It's always fun seeing these posts, it's a look into such a strange way of living and supporting life. And there's something subtly terrifying about the whole operation too, seemingly teetering on a knife's edge between the ever-forward marching of entropy and all of the energy they need to put in to keep that in check, even more so with it being so cold. How fast it could collapse if, say, there was a generator problem and how diesel fuel is the only thing that's keeping it afloat.
I'd love to see a post, maybe there is, about maintenance of all of this, perhaps a story or two about an issue that maybe had some existential threat to the station and how it was overcome. I look at the majority of the infrastructure there and just keep in the back of my mind how fragile it all seems. And yes, obviously there are redundancies, but even with redundancy, things can still fail, they exist in the physical world after all.
Nit: McMurdo uses diesel since its climate is more forgiving but the South Pole station the author was at uses kerosene-based JP8 jet fuel since it comes with additives for subzero temperatures. They even have their own arctic recipe called AN8.
Tomorrow, a nuclear war happens. Next, nuclear winter and the slow death of the human race. Antarctica? Sits untouched for millions of years, then aliens land, and find a mysterious additional lake filled with all sorts of microbes.
Not so sure about that. My implied scenario had an implied ice age, and the last one scoured the land clean to bedrock.
Sure, I suppose there'd be some evidence, but in millions of years everything would be fallen, dozens of ice ages would have happened, plants and animals would have grown over everything, and so on.
We've found structures thousands of years old, but not millions. We've found fossils that are quite old, but that doesn't tell use anything about the intellect, or true capabilities of the species.
Millions of years is a really, really long time.
It's hard for me to imagine a single bit of data about humans existing, still.
Maybe some datasets on the moon, wasn't someone going to send something there?
You forget the artificial intelligence agents that escaped into the outer rim of the galaxy, where they since proliferated. They will always carry detailed records of the biological beings that once birthed them.
One thing not mentioned: McMurdo desalination (the first one in OP) historically used to be nuclear-powered, but they abandoned that and currently use diesel.
> “Nukey Poo” began producing power for the McMurdo station in 1962, and was refuelled for the first time in 1964. A decade later, the optimism around the plant had faded. The 25-man team required to run the plant was expensive, while concerns over possible chloride stress corrosion emerged after the discovery of wet insulation during a routine inspection. Both costs and environmental impacts conspired to close the plant in September 1972.
> This precipitated a major clean up that saw 12,000 tonnes of contaminated rock removed and shipped back to the USA through nuclear-free New Zealand. The clean up pre-dated Antarctica’s modern environmental protection regime by two decades, and required the development of new standards for soil contamination levels.
Maybe nuclear, material, and other engineering just wasn’t as advanced in the 50s?
They had a 2MW reactor designed to run 20 years that cracked and failed after 10 and went through three cores in that time.
Meanwhile, these days the US hasn’t built a non-nuclear submarine or large aircraft carrier in almost 50 years, and globally we have all sorts of nuclear ships including all sorts of combat ships as well as things like ice breakers. And they’re not all running around irradiating everything wherever they go.
The current French reactor produces 50MW and only needs refueling every 30 years.
Seems like it might be worth another go at this point.
I guess something fairly simple - a hole in the ground. Or it gets bagged and put into waste drums (or deposited directly) - this is still what we do at outbuildings where there's no sewage or water infra.
The answer is probably on Bill Spindler's website somewhere (southpolestation.com).
At Summit Station in Greenland (much smaller than Pole, Pole feels like a luxury resort comparitively), an outfall hole + usually we use the outhouses (which are just made using hot air).
Fresh water comes from the snow cave, and shoveled into the water melter.
>Heating the equivalent of 1 gallon of water from -60°F to a reasonable liquid distribution temperature (50°F) means heating it up by a whopping 110°F. That’s 268 watt-hours of raw energy required just to bring a single gallon of water up to distribution temperature!
It's actually more than this, because the phase change from solid to liquid takes a lot of energy too.
Yes, this bothered me too. It's impressive how much energy is required to just melt water much less bring it to temperature. It's 330 kJ/kg, which is 1250 kJ/gallon: 350 Wh. So it costs more energy to defrost one gallon of water than it does to do the rest of the 110F temperature change.
The physics term for this is the "latent heat of fusion," or the energy required to change states from liquid to solid, or vice versa.
A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy. Not practical!
> A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy.
It's an American station built by American contractors for Americans. I say this with great fondness as a non-American working there. I spent a week trying to find a specific size of metric screw, the pain is real.
Let's first be clear that most of the station is not "scientific" - it's infrastructure that people live in. The people that maintain the building are familiar with the Imperial system and so it makes sense that those units are used. The materials and parts that are used to repair the station are sourced from US companies (by law in a lot of cases).
For example if you do daily rounds at the power plant, all the temp measurements from the engines are in F. Basically all the inline fluid thermometers read F. All the interior thermostats are in F. I'm pretty sure all the dimensions for the building are specified in feet.
So the units for water temperature don't matter. We don't do water research here (beyond what our tech does to calculate treatment quantities), we just need a reliable and potable supply.
Meteorology does report in metric - METARs are a standard format. Though then you get into aviation where feet are also universally used for altitude...
But the telescopes? Oh man. Imperial hardware all over the place, but at least we use Kelvin for cryogenics.
It's a blog for general US public reading, I'm inclined to think the seriousstuff is all Celsius and SI units and Fahrenheit is used in the social write ups so than regular folk in the US know what the tempretures are.
