Artificial Arctic

In an abandoned laundry in Wilmette Ill., scientists working for the U.S. Army are patiently defrosting the arctic's icies secrets. While comic-strip artists fight th next war in outer space, the men in Wilmette are learning to defend a closer battle line: the frigid wasteland that arcs across the top of the world.

Enemy bombers, winging over the pole could best be knocked down from polar bases--out of range of American cities. And U.S. planes, heading north, would welcome arctic bases. But the little that the armed services have already learned from their arctic operations has made one thing clear: conventional construction won't work. Buildings settle unevenly as they melt their way into permafrost (subsoil, some of which has been frozen solid since the ice age). Roads buckle and heave. Runways are soon pockmarked with dangerous chuckholes.

For scientists, the biggest trouble is that the arctic is a poor laboratory. The very mechanics of existence are too tough to leave time or energy for experiment. So the Army took over the empty laundry in Wilmette. Directed by Swiss-born Henri Bader, snow-and-avalanche specialist, the Army Corps of Engineers turned the three-story building into SIPRE (Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment).

One-Man Lab. On the top floor, six separate labs are insulated by aluminum-painted cork and cooled by chemical refrigerants that circulate from great tanks on the roof. The "Wet Snow" lab, warmest of the six, stays at one degree above freezing, while one man at a time works with snow shipped down by refrigerated trucks from Michigan and northern Wisconsin. The added body heat of a second scientist might melt away an expensive experiment.

One thing the experimenters want to know: Why does snow vary in weight all the way from one to 40 Ibs. a cu. ft.? They are measuring its tensile strength, learning which varieties can be packed into runways, which must be scraped away. And they are studying its reaction to bomb blasts.

Ice from Alaska. Back of double doors in another lab, a circular saw slices paper-thin samples from huge ice crystals chopped from Alaska's Mendenhall glacier. In still other labs, at even colder temperatures (down to --77DEG F.), other work is getting under way: food preservation, sewage disposal, all the endless problems of human survival in the cold.

For a while, all the work will have a military slant: How should vehicles be redesigned? Can camouflage be improved? What is the best way to destroy the ice under an advancing enemy? But some day, SIPRE's scientists hope to turn to more peaceful problems, for their work has practical value wherever man tries to live with snow, ice and frozen ground.

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