The McMurdo Webcams
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I was there in the 92-93 season. We were lucky to have e-mail back then.
We did our own special internet link for a project that used spare bandwidth on a non commercial satellite. We had 1.544mbit up and 9600 down. We sent what would eventually be called motion jpeg for "video". There was no audio. The satellite dish was pointed 3deg below the horizon; but we were on a mountain, so that was fine.
McMurdo is a fabulously weird place. The US Navy manages all the food/fuel/housing logistics. Then you get the researchers coming through to do projects. They may be working from McMurdo, but most are just be gearing up to go out on the ice. These are often grad students, researchers, and faculty. So the average IQ is much higher than your typical ski town.
The staff that works the station is there because they like the environment. You find people with college degrees doing maintenance and safety trainings. Most are just there for the summer season (which is now). Some will winter over.
Most of the fuel and cargo comes in once a year. The ice breaker is at the ice dock, so that can happen any time now.
Everything else is flown in/out from NZ at considerable expense. Early in the season the ice is thick enough to land jets like the C-5 and C-17. While they are in the ground, they have to move them every few hours to keep the ice from cracking under all that weight. By this time in the season it's probably just C-130s doing everything. Once the sun goes back down, all flights cease and there is nothing can get out for 9 months.
We seem to have broken that bandwidth because I'm getting a 503 now!
> The US Navy manages all the food/fuel/housing logistics.
These days, actually I think since shortly after you were there, this is handled by (sub)contractors. "Antarctic Support Contract" is the phrase to search for, currently Leidos, Lockheed before that, Raytheon before that. US Military flies the LC-130s and C-17s, operates the ships, but has little other involvement.
> Early in the season the ice is thick enough to land jets like the C-5 and C-17. While they are in the ground, they have to move them every few hours to keep the ice from cracking under all that weight. By this time in the season it's probably just C-130s doing everything. Once the sun goes back down, all flights cease and there is nothing can get out for 9 months.
This has changed a bit too. For a very long time, there has been another runway on permanent ice (called "Pegasus" after a plane that crashed out there, as opposed to the "Ice Runway" that I think you're referring to, which is on annual ice just out of town) which can handle wheeled aircraft (C-17, chartered commercial passenger planes) in summer. Pegasus historically wasn't used a lot because it's inconvenient and the soot+dirt+wear isn't good for the ice surface.
At least for a few years recently they've routinely done a few flights over winter in to McMurdo - I believe the idea was to support a year-round rebuild of the whole station. But, the McMurdo winter was traditionally more like 6 months ending with "winfly" when a couple flights bring in people to open up the station for "mainbody" aka summer. Pole winter is roughly 9 months, driven by the temperatures being too cold for the hydraulics in the LC-130s.
The Antarctic Support Contract was a thing back then too. They did most of the day-day operations, while the Navy managed flights, supplies, the mess (cafeteria), and the like. I don't really know the division of responsibilities.
Do you know if they are landing on winter flights, or just doing airdrops? The later is much easier to do. Even in the summer, the C-130s have to fly with enough fuel to return to NZ because there have been times when the winds become too high to land (and NZ is the "nearest" alternate runway).
There was a helicopter inside. Pretty nifty.
As for drinking, yes that can be a problem, particularly at McMurdo which can have a fratty atmosphere as well (see also, the recent NSF report on sexual harassment in polar programs)
> Do you know if they are landing on winter flights, or just doing airdrops?
My understanding is that they have something like two windows over the winter, where they land flights. I presume C-17s, which don't usually need to take on fuel in McMurdo and are generally less hassle than the LC-130s.
I have been at Pole when they've done "practice" airdrops, but I don't think those have been a significant logistical channel since the very early days, and maybe setting up field camps.
There's a bulldozer way under the surface at Pole where its airdrop went awry. I can't remember the details but it's in Paul Siple's book "90 South" - something like the chutes didn't open, or lines got tangled, and it came to rest a couple dozen feet under the surface. Pole is in an accumulation zone though, so over time snow has built up above it. I believe it was only in the 2000s that it stopped being useful as a radar reference for landing planes.
To add: a while back I discovered who this guy did a slice-of-life video journal of his time in the south pole station. Super interesting! https://www.youtube.com/@GoneVenturing/playlists
I can't even imagine seeing that in person I'd lose my everloving mind.
https://photolibrary.usap.gov/PhotoDetails.aspx?filename=202...
Crabeater seal with serrated teeth.
All of the images have captions describing what they are.
https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#37-1expanded A bird, that's a bird...
https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#35-1expanded two different colored auroras. Today I learned that auroras come in a variety of colors, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora
Still no idea what that means.
Instead this is a whole town! Wikipedia says the population is 1000 people in the summer, which is probably 20 times more than I would have guessed.
Fascinating, thanks for the link!
In particular with respect to the size of these communities. McMurdo is effectively a remote city. But life at south pole, summit station, east grip, dye2, svalbard and onresearch ice breakers would be what you should look into if you are curious about these sorts of things. I'll link to a (small) selection of my photos from Russian icebreakers below that I've shared before.
