Showering at the South Pole | Hacker News Reader

Showering at the South Pole

brr.fyi

210 pointsAmorymeltzer98 comments

Am tickled to see this here, having done these calculations myself in the same place several years running (due to summer visits at the Pole for work from 1997-2011).

The author doesn't mention workouts. There are good gym facilities at the Pole, and there's nothing like a half-minute shower (the author's "Option 2") after using them. Now that I know there is an appetite for shower recipes, I'll share mine from 2011[1].

I will say that living under tightly constrained conditions...

- incredibly cold temperatures, typically -30F in the summer

- at times, relatively infrequent "freshies" (fresh vegges/fruits)

- spotty Internet bandwidth

- the water constraints under discussion

- ...

... give one a renewed appreciation for the common luxuries one typically has in "the real world."

The biggest surprise luxury when getting off the Ice at Summer's end? Nighttime.

(I only deployed in Summer -- daylight all the time at Pole.)

[1] http://johnj.com/posts/shower-instructions/

(edit: formatting, and fix gender assumption)

Did anyone ever engineer the shower heads to reduce the GPM and thus, increase their shower time?

At 1.3gpm, you're already well into this-is-an-unsatisfying-flow-rate territory. I stayed at a camp once that had .9gpm showers, and even though our time limits were a lot more lenient than what is described in TFA, it was close to the point where I would have rather had a bucket and a sponge.

1.8gpm is the current standard for California, just as an example, and I would say subjectively ~2.5gpm is where you hit genuinely satisfying amounts of water.

Took a unique shower experience at White's Landing on Catalina Island. It was late at night and the open-roof stall was surrounded by walls. The stalls were divided by plywood walls with a 2ft gap from the ground and curtains. Wind was strong, around 20-30 mph, making everything blow around. The temperature was chilly, mid-50s, and water pressure was low, around 1 GPM. There was also fox poop in the next stall. Despite these conditions, showering under the stars with my partner was a memorable moment. We laughed at the strange noises we made due to the cold and wind.

We realized that we should shower earlier next time.

Someone made an even better solution, surprised it's not used at the South pole actually!

Originally developed for the ISS, this shower system filters and recycles shower water, saving both water and energy!

https://orbital-systems.com/

Ah the thing they had on Ceres in the Expanse isn't it?

"Use with Alexa" No thanks, guess I'll have to build my own, dumbed down manual version; A graywater catchment, with cyclone bin, settlement barrel, and solar evaporator, perhaps. Or just a standard garden-variety graywater harvesting setup.

Wow, impressive. I didn't know such a thing existed. Need to tell my uncle who builds/maintains gas/water/heating systems for houses in Germany for clients.

0.75 gpm: https://www.moen.com/nebia-by-moen

Or DIY 2 l/min = 0.53 gpm: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustain...

Thanks for sharing. In the picture of Gary, what is the contraption in front of his mouth?

Guessing it is a breathing mask like https://www.airtrim.se/eng/default.asp to make the air you breathe in warm and moist. Common for athletes here in the Nordics. Not sure about the exact science but I remember hearing exercising outdoors starts to be bad for the lungs around -15 to -20C (5 to -4F) Because the air is so dry.

And if you have asthma it's bad even below 0 C. I use my Lungplus [1] as soon as the weather hits +5 C, makes me able to actually do something outdoors in the winter. It's just a heat exchanger in your mounth, storing heat from the exhaust air, and heating up the intake air [2] :-)

[1] https://www.lungplus.se/databl_e.html

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=lungplus&iax=images&ia=imag...

If I recall correctly, Gary made a little funnel apparatus to keep his goggles from fogging up.

I was curious to see how and if they meter it. Is there a wall clock? Honor/Guessing system? A bell?

Edit: found it "McMurdo doesn't really care. According to my buddy who worked at both the power plant and the water treatment plant, the station produces more than enough water. You can pretty much shower twice a day (though it's so damn dry there that I don't recommend it at all). Pole is restricted - people will police each other and heckle those who take too long."

I don't get the dryness comment.

Showering can dry out your skin.

And so do really low outdoor temperatures with noticeable impact on indoor air humidity.

It's an honour system. Actually the showers have two mechanisms. One is flow restriction/misting. Though some showers are much better than others. The other is a small valve on the shower head which you can use to pause the flow while you soap up. It's convenient because you don't need to reset the temperature each time. It's a normal screw valve to open the flow, it's not a timed system like you'd find in a gym/pool shower.

Also there are times over winter when we're allowed extra time, such as when the tanks are being cleaned (and have to be drained). Occasionally "vouchers" are given out as prizes, eg for the annual marathon.

I think heckling is more likely because at peak capacity there are 150 people on station and only ~10 shower cubicles per gender. There are 2-4 cubicles per dorm wing, each with up to ~30 people. So there can be some contention and people want to shower after work/before dinner.

