South Pole Topography | Hacker News Reader

South Pole Topography

brr.fyi

193 pointsafrcnc24 comments

The drifting at south pole is rather benign compared to places like Summit Station Greenland. My experiments in Greenland get buried twice as fast as the ones at Pole :)

Can you briefly outline what experiments you setup on both sides of the earth? Thank you!

Looks like they are related to being an Experimental Particle Astrophysicist. But, Yes! I'd like to hear more. Once I looked at applying to work in Antarctica but life hasn't taken me in that direction. It is still a weird backup type idea I keep in the back of my mind.

The two experiments I'm talking about are are named the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) and the Radio Neutrino Observatory - Greenland (RNO-G).

Basically we're looking for really energetic neutrinos by burying radio antennas (and readout electronics) in the ice. If a really energetic neutrino interacts in the ice, it will produce a particle shower, which, at really high energies (like > 10-100 PeV) will produce detectable radio emission. Since there is lots of ice both in Antarctica and in Greenland, we have detectors in both places.

How about a building which rests on screw-like pillars which sit in a motorized shaft, with the pillar extending from the structure down into the ground.

The tops of the pillars would be accessible from inside the building.

When you want the building "height" to increase, you install another notch to each pillar and set the system to climb it's way up (or even down) a notch.

Such a structure would be "drift" proof.

    .______________________.
    |                      |
    |                      |
    |                      |
    |_.____._.____._.____._|
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |
    | |    | |    | |    | |

Is this the concept alluded to but not addressed directly in TFA? A quick web search didn't turn up any information for me.

The 3rd south pole station is designed for hydraulically jacking up those pillars and installing height:

https://www.southpolestation.com/foundationdesign.html

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/livingsouthpole/new...

It’s the current trend for antarctic architecture, also seen in the German Von Neumayer III and the British Halley VI stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumayer-Station_III

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

I misinterpreted your idea at first: Could the building rest on a set of screw piles? [1] Presumably they would get stuck, but perhaps you could heat them when you wish to move. The building could then be a self-jacking snow anchor.

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

I've been enjoying this blog. I just ran across a link to the McMurdo webcams. It looks lovely today.

https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmwebcam.cfm

What I wonder, after reading this, is what happens with all that snow that is accumulating and causing all the buildings to be burried? Is the South Pole slowly rising? Or is snow at the bottom somehow dissipating?

It slowly turns to ice, compressed by its own weight.

Thereby enabling us to get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core and analyse the layers like tree rings, err... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

It accumulates on top, turns into ice, but the bottom layers of the ice very gradually flow (tenth of thousandth of years) toward the see. Modeling that precisely is hard and we do not know if Antarctic as the whole gains ice or looses it.

My current understanding of the numbers is that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (which includes the South Pole) is in positive ice mass balance, while the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing ice mass and is in or near a complete collapse scenario. It seems that the eastern sheet isn't gaining enough mass to offset the loss of the western sheet, but every study seems to contradict the previous study so... :shrug:

That depends who you mean by "we", but for people who follow this stuff the GRACE measurements are pretty clear.

In short: they become glaciers. The snow gets compacted into ice, which then slowly moves as a glacier (motion is highest at the base, I think) until it eventually reaches the glacial margin.

There is also an interesting article about taking showers at the South Pole Station written by the same guy: https://brr.fyi/posts/showering-at-the-south-pole

Is that why there is the walking station (Halley VI)? So they can just step up the snow from time to time?

I read the entire article and was waiting for them to talk about fonts before I realised it’s about Topography, and not Typography

Discussion from last week, four comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34549893

Thanks! I've merged those comments hither (and relativized their timestamps to the current submission).

As the poster of one of those comments I was rather irritated by the adjusted datestamp and doubted my own memory. Has there ever been discussion for the HN software to enable more metadata for moved comments, like "10 days (older thread)" or such?

I don't mean to take away from your entirely-valid response, but I was pleasantly surprised that something like that had been thought of, to ease the awkwardness in such situations. I imagine there's a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

I'd also be interested in further discussion into something like that. Talk about deja vu.

It weirds me out too, I always have the same reaction. Have been so confused that I emailed staff about it, but turns out there's no perfect solution. If someone hadn't replied to my comment today I'd never have seen this again.

I wish my comment history ("threads" link at top of every page) would adjust to push the comment up so I'd be more likely to see the thread again or notice any replies without counting on email alerts.

It's true, it's annoying—but the alternative is even more annoying: every related thread would fill up with "how can X be Y when the timestamp is Z and the other timestamp is W". I know that because it's what prompted us to relativize the timestamps in the first place.

I'm not averse to encoding more metadata in the HTML if people would actually use it, but I'm averse to displaying that sort of thing in the UI because I fear the downside would outweigh the upside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com