Underground Cold War

Up north around the Arctic Circle, scientists and engineers have been engaged for years in a cold war that knows no politics. From both sides of the Iron Curtain, volunteers enlist in the fight against a common enemy: permafrost, the iron-hard layer of dirt and rock bonded together by year-round ice. Permafrost underlies 20% of the earth's land area. It is 150 ft. thick at Fair banks, Alaska, more than 2,000 ft. thick beneath the Taimyr Peninsula in Russia. Permafrost blocks well shafts, freezes oil drills, makes water piping and sewage disposal costly, heaves up 5-ft. hummocks in airport runways. Thawed, it only gets worse. Heated buildings tilt on their softened foundations. Blacktop highways often absorb enough heat to melt their way downhill.

Last week Western and Soviet permafrost experts got together at Purdue for a five-day conference on ways and means of heating up their underground cold war. Eventually the assembly settled down to develop two lines of strategy--attack and conservation.

The five-man Russian team, in particular, seemed interested in large-scale efforts to get rid of permafrost at mining or construction sites. Pointing out that massive blasting is too expensive, it offered plans for melting permafrost by solar heat trapped beneath huge sheets of plastic, and for electrifying the ground to move aside the water that makes permafrost so unreliable during partial thaws.

Others at the conference, conceding that the Russians talk with the authority of experience dating back to the 19th century construction of the trans-Siberian railroad, nonetheless found such schemes too far out.

U.S. scientists described the aerial mapping techniques that were used with great success to pick relatively solid sites for DEW line stations. Norwegian engineers explained how simple insulation prevents frost-heaving beneath their rail lines. Refrigerated well linings were described as an approach to keeping permafrost in place, but refrigerated building foundations, widely heralded a few years back, were rejected as too expensive to be practical.

The conferees faced up to the fact that as the north grows in population and economic importance, some permafrost problems will become more severe. Sanitary Engineer Amos Alter, 47, chief engineer of the Alaska Department of Health, detailed some of the elaborate methods now being tried for heating and pumping sewage in his burgeoning cities. And in a far-out speculation of his own, he suggested that in the future arctic liquids and wastes could be purified and recycled in "some sort of closed-circuit arrangement" that would treat whole cities in the manner now planned for two-man space capsules.

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