London

Proof has arrived — if any were needed — that there's no escape from technology. The electronic superhighway is about to reach the ends of the Earth, when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) lays a high-speed fibre-optic cable to the South Pole.

The NSF wants to provide its research base at the pole with continuous electronic communications. It has asked Denver-based Raytheon Polar Services to investigate the practicalities of running a cable across the ice from another, larger research station, over 1,000 miles away.

“This is something we've wanted to do for a while and a feasibility study is being carried out, but it's still very early days,” says Peter West, an NSF spokesman.

Polar researchers already have access to e-mail and the Internet, but only for a few hours a day. The base is the only permanently inhabited place on Earth that lacks a clear line of sight to communications satellites. It relies on intermittent contact with ageing satellites that have drifted from their orbits.

As well as giving 24-hour access to sports results, the link will allow researchers around the world to monitor remote experiments. The South Pole is popular with physicists because the compressed ice is transparent and contains few air bubbles, helping them to spot the faint light emitted from neutrino-particle interactions. Astronomers like it because it offers 'continuous astronomical darkness' — better known as night — for several months of the year, and geologists are interested in the micrometeorites strewn across the Antarctic tundra.