I actually like taking short showers, as a sport! I've optimized it during the years I just timed my 'short' version shower and I made it in 1m 22s, including the 5-10 seconds of letting the water heat up.

1: Drench yourself in water.

2: Use soap where you have apocrine sweat glands ONLY, i.e. groin and arm pits.

3: Rinse soap.

4: Rinse hair and massage with your hands simultaneously.

5: Done.

I used to cover my whole body and soap carefully and rinse it off, but after realizing the foul smelling sweat glands only are in the groin and arm pit area, I realized it's unnecessary.

What about shampooing the air? I don't. I usually only do it before going to the hair dresser, once every two months or so. Does it get super oily? No, you can train your hair not be, if you don't shampoo. Here's how (for people ok with short hair). Just do it after cutting your hair really short. Stop shampooing and instead just rinse it really good. After the shower it's important to rub the hair with a towel really good though. It's much easier with short hair. You can also train long hair by just extending the period between shampoos slowly, there's a ton of YouTube videos about it.

"Every 14 days: 480.2 seconds. That’s 8 minutes (!!!), 0.2 seconds. Congratulations! You’ve scrounged and saved, and you’ve managed to accrue enough shower-seconds to take an average American shower!

You’ve sacrificed your health, well-being, social life, and potential future job prospects, but you can enjoy a truly obscene amount of shower, guilt-free."

I'm a bit sceptical about the "sacrificed your health" part, I don't have any sources (which is always a good way to start a debate - joke) but I don't think much physical harm can come to you if you don't shower for more then 14 days. Sure, people around you probably won't appreciate it and will probably say something, but I do believe that not showering for extended periods of time is physically safe.

Do correct me, if I'm wrong.

You saved me from stating the same thing. As for the daily hot showers, they aren't good for your skin anyways.

If I was living down there, I'd chose the interval approach, taking oportunistic showers to manage smell :-D

There's a range of potential things that could develop, like fungal infection, clogged pores, bacterial infection in unknown cuts, etc. Likelihood depends on a number of factors.

This is relatively unlikely at Pole. While you aren't supposed to take regular showers, you're still expected to maintain general hygiene - hand washing, sponge/cloth baths on other days. If you had a cut that was serious enough that you'd worry about infection then you would probably visit medical anyway. Otherwise clean the wound and bandage as you would otherwise.

Trench foot? Athlete's foot? Ringworm? Ingrown hair picked and infected with staph from fingernail? Sure you can deal with it, but regular cleaning is the best way to avoid a problem.

Every 14 days, two weeks pass. Together we can stop this!

As water is the actual metered resource at 0.74 gallons per day, I’d prefer having it all poured into a bucket and use that to shower along with a glass or a sponge.

It’s much easier to manage, and is pretty common practice in India (albeit with maybe 2 or 3 gallons buckets)

For those of us who don't use burger units: 0.73 gallons = 2.8 l

I wish I'd thought of that when I was at the Pole!

This is absolutely what they should be doing. Just a few litres of warm water and a sponge. Vastly less water usage and just as refreshing as a shower. I honestly think very few people know what a great way this is to bathe.

...why not just have a nuclear reactor to provide an infinite heat source? Submarines at the bottom of ocean have more shower time than south pole stations.

Did not work out previously.

https://www.wired.com/2011/03/0304antarctic-nuclear-plant-mc...

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

Seems like at the time it was a primitive and poorly executed affair. We could do much better this time.

"why not just use a nuclear reactor" might be the most insane "why not just" I've ever seen in my life. :D

Come on, nuclear is not black magic. There are nuclear reactors in submarines and carriers, so why not at the polar station.

Why not just use a lithium-water furnace?

This was less a comment objecting to the idea of a nuclear heat source, and more that "why not just" is a comment that fails to account for all of reasons the experts involved probably considered but decided not to "just" do that.

Why not just a nuclear reactor is a huge version of this, because obviously there are a lot of additional expenses and concerns when you deploy a nuclear reactor anywhere.

And of course the small detail that they had a reactor a McMurdo, got rid of it because it was less reliable than fueled generators, and had a massive cleanup mess to deal with because the damn thing leaked.

Yeah, sure, let's just throw a billion dollar reactor using high enriched uranium which requires tending 24/7 at every single problem.

Antarctica is a big place, maybe not at the South Pole, especially sitting on a thick ice sheet.

But there must be several areas of geothermal power. The idea is to make no changes, or to mine resources, but if there’s wind turbines set up, near McMurdo, that has concrete footings.

Pole has very little wind and the bedrock is 2 miles below the ice.

> You’ve sacrificed your health, well-being, social life, and potential future job prospects, but you can enjoy a truly obscene amount of shower, guilt-free.

I'd be interested in if there's actually health issues here. Anecdotally, from backpacking, it's no big deal to go that long.

it depends on a number of factors including the individual's age and health, and the environment. Skin infections are a possibility.

Quite enjoyed the writing and it’s a fun topic to think about.

Would doing a daily “submarine shower” [0] be the best strategy here for maximising cleanliness? This would be use fifteen seconds with water on to get as wet as possible all over, turn water off and apply soap and shampoo, then water on for the last 15 seconds. (Note I’ve never actually tried this so ymmv)

[0] https://sketchplanations.com/submarine-shower

We used to do that as a way to conserve our minimal hot water, and while I can't say I enjoyed it per se, it was more satisfying to have a real blast of water when you could, than just dribbling it out at a paltry rate. And you were able to get clean.

Those are generally known as "Navy showers," as opposed to "Hollywood showers."

(In one scene in The Hunt for Red October the sonarman Jones aboard the USS Dallas was told to take a Hollywood shower when he went off-watch as a reward for having detected and tracked the Red October.)

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

I wonder if there’s a side market trade of shower minutes. Some people will feel more strongly about cleanliness than others, perhaps they’d be willing to sell or trade shower time..

Take my $100m series A

They say every prison has a barter-coin. In the Antarctic, it happens to be water. ;)

The url is surely, given the topic, one of the better ones I've ever seen.

Funny how nobody has mentioned sponge baths, they work well for astronauts and hardly use any water.

> 0.74 gallons of water per day. What you choose to do with it is up to you!

> 34.3-second daily rinse.

Using mist nozzles you could get 2.8 minutes of shower per day:

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustain...

> Three nozzles – with a flow rate of roughly one liter of water per minute – are the minimum for providing the comfort of a hot shower

Not a single mention of recirculating showers? In the van-curious phase of my life I have watched and read about several such setups and, albeit a bit gross, it certainly beats showering once a week? Of course if shower stalls are shared among many people, you'd have to bring your own filter (and cleaning your filter takes, well, water, but I assume relatively little of it), but it sounds at least doable and worth the quality of life improvement?

I wanted to provide a clever insight here saying they should bring some more solar panels, but unless my back of the napkin calculations are totally off that would work poorly. To begin with, there’s very little sunlight at the south pole and efficiency of panels is 10% of normal. Admittedly I’m only glancing through this paper, but an installation to generate an average continuous 2.5kW would have a total cost $250k [1].

The good news is that if you did do that, 2.5kW would allow you to heat a very significant amount of water per hour, even from ice to shower temperature. Like a US gallon in 4 minutes from 0º to 35ºC.

1: https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/14220/Jam...

Although it would take 8.4 minutes to melt a gallon of ice with 2.5kW (then the additional 4 minutes to get it to 35 degrees).

When I lived off-grid in a warm and humid environment (Asheville area), I'd take a sponge bath with a short hot shower rinse afterwards every night. For all my water needs I used about 8 gallons a week. After I started to collect rainwater water availability wasn't no longer the issue but heating it was.

I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs and they were discussing that after a month of not bathing the bacteria and other microscopic life on our skin hits a peak and is able, to some extent, to improve body odor. Maybe accrue all your minutes for a single massive year end shower.

Ah, this must be why homeless people smell like chamomile !

But can you pool your shower minutes with a friend or two?

Why take showers at all? A large bath filled with warm water that could be sterilized regularly would be far more luxurious and last quite a long time.

Also pro tip: to maximize water you need a mister type shower head that sprays smaller droplets, which gets you far wetter and is more efficient than a regular rain type shower. Bladerunner 2049 featured such a shower and I think a longer running version of that for Antarctica would be fantastic.

But as the surrounding is subzero, wouldn't the water just instantly become cold?

Depends on the insulation I guess.

I'm guessing there aren't many folks with long curly hair at the south pole. There's no way that's gonna rinse out in 2 mins.

Why showers? Showers are very water-inefficient. Sponge bath is definitely possible in the allotted amount of water.

I'll double check tomorrow but I think my shower takes at least 15 seconds to warm up. I'd probably go stinky a bit so I could enjoy more shower time instead of wasting half my rations every day having cold water cramp up my muscles.

Their shower water's not heated beyond cold, so it doesn't make a difference.

With water being so scarce, what are the toilet bowls filled with?

I'm not clear whether all water is rationed down there, or only hot water.

It seems likely that the standard for that it lower; you kind of need clean water to bathe, both practically and for sanitary/health reasons, but you can flush toilets with dirtier water. ...Actually, now I'm wondering if you could run toilets with water from showers.

You can.

no reason not to be a dry drop. It would be frozen and no longer ... active... after a few minutes

The men's urinals are water-free toilets. The sit-down toilets are low volume-per-flush, I expect.

Water isn't exactly rationed -- people are just asked to minimize.

