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Bars in Antarctica
- standardUser 4y ago> Whichaway Camp, one of only two luxury hotels on continent The fact that there are more than zero is shocking to me! Looks like this one is in the range of $5-$10k per night.
- telesilla 4y agoConflicting - looks like an extraordinary experience but oh boy, the hotel starts with a private jet to Antarctica from Cape Town. Can't we at least agree to keep everyone out except the scientific crews? https://white-desert.com/adventures/south-pole-emperors/ https://white-desert.com/adventures/south-pole-emperors/
- notpushkin 4y agoIf you, like me, have read latest brr.fyi post [1] and were wondering how bars in Antarctica look like. :-) [1]: https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans
- beachy 4y agoTwo people I know met their partners while working at Antarctica. Plenty of social life I guess.
- flycaliguy 4y agoI also know of a couple like that. Apparently cross dressing is a staple of the social culture, I wish I could elaborate.
- usea 4y agoA relative of mine has applied to work there. He told me in all seriousness that he wanted a place where women couldn't get away from him. Thankfully, he was not selected.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI guess the implication scene in Sunny in Philly was not fiction.
- beachy 4y agoYikes! I understand the psych testing is quite thorough before you can work there, so that's a good catch.
- bizzyb 4y agoits been a few years since they did any psych testing for mcmurdo or pole
- notpushkin 4y agoWhy would they end it?
- bizzyb 4y agosorry for the late reply. but basically it simply wasn't helpful. good people got screened out, bad people still got thru.
- moron4hire 4y agoWith the banning of homebrew at the station being rationalized as a safety issue, do they have actual instances where someone got drunk on homebrew and froze to death outside? Because that seems pretty far-fetched. I've never been so drunk that I didn't notice sub-zero temperature.
- chrononaut 4y agoI don't think most individuals (sober or drunk) are typically wearing clothing that keeps them at an appropriate temperature outside for multiple hours while sitting still, since that's not what they usually plan on doing. I suspect if these circumstances occur, as the article describes, people are venturing outside drunk and feeling the cold as they normally would expect but caring less about its consequences and then just passing out.
- Swenrekcah 4y agoOr perhaps you have but didn’t notice it?
- Retric 4y agoAntarctica is still really dangerous when you consider how few people work there on average. This makes people very safety conscious even over seemingly unlikely events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_Antarctica_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_Antarctic...
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI don't think the homebrew itself is the problem, it's the quantity of booze they can create. Plenty of people die to exposure while drunk, here's one of the first examples I could find https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/05/autopsy-college-student-had-been-drinking-died-exposure/vCJoYb0hykFaU6PPMzJrvL/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/05/autopsy-college...
- cromulent 4y agoIt's pretty silly, I think, to claim weather and safety. The Australian stations are only about 67° south, just inside the circle, and about the equivalent of Bodø in Norway.
- samatman 4y agoI know it's a lot to expect from "drinks digest", but the rampant alcoholism in Antarctic research communities is notorious. I'm not wagging a finger here, not really, I won't blame people for responding to inhuman conditions with (copious amounts of) antifreeze, but it's jarring to see a puff piece about the fun cocktail bars which doesn't mention the accidents, assaults, and rapes, which trace directly back to drunkenness.
- cromka 4y agoThis was published barely two months ago on that subject: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/01/1120518369/antarctica-sexual-harassment-assault-nsf-report https://www.npr.org/2022/09/01/1120518369/antarctica-sexual-...
- dav_Oz 4y agoDon’t know why you got downvoted but here are some relevant links about legal complications [0][1], sexual assaults [2] and alcoholism [3] on Antarctica (data mainly from US-based stations). [0]https://archive.ph/dgKwt https://archive.ph/dgKwt [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica [2]https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=305782&org=OPP https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=305782&org=OPP [3]https://www.wired.com/2015/10/scientists-antarctica-drink-lot-maybe-much/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/scientists-antarctica-drink-lo...
- speakfreely 4y agoSome of these read exactly as you would expect: > He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest multiple times. According to some sources, the attack occurred because Beloguzov was giving away the endings of books that Savitsky checked out at the station's library.
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoWas that the one where the victim testified afterwards that he had it coming?
- jl6 4y agoI always imagined working in Antarctica to be like working on an oil rig. Alcohol is generally completely banned on such facilities.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThere's a lot of safety concerns, but not exactly the same level of danger. I suspect the biggest danger, is passing out, and dying of exposure. That also happens here, in New York. Every winter sees a few corpseicles.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoDrunk people freezing to death on the street is common everywhere, even in Europe. One of my friends last winter, walked back home super drunk and passed out on the street. Instead of being happy he didn't freeze to death, he was angry some people called the ambulance for him that took him to the hospital, and got a €600 bill for it.
- Reason077 4y ago> "Drunk people freezing to death on the street is common everywhere, even in Europe." Probably not so much in Southern Europe.
- InCityDreams 4y agoIt can get very cold down here, too.
- dmd 4y agoI thought health care was free in most of europe.
- autotune 4y agoLess than the $3500 bill I received for taking an ambulance in SF several years back. And that was with health insurance.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluedays 4y agoWouldn’t all the bars in Antarctica be cool?
- 11235813213455 4y agoI feel like the CO2 footprint for living there must be super high
- aflag 4y agoWhich just makes Antarctica a more hospitable place in the long term.
