Board chair Leon Grice said the organisation had come up with a more affordable plan, which included refurbishing the Hillary Field Centre instead of replacing it.<\/p>\n
“So by getting more life out of a building that didn’t need to come down, and by building in a more traditional way, we were able to get it under budget.”<\/p>\n
Grice said redeveloping Scott Base was crucial to continuing New Zealand’s legacy in the region.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had continuous presence there since 1957. So this project continues that legacy, and continues to support our science programme which is crucial to understanding the planet.”<\/p>\n
The redevelopment would increase the total size of the base by about 1500 square metres.<\/p>\n
That included a new Base Services Building, refurbishment of the Hillary Field Centre, and replacement of ageing water and power infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Building in Antarctica was incredibly difficult, due to logistics and the weather, Grice said.<\/p>\n
“You can build from October to February. So you have to have all of the building materials supplied the February before your October start.”<\/p>\n
“You can’t make any mistakes in terms of what you’re building, because there’s no hardware store to pop down to and pick up an extra bag of bolts.”<\/p>\n
Science in Antarctica was more important now than ever to help understand climate change, Grice said.<\/p>\n
“Last year, we did all the logistics and support for a multinational science team that did a 500 metres ice claw drill… to get 20 million years of atmospheric record… so that will be an incredibly rich resource that will be studied for many many years.”<\/p>\n
Work would start in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Board chair Leon Grice said the organisation had come up with a more affordable plan, which included refurbishing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-549975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}