What I wonder, after reading this, is what happens with all that snow that is accumulating and causing all the buildings to be burried? Is the South Pole slowly rising? Or is snow at the bottom somehow dissipating?

It slowly turns to ice, compressed by its own weight.

Thereby enabling us to get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core and analyse the layers like tree rings, err... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

It accumulates on top, turns into ice, but the bottom layers of the ice very gradually flows (tenth of thousandth of years) toward the see. Modeling that precisely is hard and we do not know if Antarctic as the whole gains ice or looses it.

My current understanding of the numbers is that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (which includes the South Pole) is in positive ice mass balance, while the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing ice mass and is in or near a complete collapse scenario. It seems that the eastern sheet isn't gaining enough mass to offset the loss of the western sheet, but every study seems to contradict the previous study so... :shrug:

That depends who you mean by "we", but for people who follow this stuff the GRACE measurements are pretty clear.

In short: they become glaciers. The snow gets compacted into ice, which then slowly moves as a glacier (motion is highest at the base, I think) until it eventually reaches the glacial margin.

How about a building which rests on screw-like pillars which sit in a motorized shaft, with the pillar extending from the structure down into the ground.

The tops of the pillars would be accessible from inside the building.

When you want the building "height" to increase, you install another notch to each pillar and set the system to climb it's way up (or even down) a notch.

Such a structure would be "drift" proof.

    .______________________.
    |                      |
    |                      |
    |                      |
    |_.____._.____._.____._|
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |

Is this the concept alluded to but not addressed directly in TFA?

The 3rd south pole station is designed for hydraulically jacking up those pillars and installing height:

https://www.southpolestation.com/foundationdesign.html

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/livingsouthpole/new...

It’s the current trend for antarctic architecture, also seen in the German Von Neumayer III and the British Halley VI stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumayer-Station_III

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

I misinterpreted your idea at first: Could the building rest on a set of screw piles? [1] Presumably they would get stuck, but perhaps you could heat them when you wish to move. The building could then be a self-jacking snow anchor.

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

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665174, which somehow made the front page a week later.