Researchers plan to expand the Fox Permafrost Tunnel during the next few years, drilling or blasting a new shaft 450 feet into a frozen hillside to parallel the existing tunnel.

“We want to begin digging (a new) permafrost tunnel next winter,” said Matthew Sturm of the U. S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory on Fort Wainwright. He and others envision a new “Alaska Permafrost Research Center” that will better serve scientists and non-scientists.

With start-up federal funding of $500,000 this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will carve out a new tunnel as well as build labs, offices, and a learning center. Other improvements include a walkway on top of the frozen bluff where scientists can do permafrost experiments from the forest and tundra above the tunnel, and side rooms within the new tunnel for permafrost-warming experiments.

 

The improvements would replace infrastructure at the tunnel that has endured for four decades.

“Our current on-site facilities consist of a shack and a Porta-Potty,” Sturm said.

The new tunnel would be excavated during the winter of 2010-2011 with a “road header” or by drilling and blasting, whichever method is found to best preserve large chunks of permafrost that could include animal and plant remains, said Kevin Bjella of the Corps of Engineers.

The Corps Engineers dug the original tunnel 360 feet into a frozen hillside exposed by miners as they blasted a hillside with water from a hydraulic giant in the northern Goldstream Creek valley, about 15 miles north of Fairbanks. The engineers used an Alkirk mining machine with a pair of spinning six-foot cutting heads to create the tunnel during three winters from 1963 through 1966.

The official reason the Army dug the tunnel in the 1960s was to test ways of digging into permafrost and learn more about building underground usable spaces and foundations in permafrost. Near Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, the military dug ice tunnels hundreds of feet long with rooms for people to live and work...(more)