Sunset at the South Pole
brr.fyi
brr.fyi
Given the excruciatingly harsh conditions of the environment, I cannot imagine what the construction process must have been like. Looking at a lot of the pictures conjures a feeling for me like it all must have been built by some advanced alien civilization and left behind for us to occupy. The construction crews who created all that stuff should be celebrated as heroes as far as I’m concerned. Very impressive.
Part of that may be a complex construction may work better, but a simple one can be repaired on site by those who are there.
Apparently they also have advances against pay as cash, or did in the past.
There is a lot of wood construction, because it insulates well, it's light (extremely important for cheap construction), there's no moisture to speak of, and it's easily repaired. A lot of the walls are wood with a ton of insulation and metal cladding [0]. The windows are beefy, though weirdly they were designed in with metal frames which I imagine leak a lot of heat. Most of the interior construction feels somewhere between a corporate and a university space. It was built by government and defense contractors, so there is also a bit of a barracks feeling about it too.
And "A walk at the South Pole" in -63C: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiHpQ2q9ZcI
Bonus Sunday thought: It's always said that ants are found on all continents except Antarctica, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant (surely there must be some ants in the buildings). I've always thought it would be interesting to try to introduce them there, sort of like a modern-day Herostratos.
This also explains why across 24 hours on the video in the blog the sun just "revolves" at the same height across the sky. In reality it's setting but it's imperceptible.
At less than 90 degrees (anyone know the longitude?), the earth's rotation comes back into effect and the sun does go "behind the earth", i.e. it sets, daily, for a few months.
I was wondering too. It looks like it's at about 84 degrees that there is a normal day night cycle (for some definition of normal, there is only a few minutes of daylight at the winter solstice).
As for the ants idea, introducing a species where it doesn't exist is usually a Bad Thing (TM).
However, by the time Amundsen Scott was built in 1956 we'd got much more conscious of why this is a bad idea and of how to prevent it. So the only reason there would be ants at Amundsen Scott would be if we intentionally wanted ants there, and I can't think of any reason why we would. If they "escaped" they can't live on Antarctica, the penguins make it look easy but it's really hard to live there, an ant colony would need human intervention to basically feed and protect the ants.
I imagined the sun “flying across the sky” quickly to make it a short day.
In fact, the sun barely peeks up over the horizon, glimmers with some disorienting side-light for a few hours before settling back below the horizon. This created an effect which was like a literal twilight zone and was totally surreal.
It would be very cool to have an extremely long exposure/solargraph of this!
They made it about five years (they were there on a med school debt reduction program to work in smaller communities) and then noped the hell out as fast as they could. They are both pretty resilient people but really struggled with the months of these daylight patterns. Even after “getting used to it” they felt the oppression of the dark seasons particularity hard.
I’d be curious to know what the science is around making this more bearable for long term stays in that type of condition. I’m laughing at the photos of tropical beaches in the cafeteria photos from the article but I’m guessing those honestly probably do offer a slight marginal boost!
If you weren't careful, though, suddenly you'd notice that the pesky sun was higher in the sky than it had been a couple of hours ago, and you knew you were in for a hard day.
The freezing point of Carbon Dioxide at atmospheric pressures is -78.5C, which it reaches sometimes at the south pole.
So apparently carbon dixodie can freeze out of the atmosphere (deposition) and turn to solid carbon dioxide ice in mid-winter. Though I believe because the partial pressure will be too low, you'd need to concentrate the CO2 first.
The station is at 10,657 feet (it's on top of a mountain) and the air pressure is 679.1 mb. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice#/media/File:Comparison... is a log chart for y and doesn't have many minor ticks for X ... I want to say it's closer to -83 °C. It's significant enough that you'd notice (if you were to go outside).
Nitpick: it's not on top of a mountain, it's on top of a 2-mile-thick ice sheet (glacier).
https://earthtechling.com/2015/11/could-we-sequester-co2-in-...
imagine how livable (or not) a planet would be if the planet's axis were even more extreme
For a SF take on the effects of living on a planet with very extreme days (and years) take a look at the Helliconia series by Brian Aldiss [0]. Helliconia is a planet in a double-star system whose 'year' lasts for about 2500 Earth-years, and the seasons last for centuries. When the primary star dips below a mountain range, you might not see it again for 100s of years. Civilisation rises and falls over these timescales, with winter inevitably causing a reset as farming and other activities crash.
Byrd claimed it lasted over 35 minutes during his expedition in 1929.
A good puffy and head coverings can make even the coldest temps totally bearable.
A human breathes at about 6 liter/minute. In terms of mass and converting to seconds, that's 0.1293 gram/second.
Heat capacity of air is 0.7 Joules per gram per kelvin. So the power needed to heat up incoming air 1 degree kelvin is 0.1293*0.7=0.09051 Watt.
Times a hundred (-60C to body temperature), that's 9 watt. Since the human body produces about 100 watt of heat in total, that's maybe still feasible. But having that percentage of your body heat being drawn out through your airways and lungs is getting dangerous.
And it gets colder on Antarctica. And exertion will speed up breathing.
Researchers on Antarctica apparently deal with by breathing through snorkels that pass through their jacket, so that the rest of the body can help to heat up the air:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24731-coldest-place-o...
Perhaps it would also be possible to recover some of the heat in exhaled air, by passing it through a heat exchanger for the incoming air.
Temperature bottoms out around -100 F/-72 C and if you're outside, you're breathing through a gaiter/balaclava). That's sufficient to warm it up. I don't recall there ever being a situation (even that cold) when breathing was challenging due to the temperature alone.
Weird fact: you can't whistle when it gets that cold. I don't know if it's something to do with the immediate dense condensation or the temperature. It's not the pressure or the humidity, because indoors is OK.
Humans can live comfortably on the vast majority of the land on earth. (Unless you were including the oceans in your sentence?)
And fire is the oldest technology of human kind and has been in use since the dawn of human history.
So you can see why I'm not going.
The first problem is power. I have no idea where he got a hookup from that spot - I'd guess running a cable from BICEP (the closest dish with the mast on the roof). Then there's heating for the camera, which you can solve easily enough if you have power, but the real challenge is keeping the tracker moving. I guess if you somehow insulated the entire gear assembly you could do it.
Just like how most country does it and that’s why the Antarctic Treaty System exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic...