Coming home from the South Pole
brr.fyi
brr.fyi
Your curiosities and resulting blow posts really appealed to me as they were questions and things I would want to know.
The breath in unconditioned spaces freezing, the fuel storage, planes landing, power generation. Awesome topics! Kudos and respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaectJyCeIU&list=PLFWX3wT095...
(Good book, btw. Recommended.)
But if I were single I would seriously consider applying for a winter-over at the pole based on these blog posts. It just seems so interesting and different.
Sadly I missed that.
Also, on the limited connection they have, mosh and IRC among mail/nntp could be life savers for comms as they can be slow and unrealiable. If they work under mosh against a public Unix server they could discuss nearly anything.
On images, Imagemagick can do dithering magick and save lots of bytes under a JPG/PNG format with 256 colours.
Also, if the goal is to send data even with connection cuts, nncp can resume data packets on the fly until it finishes.
On the "caveats", you need UTF8 support in the client machine, but today that's granted.
Still, mosh curb-stomps ssh on latency, input guesssing, data saving and bandwith usage.
Using that over 2G was a literal black/white difference compared to SSH which was nearly impossible to connect and the latency was unbearable. Under mosh I could chat, email, nntp (they still are some good newsgroups), IM over jabber/telegram, read news over RSS, code in C/TCL (jimsh) and read the docs with links, among reading books (novels and essays) with some CLI epub reading script.
Yes, I also used tmux on the remote machine too, mosh+tmux work great with each other. Albeit mosh resumes a potentially lost/dropped connection just fine (even without a running remote tmux/screen), I think tmux itself would send less data over the wire.
I was thinking about the route those packets were taking - from my computer to the plane router, up to a satellite, down to the DO data center in NY, from there to my home in NJ, then to the K8s cluster in NY, and then all the way back around. When you put it that way, one second per character isn't that bad.
Starlink does have some satellites in polar orbit (initially it seemed like there wouldn't be any, so this is relatively new), and there were some limited Starlink tests last year, but due to the CMB telescopes at Pole, which may be negatively impacted both by the satellites and the ground antennas, any Starlink deployment will be very cautious.
In 2014 we spent a lot of time fiddling with tapes and drives... At that point, all the data was recorded to tape and flown North in the summer. Additionally, software at Pole filtered out the more interesting events to upload over satellite within hours. I assume it's still basically the same.
As far as transport, it's about a km (in winter, typically a walk) from the main station to the "dark sector" where the CMB telescopes and IceCube Lab are. As another comment points out, there are cables between the main station and the dark sector so typically data flows through them. When you do need to move equipment, it's usually not too big of a deal to carry it inside a parka or something if it's smallish, or arrange a vehicle for bigger items.
Things like cables can be a bit of a learning experience; a friend hand carried a PVC-insulated monitor(?) cable outside, coiled up, then promptly tried to uncoil it and found that PVC gets quite brittle at low temperatures...
As an extended traveller myself, I've found mail forwarding services to be indispensable. They scan your postal mail and email you the image. You can forward original documents to your current location, and have them cash your checks (although I do everything electronic now). If you move around a lot, like for work, one benefit is that you get to keep the same mailing address. I have used VirtualPostMail and PostScanMail, but there are many out there.