Shuffleboard at McMurdo

Myself and a fellow researcher have been emailing about this essay today. Despite the author spending shockingly little time there, it's definitely spot-on McMurdo.

> McMurdo looks like a series of shipwrecks that people have tried to make the best of.

I've often tried to accurately describe the feeling you get when seeing McMurdo. This is pretty good. It's an ugly town.

> It’s not just that McMurdo station is ugly—and it is lens-shatteringly ugly—but that there is so damned much of it.

I personally dont find this fair. McMurdo is an operating fuel, food and support depo for the US operations on the continent. It supports a fixed wing airport and full helicopter operations in crazy inhospitable conditions. There's no local home depo. There's no McMaster. There's no grocery stores. No independent construction companies. EVERYTHING has to be down there. There is going to be a lot of stuff around. While down there, I've often pondered how many of our very beautiful cities are probably supported by far less beautiful cities. Do you know where your garbage goes? Down there it's stored until shipped back once a year.

> The only way tourists might come to the Ross Sea in numbers would be by air, but the memory of the 1979 crash, when an Air New Zealand plane flew into the side of Mt. Erebus, is too painful.

If you don't have a weak stomach, the tale is a fascinating one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand_Flight_901). Highly recommended.

> the Chalet, an ancient administrative building built in a style I would call ‘Ford-era National Park’.

This is so right. It's a weird building(https://www.jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2014/12/the-national-s...).

> We're certainly not the ones leaving our trash all over the ice. Tourists don't have bingo night, IceStock, exercise bikes, hot lattes, or yoga.

Whoa, there isn't trash on the ice. At least no intentionally dropped litter (the wind is strong, stuff can get blown around). Trash is a big deal down there and compared to everyday USA, everyone is super vigilant down there. There is a lot of stuff around, but much of that has purpose or is being stored (often outside as there's limited indoor storage space, so things can look cluttered).

Also, keep in mind most of those activities the author mentions are all run by volunteers. Nobody is paid to put on bingo night (thats new to me), IceStock, or yoga. Hot lattes? Yeah, there's a machine in the coffee shop that's open like three days a week for a few hours. And yes, there's exercise bikes, but come on, even people in prison get to exercise.

> The US Antarctic Program did not fly cases of Jim Beam to the bottom of the planet to watch them disappear into visiting bloggers. We are cut off.

They don't fly heavy staples like that down. Pretty much everything shelf stable or frozen comes down once a year on a ship. You should see the selection of booze and beer diminish when the main body of workers and scientists are down there. There is no flight resupply. I had one week with Sierra Nevada available last year, then all I could get was Tecate.

> Our presence here is just as unnecessary as the sprawling American base whose cookies I can't stop eating

The cookies from the kitchen are actually really good.

> The summer staff is about to be raptured to New Zealand, leaving only a remnant to face the tribulation of a Ross Sea winter.

Interesting note. Last year they started doing monthly flights through the winter, so the wintertime crews are going to be a lot less isolated (apparently, a couple days before every winter flight last year several people would quit. Before the flights that just wasn't an option).

> “Okay,” I say. “Do you have any Zippo lighters?”

I didn't know they had these. Ironic that smoking is so rare, otherwise these would make great gifts for my friends.

> “Today is the coldest I've ever been in my life.” I want to say something, but my jaw is too stiff to move.

So cold mid-to-late summer? I don't get it. Honestly, I'm from Wisconsin and summer in McMurdo is pretty balmy. The author must have zero cold tolerance. January and February daily mean temp is around freezing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Climate) and the sun is pretty damn strong.

Seriously, summertime in McMurdo isn't that bad. Wintertime is of course another matter.

But yeah, great writeup.

Really interesting read - I just accepted a position with the US Antarctic Program as senior computer technician at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station this upcoming summer season, and I'll be spending a good amount of time at McMurdo in transit on the way to and from the Pole.

The research I've done on what to expect in Antarctica (and stories I heard during the interview process) are really, really interesting.

While McMurdo is the largest permanent base on the continent it's still incredibly isolated and self sufficient - and the polar station / field camps, an order of magnitude more so. Literally the closest thing we currently have to a permenant Mars colony. The USAP doesn't let anyone stay on ice longer than a year to prevent potential mental health issues.

If there's anyone else here involved (or previously involved) with the USAP here, I'd love to connect.

If you enjoyed this, definitely follow Maciej's recommendation and read Big Dead Place (http://www.powells.com/book/big-dead-place-9780922915996), which captures the "Office Space on Ice" bleakness quite vividly.

You can get a taste here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140108023919/http://www.bigdea...

Unfortunately the blog is now only on the Wayback Machine, as the author, Nicholas Johnson, sadly committed suicide a few years ago after a tour as a contractor in Afghanistan (http://feralhouse.com/nick-johnson-rip/ and http://www.alternet.org/media/world-forgets-antarcticas-firs...).

Also highly recommend Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog.

Another hilarious take on McMurdo and some of the scientific work going on in the region.

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

I love this guy's writing.

Why oh why does he make it so hard to know when he's posted something new? No RSS, no email list, not even a Twitter account. I've had to resort to setting up a changedetection.com alert on his home page so I know when a new article is posted.

The prefab functional/ugly architecture is remarkably similar to parts of the Bagram and Kandahar air bases, but obviously adapted for the polar climate.

It makes sense when you consider that the place has been run by large federal defense contractors for the last 30+ years, as mentioned in the article, Raytheon and now Lockhed Martin (PAE). PAE also does a lot of work in Afghanistan. I'm sure if/when PAE ever loses the contract it'll go over to somebody like DynCorp.