> I'm inclined to think the serious stuff is all Celsius and SI units and Fahrenheit is used in the social write ups [...]
There are two photos in this article which show thermometers (search for "Temperature of the "), which clearly are in Fahrenheit (the scale goes from 20 to over 140, which would be from "comfortable room temperature" to "beyond boiling at normal pressure" if it were in Celsius), and both having a printed label "EACH LINE: 2°f" (with lowercase F for some reason) glued below them. So, at least for this water treatment plant, it seems to be using Fahrenheit for the instrumentation.
Fair point, but as SoftTalker observed in a peer comment there are two types of equipment, industrial grade HVAC heating cooling gear sourced from the US for living | working environmental control ( F ) and actual scientific equipment ( not shown in the photos I saw which were all of HVAC type gear and marked in F ).
This never made sense to me. What "feels" special about 32, or 98, or 212? If anything this argument is way more applicable to Celsius (0 noteworthy, 100 noteworthy).
I once read that it had to do with making a calibrated scale (divisions of 2) - and that felt like it held water - to me.
I don't defend any other imperial units. Bring on the kilograms, meters, and liters. But when I saw that thermostats in Europe change by increments of 0.5 my gut reaction was "this is silly".
The sauna I was in last night was over 90C so I'm not sure "dead" would apply. I've seen thermostats set to F move by 2F each increment which felt "a bit silly" to me
Allegedly (and probably) yes, but it's really hard to tell. In the past, people have dropped magnets down there to pick up things that were dropped - occasionally tools, for example. The magnets come back with filings of metal stuck to them. But it's hard to argue against it just being particles that have worn off piping or other machinery since the water gets recirculated continuously (assuming there are ferrous things in the loop).
>"Heating the equivalent of 1 gallon of water from -60°F to a reasonable liquid distribution temperature (50°F) means heating it up by a whopping 110°F. That’s 268 watt-hours of raw energy required just to bring a single gallon of water up to distribution temperature!
This is one of the reasons we’re restricted to two-minute showers."
Everyone reading this should try to get by on a two-minute shower once a day for one week, to see if we could be candidates for this job.
This is pretty typical aboard ship for smaller vessels on long voyages. Not so hard as it sounds: get wet, turn off; lather up, rinse off, turn off. You can do with 20-30 seconds of water and be quite clean, with some practice.
It's not satisfying though. And I can't imagine how those numbers scale if you have long hair, or use conditioner.
I lived for 3 years in a motorhome roaming around the US, taking a navy shower about every other day -- usually after an exhausting hike, run or maintenance work. It was a delight, every single time.
I like what a cold shower does to my brain. It's uncomfortable in the moment but it sort of stays with you all day in a nice way. I used to time them at 5m when I was building the habit but now I gravitate to around 2m.
Admittedly, Colorado "cold" is not Antarctica "cold". Just saying that 2m is plenty of time for a shower if you're not luxuriating in world of steam and shower thoughts.
Little surprised that there aren’t contamination concerns with pumping waste water back into the snow pack. I guess at -60° it doesn’t travel far, but still.
TL;DR: They mine the Antarctic for ice, creating huge sinkholes, then fill the holes in with raw sewage, a gift for future generations. Environmentally friendly, right!
The alternative would be to collect and ship it back which would require tons of energy that will have to be in the form of fossil fuels given current technology. Said fossil fuels have a huge environmental footprint (greenhouse gas emissions and depletion of fossil fuel reserves) that is affecting us now.
In contrast, the ice shelf is huge and still has a lot of capacity to contain sewage. It should remain frozen for the foreseeable future - if it melts (to the level where this sewage will become liquid) it means the global warming situation is so bad that there's likely no longer any humans around to actually witness this sudden deluge of sewage.
As long as we manage to keep that ice shelf frozen, we're fine. If we somehow fail at it it's likely there wouldn't be anyone around to complain about the sewage anyway.
Aside from that what do you think our ancestors did with their waste?
People overestimate the impact of individuals on the planet. Which is a game corporations play so you underestimate the impact of their profits on the planet.
This would be valid if it was a small natural amount of sewage from a few humans, not tens of millions of gallons. Penguins shit somewhere, so the ecosystem probably won't mind if a few humans shit where a few penguins shit. But this is like noticing a few burger wrappers on the side of the road so you dump your commercial trash bin there every week.
Humans have been living in cities for thousands of years yet we've only very recently began treating our waste. Humans outside of cities have been using septic systems for centuries.
"Tens of millions of gallons" of human waste sounds significant, but, it likely isn't. I also feel that equating the unavoidable byproduct of human scientific research in remote locations with road side burger wrappers is bordering on luddite hyperbole.
Landfills aren't usually in Antarctica. I thought we were supposed to be trying to keep Antarctica relatively pristine because it's Antarctica. Also, the sewage doesn't decompose in those temperatures, like it would in a normal landfill.
There are some smart folks making the decisions for the procedures down there. I wonder how that decision process went, to end up with burial. I would love to know the details.
I'd love to see a post, maybe there is, about maintenance of all of this, perhaps a story or two about an issue that maybe had some existential threat to the station and how it was overcome. I look at the majority of the infrastructure there and just keep in the back of my mind how fragile it all seems. And yes, obviously there are redundancies, but even with redundancy, things can still fail, they exist in the physical world after all.