It's a 'land' air strip - about 40 kms from the coast and 70 clicks from Casey. The ice is solid underneath the drifting wind borne snow; the snow is cleared from the top and heavy rollers compact the ice to withstand the stiletto pressure of an pax jet on top of any subsurface melt channels.
The sea ice around Casey is not strong or reliable enough even for small skiplane ops, let alone an Airbus. Davis and Mawson have islands that help lock in the sea ice supporting skiplane ops until mid December. A decent 'blow' and a Casey sea ice runway would soon be drifting a long way north with all on it....
Wilkins ice runway is on the Vanderford Glacier that moves 12m a year (roughly along its length) which for this part of the world is quite slow. Some of our fuel caches, AWS sites and other data download sites move 750m a year which can make it bloody annoying when trying to find them again.
