Hacker News Reader

Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

When I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.

View on HN

OSM seems to have it quite well mapped: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-77.846323&mlon=166.6682...

Of course, I wanted to know what "FSTP Snow School" was, but garbage blogspam gives first-search-results like this: https://mapcarta.com/N8759058406

<sigh>

I can help! I went through it 7 times.

FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the "field safety training program" and basically it refers to the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in McMurdo.

Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year and instructors).

I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too, including how to travel on sea ice, and some mountaineering.

We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke was "the F stops here."

I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so... around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the building fulla chicks...

I think this is called ‘happy camper’ and there is a light version where you just learn basics so you can go travel off station.

Right. So when I first went (2010-11), everybody going to mcmurdo had to sleep out on sea ice one night (and it was called "happy camper" or "snow school"). They gradually scaled back the program; added lesser versions and made it so your group had to request it. Maybe meanings of "snow school" and "happy camper" diverged at some point.

Correction: I just checked and my first trip was actually 2009-10

Huh, thanks! That sounds really fun.

It feels strange watching the roads cross onto what looks at first glance to be water.

The other weird thing is seeing the map as a Mercator projection, since Antarctica is usually displayed in a polar projection.

You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for Antarctica articles.

(McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to anywhere else.)

Near? It's 99 miles!

https://distcalculator.com/distance-between/106093/New-Zeala...

"If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New Zealand and McMurdo, Antarctica and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to McMurdo, Antarctica will be 1 hour."

That site is getting confused by New Zealand's Antarctic Scott base.

NZ proper is about least 1,500 miles from Antarctica.

Scott Base is easy walking distance from McMurdo, not 99 miles (or 100 kilometers and 100 miles and 100 nautical miles - that site is quite confused!).

Both are actually in New Zealand depending on the purpose, due to the Ross Dependency[1]. For instance, most of those folks in McMurdo station have longer NZ visas than typical US tourists visiting NZ would get (3 months), because when they fly down to The Ice they're not technically leaving the country.

An interesting corner case is when something happens at one of the US stations in the Ross Dependency, which New Zealand wants to investigate. The Rodney Marks death[2] is a particularly well-known example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Dependency

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Marks

I think distcalculator is buggy:

"Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99 miles.

If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."

It appears to return "99 miles" for any pair of locations, even between a location and itself, or to nonexistent locations (like "Narnia").

McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZIR [1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=NZNV-NZIR [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZSP

That isn’t what I was thinking of. I wasn’t even aware there was more than one research facility in Antarctica. I was going purely off of the name.

That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base to be.

I'm typing this in New Zealand at latitude 42 degrees south (so about half way from the equator to the pole). So no, not near NZ, a bit less than 1/8 of the circumstance of the Earth away, maybe 1/10, more than 2000 miles.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, a twenty-minutes-into-the-future ecothriller, is much recommended reading for anyone who'd like to know more about McMurdo, the South Pole Station, and about the history of Antarctica's exploration and its geography and ecology. As is usually the case, KSR has definitely done his homework. (Disclaimer: you might fall in love with Antarctica, or at least develop a serious crush, as a result of reading this novel.)

It’s big enough that they have a bus to go around. It’s called Ivan the Terrabus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com