To be clear, there is a LOT of water (the station sits atop two miles/3km of the purest ice). What's really being rationed is energy, which is very, very expensive there (the rough calculation I've heard is 10x non-Ice prices, others would know better).

Interesting information, thank you! This was exactly what I was wondering about.

The only part I'm struggling with a bit with is "10x non-ice prices". What does this mean? Are you able to indulge me in additional explanation? Thanks again.

The whole station runs on jet fuel (AN-8 kerosene) which is hauled inland from the coast. In the past this was done by aircraft, which emptied their tanks, but now it's mostly done using the South Pole Overland Traverse (SPOT). It takes about a month to get to the Pole this way, so you're paying for a tractor train plus staff and maintenance costs for at least two months (out and back). The alternative is paying for a lot of flying hours which is also expensive. There are now at least two traverses each summer. So the cost of the fuel is mostly in the cost of transportation i.e. very high.

The generators are actually quite efficient. Water is heated as a byproduct of electricity production. I think it's by recovering heat from the engine exhaust.

Antarctica is colloquially referred to as "Ice".

If you get .75 gallons per day I might prefer to have a warm bath once every few weeks and a sponge bath once or twice per week.

The post says water is the metered commodity, but I imagine temperature is what's actually subject to restrictions. You can have all the subzero water you want - it's just lying around on the ground.

If heating weren't a concern, the obvious way to get around tight limits on water would be to take communal baths.

The post is also oddly concerned with "potable" water when that isn't a concern for showers.

How does this work?

Do you have to use an ID card to access your allocation, does it cut the water off?

Is there a tap for washing hands, is that limited too?

Toilets?

The showers themselves aren't timed, it's an honour system. Taps are free to use, similarly drinking water is not restricted (it'd be a serious dehydration risk otherwise). Toilets do flush, but the urinals are water-free. The bathrooms are very similar to what you'd find in a gym or pool.

Do USA-people actually perform physics calculations in gallons and all that stuff? Wow.

Almost as much as we like being called USA-people

Surely a weird lot, the USicans.

I'm particular to USAnites myself.

What else would we use?

They do orbital mechanics in US customary units, why would shower flow be metric?

The best part of this blog post is the mathemetical rigor and accuracy he's undertaken to illustrate the hardships of showering "at the bottom of the world."

Can you hoard your water rations and have a hot, gloaty bath?

Heh, I read “mega shower” as “merge shower” and was expected a joke about showering with a colleague to expand time

Yes, this is the most obvious omission of the article. It really made me think about the kind of social dynamics that must be going on in an international and culturally-diverse research station like this one. Obviously, you will try to keep social friction low, and there might be some kind of "no co-showering" policy going on to avoid conflicts.

I come from a country that is generally considered very open-minded about nudity, and having a communal shower with your colleagues after your shift (gender-separated, mind you) is considered absolutely normal in jobs that get you dirty.

And even if you are a prude, I really wonder why no-one has considered sharing a shower or sponge-bath with a colleague or two in swim-shorts. It's more unhygienic than showering naked, yes, but I would still consider this miles better than taking no shower at all for days at a time.

Or maybe the showers described are indeed communal, and they just noticed that squeezing two people below one spout is just not a efficient way to shower and does not actually save that much water...

South Pole station seems to be nudity friendly. They have saunas and 300 degree club: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_Club

How does this work if you're a medical or sanitation worker and require more cleanliness? Are there exceptions for that type of staff?

Yes, it's an honour system. If you really need a shower, for example if you get covered in grease, then you can take one. The rule is there to prevent everyone on station taking long daily showers. Some jobs are unofficially allowed to shower on more days e.g. kitchen/galley, vehicle maintenance, stewards. Medical probably, too, though there isn't usually much work.

Option 6. Shower with your friends.

Americans are so weird. Just get a stool, a wash cloth, and a small bucket of really hot water. Much more enjoyable (because it's hot), you can take your time, uses less water.

Must've been downvoted by Westerners.

it's not what you said, it's how you said it. If you want others to listen to you, I encourage you to find ways to express it in ways that they'll hear.

And upvoted by Indians

This seems preposterous. How hard would it be to put a couple big generators and a winter supply of gas down there?

[edit] no, seriously, why is this so difficult? If you can have one generator and one fuel supply, why not have enough so you're not constantly worried about potable water supply? What's the limiting factor here?

Delivering anything to Antarctica is expensive. Maybe people value having other things more, and showering is not that important?

What other things? Water, food and fuel seem pretty basic. Is suffering some sort of prerequisite goal? Can a person not be comfortable at the South Pole in order to go about their business?

Showering at Antarctica is a luxury. As the humorous article made clear. And we're not even talking about the South Pole station. I do wonder what showering regime applies there.

People who can't shower don't suffer. They sponge bath. If you value showering so much, Antarctica is not for you. That's ok.

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