1956 environment where we were still conducting above-ground nuclear testing and polluting the atmosphere with radioactive iodine?

[richlevy]

When I saw the ice highway story I had a mental picture of a giant Zamboni..

Originally Posted by Elspode

You mean that 1956 environment where we were still conducting above-ground nuclear testing and polluting the atmosphere with radioactive iodine?

True, I didn't think about that. The last time we had an evironment was probably pre-WWII

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by marichiko

True, I didn't think about that. The last time we had an evironment was probably pre-WWII

Not so, and you call yourself a librarian, harumph.
Clean, dirty, polluted or not it's still the environment.