Sometime in the next few days, a DHC-6 Twin Otter ski plane will circle the British Halley VI Antarctic base, look for the landing strip, and touch down on a floating ice shelf.

Two plumbers, an electrician, and an engineer will grab their gear, check their satphone, and wave goodbye to the pilot. For the next few weeks, the team will try to jumpstart a base that has been closed for the past eight months. Normally, the streamlined research structure would face the brutal Antarctic winter with 14 hardy souls to keep valuable scientific equipment warm and running. But British science officials shut down the remote outpost last March because of a 300-foot wide crack in the Brunt Ice Sheet creeping toward Halley about nine miles away.

Now, for the first time in modern Antarctic history, a team will attempt to restart equipment and generators that have been sitting in temperatures down to -67° Fahrenheit. They hope it will turn back on. But it might not.

High Exposure Photography/Alamy

“We know it’s standing, we know it’s not buried in snow,” said David Vaughan, science director for the British Antarctic Survey, which operates the base. “We might find some snow inside, and there is always the possibility that windows have been broken.”

Vaughan and others at the Cambridge-based research unit have been scanning NASA satellite imagery to keep an eye on Halley VI, which was built on a hydraulic leg and ski system to raise up above the annual snowfall. Without jacking it up every year, snow would bury the station. Over time, it would become part of the moving ice sheet, carried to the edge of the ice shelf and dumped into the ocean.

It's happened before: The UK has operated a research station on the 500-foot-thick Brunt Ice Shelf since the late 1950s, and Halley bases I to V were either demolished or slowly drifted out to sea on icebergs. But Vaughan says he’s not ready to abandon Halley VI.

“It’s something we will be looking at year by year,” Vaughan says. Halley VI is actually threatened by two cracks: Chasm 1 and the "Halloween crack." British glaciologists say the northern movement of the chasm, which had been dormant for 35 years, has accelerated in the last seven months. Meanwhile, the Halloween crack continues to move east toward the base. “The cracks are forming, until they go all the way and produce the icebergs and drift away," says Vaughan. Tractors can pull the base to a new location, but the British Antarctic Survey already pulled that move in February—and they're hoping not to resort to it again too soon.