- 11235813213455 4y agosure but not with 10 billion people, same for Siberia, easy to forget it's not as large as it looks in flattened maps
- madaxe_again 4y agoYup. Most stations are diesel powered - McMurdo is no exception, and their brief experiment with nuclear power there was a total disaster.
- etrautmann 4y agoYes - though since much of the science that's performed there is focused on climate, it may be a worthwhile tradeoff. Much like the carbon invested to fly world leaders around - small relative to its global importance.
- userforcomment 4y agoThats how environmental scientists spend funding, huh?
- photochemsyn 4y agoIndividuals using drugs in a remote facility where screwups can lead to fatal results is a terrible idea. Yes, alcohol is entirely comparable to opiates, it has a similar endorphin-like effect. Beer is like opium, wine is like morphine, liquor is like heroin. As I see it, you might as well have photos of an opium den with some heroin needles lined up for the customer's use.
- extrememacaroni 4y agoWell here's one guy I wouldn't want to have a beer with, in Antarctica or elsewhere.
- photochemsyn 4y agoMore reasons to not normalize alcohol consumption: > "People with alcohol dependence often experience "brain shrinkage," which is reduced volume of both gray matter (cell bodies) and white matter (cell pathways) over time." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33424857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33424857
- extrememacaroni 4y agoMakes sense to want to ban alcohol if no one wants to have a beer with you, it's okay.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI don't think any drugs (including alcohol) should be banned at all, except in places where the consequences of being drunk/stoned/doped/disoriented could be very serious - operating ships (Exxon Valdez's drunk captain), for example. I can imagine people holed up in a insulated box for months during the Antarctic winter would want some relief, but maybe playing video games is a better option than booze or other drugs.
- beachy 4y ago> As I see it, you might as well have photos of an opium den with some heroin needles lined up for the customer's use Clearly you have never been in an opium den (nor have I, but I know people who have). The patrons smoke the opium (not heroin) from pipes.
- jordemort 4y agoWell, I wouldn't expect there to be hot bars.
- JasonFruit 4y agoHi, dad.
- elif 4y agoThis is a surprising characterization of alcohol use at mcmurdo, and seems PR-focused. I hiked with a guy after he finished up a season working on the base, and here is what I recall of how he described it: Everyone is so bored that alcohol is the default entertainment, crown royal is virtually the only choice for daily drinking, and drinking is rationed to keep the problem down.
- Reason077 4y ago> "Everyone is so bored that alcohol is the default entertainment" Sounds just like winter in the UK to me.
- notpushkin 4y agoSounds just like winter in Russia to me. :^) (Pretty much everywhere else I've been, too. Perhaps something's wrong with my lifestyle.)
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoFunny, alcohol seemed like the year-round UK entertainment to may limited experience there.
- etrautmann 4y agoI spent five weeks doing robotics research at McMurdo in 2010. At least then, there were there separate bars, no limits to alcohol consumption, and regular parties. I didn't get the sense that it was a big problem - seemed like a medium-heavy drinking culture that was quite a few notches less problematic than most college campuses.
- etrautmann 4y agoReading the rest of the replies here, I may have missed some of the more problematic sides of the drinking culture there - though it wasn't apparent to me. Side note - for much of the summer it feels like day-drinking since it never gets dark over the summer.
- madaxe_again 4y agoI’ve been to the bars in McMurdo (coffee house has the best vibe by far of the official bars), and Vernadsky. Vernadsky is a characterful place - the bar was built by the Brits in the 80’s out of a shipment of lumber that was intended for a new pier, and the Ukrainians turn a significant portion of their potato rations into rather stonking zamagonka - the kind that has you deciding to go frolic with the penguins and then jump in the banya - and at the time, speaking crappy Russian and having a shared interest in gravity waves with a couple of the guys there was enough to make fast friends and the moonshine flow freely. I only spent a few days at/around Vernadsky, but the guys there were ridiculously hospitable - it probably helped that we were the first new faces they’d seen in a month. Vernadsky is much easier to get to than McMurdo, there are some vessels which go there from Ushuaia on 3 or 4 day trips to the peninsula - McM, you’ve either gotta go with NSF or a contractor, or find a tourist boat that goes there - although the latter is a “once every five years” type affair, and I’m not sure anyone is going there at the moment. Or of course you can take your own boat/charter, but most of the year you’ll also need a helicopter to get to shore at McM - the sound is iced over most of the time.
- MrJagil 4y agoHere's one of my favorite HN submissions, written by a bartender in Antarctica https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951227
- ck2 4y agoThere are somehow 73 cases of covid there too https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/one-earths-remote-research-stations-covid-still-problem-rcna55338 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/one-earths-remo...
- thomasfl 4y agoNorway has an airport and a tax free shop in Antartica. The commercial airliners from Boeing and Airbus lands on the ice. Many nations has stopped using the Russian airport in Antarctica. This has increased the traffic in Norway’s Troll airport lately.
- vocatus_gate 4y agoI wintered over at Palmer Station. Drinking increased heavily during the dark months.
- Nifty3929 4y ago"For years, Australian Antarctic expeditioners have been making home-brewed beer in Antarctica, but the tradition was recently banned." Is there literally nowhere on planet Earth people can go to be let alone to do as they please?
- cathdrlbizzare 4y agoIs it still the case an appendectomy is required before spending time there? https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4965 https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4965
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoIIRC, it's only required for surgical doctors overwintering but wouldn't be very surprised if the policy varies by base.