What You Can Learn from Living in Antarctica
nautil.us
nautil.us
October 2018 – On 9 October 2018, a stabbing occurred at the Bellingshausen Station (станция Беллинсгаузен), a Russian research station on King George Island.[18] The perpetrator was Sergey Savitsky (Сергей Савицкий), a 54-year-old electrical engineer.[19] He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest[19] multiple times.[20] According to some sources, the attack occurred because Beloguzov was giving away the endings of books that Savitsky checked out at the station's library.[21]
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442
A remark from the article comes to mind:
"If you’ve got a bunch of pessimists together, then nothing is going to happen other than misery."
In any case, the long list of professionals going crazy suggests the conditions at the stations cause emotional instability - I assume being stuck with a stranger in a confined space for long periods of time. They should build bigger stations, and under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave (and feels they need to commit arson to do so).
EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted..
Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them.
Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.
> Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naïve
I didn't mean literally cannot leave, I mean choose to leave, i.e when safe to do so, rather than being forced to stay by naval order or contract. Though admittedly it's hard to find if that is the case in some of the historical examples.
> shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet
Why? If you commit human beings to an environment you either allow the conditions that will keep them sane, or you call the whole thing off. As soon as you decide the difficulty is surmountable, you lose this excuse, because not doing it is also an option.
Would you build a station without a toilet or food? Then why not extra space? Skipping both will save money/effort, yet "there's more to living than just surviving" - both are requirements. If providing extra space is too hard, then the whole thing is too hard.
The previous point only compounds this: "you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely" - If you can't control how long they'll be there, ensure the environment is one they can remain emotionally stable in, or don't send them there at all.
They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill.
In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything.
Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel!
As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.
How did they F that up? The Russians manage to successfully use nuclear power for similarly remote stuff and it works well until locals decide they want to steal parts to sell for money (which is a problem you don't have in Antartcia).
If you need a transmitter or relay station hundreds of miles from people to run for years without fueling... RTGs are an option for governments.
Maybe this is a great candidate for vertical axis wind mills / turbines?
As I understand it, vertical axle don't suffer the red-lining problem of horizontal axle / fin based turbines, and while generally less efficient than conventional wind turbines, they'd ultimately be more effective in this environment.
Wouldn't it be better left in Antarctica than where ever else it was dumped?
For a long while, waste management at McMurdo was “tow it out onto the sea ice, and wait for summer”. The sound is littered with who only knows what.
In this case the result might have been the Russians deploying nuclear energy or even weapons there.
That said, the international community is not "society". You can have all the treaties you want, the threat of violence comes when nations care to break them.
One thing it does share (on smaller stations, not McMurdo) is the isolation and the impact on social structures. Concordia, run by the French and Italians, it has an ongoing relationship with the European Space Agency.
[0]: https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
Maybe you could even remove the air from a case if feasible?
Starlink might finally fix this problem. Anybody know the current status of Internet access at McMurdo?