The Volkov Relay - Desolate Cold War Arctic Station | Winter Sci-Fi Ambient | 4K

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At the edge of the Antarctic plateau, a single dish stands frozen in ice.
It isn’t listed on any registry. No nation claims it. Survey flights detour around its coordinates without explanation, and no expedition has been granted access since the 1970s.

Officially, the site doesn’t exist. But fragments of paperwork recovered from the Soviet Directorate for Special Energy Applications describe a remote installation built in 1961: Volkov Relay Station.

Its original task was to support a series of high-altitude nuclear tests under the program name Operation Glas-3. The relay transmitted synchronized pulses during detonation, designed to distort radar signatures and conceal the tests from foreign monitoring.

The final test—RDS-β, conducted November 1963—did not go as planned.
Detonation occurred at an unexpected altitude. For twelve minutes, radio contact with every Soviet facility in the southern hemisphere was lost. When communication returned, the readings from the Volkov Relay showed an anomaly: a persistent magnetic field hovering in the upper atmosphere, centered precisely above the blast coordinates.

Attempts to power down the relay caused the field to destabilize, producing electrical surges across the Antarctic network. Within a month, the station was placed on permanent automated operation. Its transmissions were never again interrupted.

After the collapse of the USSR, the site was omitted from all decommissioning records. Satellite imagery shows that the dish still powers on every 336 hours. Engines buried beneath the ice start, floodlights engage, and the array aligns itself with the same patch of sky. Then it falls silent again.

No personnel are registered at the location, yet the fuel reserves remain full and maintenance logs—unsigned, undated—appear in the surviving archives every year.

A classified memo from 1984 reads simply:

“Do not approach. Do not interfere. Continued operation is mandatory.”

Today, the Volkov Relay is surrounded by a restricted air corridor that no one officially enforces. The ice around it shows the faint geometry of something vast beneath the surface—too regular to be natural, too deep to be studied.

Whatever it was built to manage, it is still managing it.
And no one is willing to find out what happens if it stops.

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