Reading this article (highly entertaining, as always, Maciej; thanks for brightening my day with your cynicism) led me to reflect on architecture. It seems pointlessly wasteful to have built a bunch of Quonset huts and trailers that people have to walk between, and also to have built the buildings above ground in the first place. I suppose digging in permafrost is difficult, and bringing in machinery so that you can have economies of scale is difficult, even if we no longer have the problems of cold steel embrittlement and tin pest that bedeviled the old polar explorers.

A little quick calculation, since calculation is always what I end up doing when confronting stories of human folly and suffering.

If you need to house, say, 1024 people, with 128 m² of floor area for each one (home plus office plus bar, etc.), with a mean ceiling height of 4 m, that’s 524 288 m³. If you want to enclose that volume inside a hemispherical dome, the radius (and thus the height) of the dome is about 64 m, or 16 floors. The skin of the dome — the part that insulates the people from the cold wind — is about 26000 square meters, 25 square meters per person. The cross-sectional area that the dim sun illuminates during the summer is about 6400 m², so if we assume a bit less than 1000 W/m², you receive about 6 megawatts of solar energy during the summer, and about 3 megawatts year-round (3 kW per person).

How much insulation do you need? If the inside-outside temperature difference is 40° C, and you need to maintain that on 1500 W per person (maybe your thermal solar collection is only 50% efficient and you don’t have significant other sources of heat) then you need insulation with an average R-value of about 3.8. 1-inch polyisocyanurate foam panels have an R-value of about 6, and they only cost US$19 for a 4’×8’ panel (US$6.40/m²; this is the Home Depot retail price and includes aluminum facers) which works out to about US$160 000 to cover the whole dome. Unfortunately they aren’t transparent, so you can’t get solar radiation through them; you kind of need some kind of non-imaging optics heliostat if you want to gather the solar heat to illuminate and keep warm with. As far as I know, these don’t exist yet.

At this point, and certainly when McMurdo was built, it would make more sense to use heavier insulation, and do your climate control by dissipating energy that you generate by some other means, such as with the nuclear reactor or by burning fuel oil. If you’re dissipating 500 watts per person, you need three times the R-value (11.4, a bit under two inches of foam insulation, or US$320 000 of insulation). You need to use countercurrent heat exchangers to keep the air from going stale.

16 stories is small enough that people can avoid using elevators most of the time, at least if the common areas they usually travel to are intelligently located; 128 meters diameter is small enough that you can walk anywhere (in about two minutes), but large enough that bicycles or skateboards would occasionally be convenient.

If each floor is concrete 250mm thick (suitable for essentially any purpose that doesn’t involve armored vehicles), we need 32768m³ of concrete, or about 65536 tonnes, if we use somewhat lightweight concrete. Concrete typically costs about US$120/m³, so that’s about US$4 million of concrete, plus probably a similar cost in rebar. This cost isn’t particularly sensitive to whether you build a bunch of separated buildings or a single giant arcology like I’m suggesting above, as long as the buildings are more than two or three stories tall. It is sensitive to things like whether each person gets 128m² or 32m² and to the flooring material.

If you could somehow get by with more inexpensive floor materials like expanded steel sheet with drywall under it, you could reduce the cost dramatically — the 250mm reinforced concrete I suggested above costs about US$60/m², while 9-gauge expanded steel sheet might cost US$24/m² (according to MetalsDepot.com). I feel like that kind of thing might be acceptable for a lot of floors that don’t separate unrelated strangers.

This is important not so much for the cost of the materials (although that is kind of important) but more because you don't have a cement plant or even a quarry onsite there in McMurdo; all your manufactured materials have to be shipped in, as if you were in Alaska or something. A heavy-tested TEU only holds 28 tonnes; the amount of concrete suggested above is 2340 TEUs’ worth of mostly sand and rocks. That’s because the concrete weighs a ton per square meter, while the expanded sheet metal weighs 8.8 kg per square meter. That way, you might only need 25 or 30 TEUs instead of 2300 of them.

(The above conveniently omits the sheetrock...)

What about trash? Is it really necessary to haul it away from Antarctica? Let’s make some pessimistic assumptions: suppose we need to plan to store 64 years’ worth of garbage — ideally, frozen — and that the McMurdo Base residents and visitors produce the same amount of garbage per capita as New Yorkers, who are twice as productive of waste as any other major metropolis, at 7.8 million tons per year (220 kg/s) out of 8.6 million people (26 mg/s per person). Over 64 years and 1024 people, this is 54 000 tonnes of garbage, or about 54 000 m³.

This is about an order of magnitude smaller than the size of the people dome. If we just build a garbage dome near the people dome and put garbage in it every day and let it freeze, the garbage dome will only be five stories tall if it’s built for 64 years’ worth of garbage.

Presumably it will take less than 64 years for it to become economic to mine the rich deposits of refined mineral resources (indium, gallium, gold, copper, maybe even aluminum if energy prices don’t fall dramatically) in the garbage pile.

Hopefully, the McMurdo residents will demolish less buildings, buy less new clothes, junk less taxis, and compost more of their food than New Yorkers do, so hopefully their garbage volume will be even smaller.

So you could probably build a new, much better McMurdo Base for under ten million dollars.

Chemtrails, really? I read this: "After sailing for three weeks with no signs of human activity, no power lines, no chemtrails, no evidence that we exist on the planet at all except for a mournful wooden cabin at Cape Adare, it’s jarring to see this open-air museum of prefabricated regret."

I'm sure the author means contrails ?

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4027 "Chemtrails, real or not?"