Also also. Check out the Russian drifting stations for truly insane stories:
I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Parazynski (an incredibly impressive emergency medicine physician, astronaut, and adventurer who was the first person to summit Mt. Everest and go to space), and he said working at the McMurdo base over the winter was perhaps the hardest thing he’d done. He also said alcoholism is incredibly prevalent in polar regions during the winter.
Curious if you’ve seen the same thing?
A Soviet machine made to cut ice in half in both directions!
you're ok , they're nuclear powered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker?use...
I'm guessing it's integrated with the engine's cooling, and is effectively free to heat.
I am lucky to have spent time in Svalbard and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Describes some of the engineering and logistical challenges of doing scientific research in the arctic environment.
The sun just orbits and never sets. So any normal day/night cycles doesn't exist.
There are other (smaller) bases on the Antarctic peninsula. I don't know what timezone they use. Their supplies are coming in from Chile or Argentina.
Wow, that was an achievement back then. Started university in 95 and having your own email address provided by the university was a big thing back then.
One of the researchers he interviews about it describes how he lives life with no real home and always has a bag packed with enough essentials to go hike out into the wilderness anywhere in the world--Herzog asks to see the bag and the person happily pulls out an enormous pack and starts pulling out stuff like an inflatable pack raft, stoves, tents, etc. The big point is that you have to be a special kind of person that's not really attached to modern society to go live and work at the end of the world.
Many, many years ago I was in the Army and served with a man, Corporal White, who was the oddest person I had ever met. He was probably the best soldier I have ever seen, but refused to take anything seriously and treated the Army as a game to be played (as one should).
Anyway, he put in a DA4187 form, a personnel action request form, with roughly four words on it: "request duty in Antarctica", it worked its way up the chain of command, and after several months a telegram (the army sent telegrams called PERSGRAMS up until the late 90s!) arrived assigning him to duty in Antarctica.
He spent about six months down there, in his words "moving around barrels and crates and playing Nintendo", and came back engaged to a scientist.
Now he and his wife are itinerant adventurers and I don't think they've lived anywhere for more than six months in the last 25 years.
Maybe if you somehow assume the identity of somebody working at one of the research stations and are able to do their job? If I was going to write a book and make it halfway plausible that's how I'd have the character do it. But unless I'm mistaken everybody has a fairly specialized job and/or is a grad student or professional scientist.
edit: There are some perhaps "somewhat" unskilled positions, I see, such as "Positions in waste management, food and station services, retail, lodging coordination, and more."
https://web.archive.org/web/20230120081822/https://www.usap....
There are some Antarctic cruise ships that come in and do a day trip. I hear the NSF hates this and makes sure everyone gets back on the boat.
They plan their logistics over a year in advance. Anyone showing up unexpectedly is going to throw that off.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/579732/mysterious-death-...
There’s no way I would trust my life to any fuel but diesel in this environment.
Could be a perfect place for a new SMR.
Geothermal on the other hand is local damage - it will be blatantly obvious who exactly is responsible for any environmental damage.
Top tip for polluters: If possible, give out pollution like CO2, because it's invisible and mixes with everyone else's CO2, and when global warming sea level rise wipes out pacific islands, you can shrug and point to everyone else.
Whereas if you damage one specific area, some government might come and fine you or put you in prison.
At mcmurdo and scott, wind power, etc are healthily supplementing and slowly substituting diesel but ultimately arctic diesel will stay a staple because it consistently operates at extremely low temps. Especially inland where the temperatures are regularly lower than -70C.
As for the geothermal being banned, that's because it takes a lot of digging and "permanent changing of the environment". Doubly so since the low temperature environment means you have to use a ton of additives in your transfer fluid to keep it from freezing up during condition 1. If the circulation loop blows, those additives will stay in the environment effectively indefinitely given the weather.
So as much as I prefer geothermal, it makes sense why it's banned. Even if they just accepted the risk, they'd still need diesel infra in case of emergency or else there's a very real risk of people on station dying in the middle of a long, hard condition 1 storm which would prevent fly-ins from bringing emergency supplies.
Also it's only mcmurdo(~1k people), scott(~70-80 people), palmer(~40-45 people), rothera(~150 people), and signy(~10-15 people) which have actual ground contact that aren't in a pristine field lab environment (like the dry valley) so there's only a few locations that could even use geothermal. The rest are either in field lab environments where you can't risk contaminating the ground or on ice shelfs where you have to dig down a few hundred meters or even a few kilometer to find anything other than solid ice.
Of those few viable locations, only mcmurdo, scott, and rothera actually justify the infrastructure cost (with all but mcmurdo only having enough people to justify it in the summer months).
So ultimately instead of choosing between maintaining diesel infra and maintaining both diesel infra and geothermal which both have their own problems you know have to address, they chose to just use diesel unless a project can prove the geothermal infra won't have con 1 failure and deep ground contamination risks.