Massive balloons help polar scientists build underground tunnels | Hacker News Reader

Massive balloons help polar scientists build underground tunnels

sciencemag.org

62 pointsrhapsodic19 comments

Sounds like the balloons are actually not massive, but voluminous.

Quite the peeve of mine, though it hadn't occurred to me until the 3rd or 4th sighting of that headline.

Bravo.

The idea in itself is not "new", pneumatic formwork (to cast concrete) has been largely used in the past, to build (mainly) waterpipes/aqueducts, but also for civil buildings, As an example this company was established in 1956: http://www.socapsrl.com/about/

And - igloo like - reinforced concrete "thin" structures for domes were largely used since the '60's:

https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/viewpoints/skil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binishell

And of course building "arch" tunnels in snow is common enough, and used - as an example - to build (each year) "ice hotels":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hotel

It is the mix of the two that might be interesting because of the reduced amount of materials that can be tranported in remote north (or south).

Residential too - http://www.monolithic.org/ - that site has some neat designs.

The "Flintstone House", a/k/a 45 Berryessa Way, Hillsborough, CA, would be another example. Bay Area residents may recall sighting this from Interstate 280, whilst crossing the Crystal Springs Canyon bridge.

http://www.flintstonehouse280.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstone_House

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/flintstone-house-hillsbor...

One variant of this that i ran into recently was from a british company, meant for erecting temporary shelters etc.

Basically a balloon wrapped in a canvas saturated in cement powder.

Basically you unrolled, inflated, hosed down with water, and waited for it to harden.

This technique reminds me of Quinzhee huts. I've been building them for years but I never considered scaling them up to create proper infrastructure.

Looks the tunnels that the article is referring to were built over a year ago http://eastgrip.org/field-diaries-folder/uk-diaries-2016/201...

I guess it takes some time for the story to be written, prioritized and finally published

Treating this as supplemental media thread, the full http://eastgrip.org/uk_diaries_2016/ and http://eastgrip.org/uk_diaries_2017/ field diaries are also online.

The author tweeted https://twitter.com/elikint/status/885562039720189953 their video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLZifcrPajE of the story (5:30).

I wonder if this is a potential application for pykrete[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

Maybe spray the pykrete around the side of the trench, before laying the balloon and mix into the first layers of snow that form on top of the balloon and you might get a much stronger support than just plain snow

Could some form of this, on an automated scale, be used to build tunnels or covered buildings on Mars?

Digging a hole, inflating a dome then burying it is an idea that's been considered yes, has the nice benefit of a pressurized atmosphere for the humans inside as well.

With access to water you can make martian concrete as well.

You can do it without water using molten sulfur as well.

Those polar scientists are quite resourceful. Nothing like those cartesian scientists.

A lot more fun too. The cartesian ones are a bunch of squares.

No need to be so hyperbolic.

Underground is a bit of a misnomer; these are under ice and snow.

Underwater would be better?

Etymological origins suggests this is faithful:

ground (n.): Old English grund "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth," also "abyss, Hell," and "bottom of the sea" (a sense preserved in run aground), from Proto-Germanic *grundus, which seems to have meant "deep place" (source also of Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Danish, Swedish grund, Dutch grond, Old High German grunt, German Grund "ground, soil, bottom;" Old Norse grunn "a shallow place," grund "field, plain," grunnr "bottom"). No known cognates outside Germanic.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=ground

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