Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2015L00160:body:0:p8
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2015L00160
Segment Type: other
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Character Range: 18946–21915

2500 m blue ice airstrip. RAAF pilots and engineers were stationed year-round at Mawson until 1960. After a storm destroyed two Beaver aircraft in December 1959 and their replacements (a Beaver and an ex-US Air Corps Dakota DC3) in the following year, air support was limited to summer, and Air Force involvement was phased out by 1963.
Mawson was also the launching pad for glaciological surveys of the Amery Ice Shelf – a four-man party wintered on the shelf in 1968 – and tractor trains and helicopters supporting major geology expeditions to the Prince Charles Mountains (1969–74) and Enderby Land (1974–80). Aerial reconnaissances were made of these and other features of the interior, including the Lambert Glacier. Air operations remained difficult though. All four aircraft supplied to the first summer in Enderby Land, for instance, were wrecked by weather or (non-fatal) accidents.
While fieldwork gained baseline knowledge about the Antarctic environment, the station continued to grow. By the late 1960s, more than fifty buildings had been erected, with a closely spaced huddle of twenty-seven core domestic and storage buildings. In the early 1970s, when physics was the dominant science, a major addition was the world's highest latitude cosmic ray observatory, with an 11 m deep shaft blasted out of the rocks on which the station is built.

Redevelopment
From the late 1970s, a new generation of distinctly larger buildings of the same new fundamental modular design and construction was progressively introduced to Australia's continental stations.
Known as the Australian Antarctic Building System (AANBUS), the buildings are generic steel-framed and insulated steel panel walled structures that sit on concrete foundations. They integrate multiple functions under one roof and are linked by sophisticated service systems. Whereas the earlier buildings were designed to be put together by unskilled expedition teams, the AANBUS buildings were industrially manufactured and erected by large teams of trades personnel.
After a prototype was erected as a pump house in 1976, two others followed before the end of the decade. The AANBUS buildings now at Mawson station include the Red Shed (the sleeping and medical quarters, and Australia's first two-storey building in Antarctica), the Operations Building, Workshop, Emergency Vehicle Shelter, Tank House, Water Supply Building, Magnetic Variometer Building, Main Power House, Emergency Power House, Balloon Building, Waste Treatment Plant, Store and Transmitter Building.
Station populations living in their new, sizeable accommodation looking down onto the small and rambling village-style station regularly submitted proposals on what to do with the old. The old buildings fell into disrepair and a dozen of them were removed in 1998.
More recently the AANBUS suite of buildings has been supplemented by two buildings assembled from pre-modified 20' shipping containers mounted on concrete footings –