Stephen Parshley ’98 ME, a research support engineer in Cornell’s astronomy department, has plans to leave his mark on the world. Literally. The plans are Parshley’s winning design for the 2006 South Pole marker.
The marker will be fabricated and placed at the exact geographic location of the Earth’s South Pole on New Year’s Day 2006 and will remain as the pole’s official landmark for one year.
For the past three years, Parshley, 30, had been throwing on a jacket, grabbing an umbrella, and driving his pickup truck from his apartment to work in a climate-controlled laboratory on Cornell’s campus. This year, however, he puts on insulated undergarments, a fur-lined parka, ski goggles, and lip balm and walks in the pitch black through knee-high snowdrifts and wind chills as low as 140 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to get from his sleeping quarters at the U.S. Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station to a telescope facility 1 kilometer away, where he is a co-operator.
The facility, the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, houses the South Pole Imaging Fabry–Perot Interferometer (SPIFI), a Cornell-owned instrument for observing star-forming regions of nearby galaxies. Parshley helped build the instrument when he was at Cornell.
Now he is a member of the South Pole “winter-over” crew—an elite group of 86 hardy souls representing a wide range of specific trades who occupy the station during the eight-month-long Antarctic winter, from mid-February through late October, when extreme weather prohibits any flights into or out of the area.
To keep from going crazy, winter-overs engage in a number of recreational activities, including an annual South Pole marker design contest. The competition’s only rules are that the marker must be able to be constructed from the somewhat limited materials and tools available at the station and that it must carry a few specific lines of official text. Any winter-over may enter a design, and the entire crew votes to decide the winner.
The design, which took Parshley about 15 hours, is both simple in structure and deep in symbolism. Its defining feature is a miniature aluminum model of the station’s new elevated building. The model stands at the center of a 5-inch-diameter brass disk and is encircled by 86 dimples, representing the members of the winter-over crew.
The marker will be fabricated at the South Pole over the next few months by Parshley and Allan Day, the station’s machinist, who estimates that it will take 60 to 70 hours in total.
“Since all the past pole markers have been basically flat with relief-style engraving, I’d been playing around for some time with the idea of pushing the marker into the third dimension,” recalled Parshley. “I also wanted to represent our winter-over crew … and keep the machining simple. Then it just hit me: the elevated station surrounded by 86 dimples. Straightforward, yet meaningful.”
—Thomas Oberst, Cornell News Service
