The ice sheet wants to consume this research station. Amid the swirls on a windy night, tendrils of snow seek across the surface, reaching for imperfections in the flat expanse. Some of our buildings have been found, captured by the drifts, and are being swallowed by the ice sheet. With time, they will be drawn deep under the ice, into the crushing darkness of the hidden interior, torn and mangled over a hundred thousand years, and excreted through a glacial valley into the sea.
The tide of snow rises without fail. With each passing year, the snow surface creeps higher on every building and on every object left outside. It buries equipment, blocks windows and vents, and generally tries to restore this part of the ice sheet to a smooth plain of uniform elevation. The accumulation is about 0.7 meters per year. Some structures are jacked up on stilts, which reduces drifting, and allows the buildings to be periodically raised. Others buildings are on skids, and when they get buried, an elevated pad is built and compacted, and a heavy tractor drags the building out of its depression and up onto the new pad. Some structures, permanently integrated into the snow, simply recede deeper and deeper below the surface, and are accessed via ever-lengthening stairways or utility channels: the sub-surface food storage and the wastewater pit are examples. And some objects, through neglect or accident, relics of past camps, are lost beneath the surface.
At the current time, the Big House, above, is perched high over the snow, and requires minimal drift-related maintenance. It is the easiest building to spot from a distance. It trembles in the gusts. In contrast, the Green House, below, is beset by drifts, and requires constant shoveling to keep the doorways accessible, the vents open, and, for quality of life, a bit of light coming through the windows. The sound of footsteps in the brittle snow outside is conducted perfectly through the drifts that pack the walls, and when you're resting inside, it sounds as if the crunching was down at your own feet.
