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Doors of McMurdo
- rexarex 4y agoGlad to see I wasn’t the only icehole on station weirdly obsessed with taking pictures and videos of the fun door latches/handles
- bo0tzz 4y agoI've been thoroughly enjoying this blog and I'm looking forward to read about the heating infrastructure there!
- pkaye 4y agoI know McMurdo station is getting a major overhaul so all these doors will probably be replaced. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/antarcticas-aging-mcmurdo-station-is-getting-a-major-overhaul https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/antarcticas-agi...
- mlindner 4y agoMakes sense. Some of these doors the latches look close to breaking with door jambs that have partially been eaten away by use.
- sgt 4y agoCan they be replaced by Star Trek like doors that go.. TSHHHHHH... ? A friend is asking.
- akiselev 4y agoBe careful what you wish for cause you’ll accidentally get doors with one of those ghastly Genuine People Personalities.
- nottorp 4y ago“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. Philip K Dick, Ubik
- loufe 4y agoI work at a large mining complex in Canada's far north. We have a mix of all types of door handles and mechanisms in outside-facing doors, like McMurdo, it would seem. Even the best of them fails to keep snow out and heat in when you get snow and ice caught in the door creases. Salt, sand, and shovel and pick are the motto. Thankfully, more doors are further off the ground because of permafrost. Having stability and door-jam-avoiding benefits simultaneously.
- loufe 4y agoPermafrost stilts, for reference: https://s3.amazonaws.com/greenbuildingadvisor.s3.tauntoncloud.com/app/uploads/2018/07/24194545/Exterior%20copy-700x373.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/greenbuildingadvisor.s3.tauntonclou...
- dendrite9 4y agoAre the stilts connected to thermosiphons? That is a cool technology and application I learned about when reading about building larger structures in the far north. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072021/thawing-permafrost-trans-alaska-pipeline/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072021/thawing-permafro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosiphon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosiphon https://dot.alaska.gov/stwddes/research/assets/pdf/erdc-crrel-tr-14-1.pdf https://dot.alaska.gov/stwddes/research/assets/pdf/erdc-crre...
- loufe 4y agoGood question, honestly I'm not sure. I will try to remember to ask next time I fly up.
- hprotagonist 4y agoThis is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.
- bombcar 4y agoCertain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.
- CrazyStat 4y ago> where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. I'm not sure even this is true. The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated. Even if it does, it will change over time.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you know where the density is but you have to get the land. In the cases I know of the density followed upon building the line, but that may not be universally true.
- thewataccount 4y agoFrom my experience playing factorio, the best way to approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably" arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road to 3, etc. You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve space past that to accompany further expansion. The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing some sanity to the underlying infrastructure. * This will likely apply to anything that needs both preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases
- russellbeattie 4y agoAntarctica Condition 1 Weather [1]. Her giggle in this video always cracks me up. Waaaaaaaahhhhh!!! https://youtu.be/qz2SeEzxMuE https://youtu.be/qz2SeEzxMuE
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bacon_waffle 4y agoClassic "Condition Fun"! Antz and Christine are great - recommend "A Year On Ice".
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoSites like this are exactly why the internet was invented.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoWhat's really nice is they have an RSS feed, so after one of these posts showed up on HN a month or two ago, I've been following all their posts since.
- 082349872349872 4y agoTherefore I try to stay in the tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
- Magi604 4y agoThese are fantastic, high quality posts. This is the type of stuff that sadly gets drowned out in the ocean of today's clickbait content.
- birdman3131 4y agoI don't tend to count (currently) #2 on the main page to be drowned.
- flobosg 4y agoRelated: I enjoyed Maciej Cegłowski’s articles about Antarctica – https://idlewords.com/antarctica/ https://idlewords.com/antarctica/
- alex_suzuki 4y agoFunny that this should pop up just as I’m reading the illustrated version of “At the Mountains of Madness” (H.P. Lovecraft)…
- anthk 4y agoI tought the same.
- londons_explore 4y agoIt's a very cold place right...? And a place where energy is insanely expensive because all fuel has to be shipped thousands of miles? So energy efficiency is paramount. So why are these doors, even the modern ones, just a few inches thick? I'd expect to see the doors being 6 inch thick foam, and every outdoor door to be a double door (ie. into an entrance room, and another door into the rest of the building, such that only one door is ever open at once, to prevent heat loss). I'd expect all the walls to be 12 inches thick (with 10 inches of foam) too - and again, this doesn't seem to be the case.
- danielvf 4y agoMcMurdo has a deepwater port, and a lot of fuel storage tanks as a part of its facilities. Tankers and can just drive up in summer and offload large quantities of fuel. It's not like the South Pole station where everything must be flown in. And the "waste heat" from the generators making electricity is routed throughout the base and used for heating. Not to mention almost a megawatt of wind turbines in the near constant wind. A study on the feasibility of electric vehicles had the expected cost of electricity per kWh at the base lower than California residential rates.
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoMcMurdo during the summer routinely gets above freezing and isn't all too different from Alaska or northern Canada in the early spring. During the winter of course it gets cold. As for power, McMurdo has a mix of power sources including a number of renewables. For about a decade ('62-'72), McMurdo also had a small nuclear power plant on site as well. This was also only a few years after McMurdo was established ('56). So there was definitely a time where energy was not particularly expensive and the greater issue was the cost per kilo for shipping supplies. Of course now that shipping logistics are mostly ironed out and nuclear was deemed too problematic, various fossil fuels are used for power and heating a good chunk of the site (whatever the scattering of renewables can't handle). Wind Turbines: https://brr.fyi/media/hut-point/town.jpg https://brr.fyi/media/hut-point/town.jpg PM-3A Nuclear Site: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/PM3Anuclearpowerplant.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/PM3Anucl...
- xwdv 4y agoHow can I do a stint in McMurdo?
- TurkTurkleton 4y agoUnless you're a scientist or researcher in a field that would be performing research at McMurdo, your best bet is probably to apply for a support position with one of the organizations or parner institutions listed here: https://www.usap.gov/jobsandopportunities/ https://www.usap.gov/jobsandopportunities/ Though as the blog mentions in an earlier post[0], you may have to re-apply repeatedly over the course of several years. [0]: https://brr.fyi/posts/basics https://brr.fyi/posts/basics
- rootbear 4y agoI kept hoping I could trick NASA into sending me down there for a few weeks. Surely a senior Linux/Unix admin would be useful there? Ah, well, there's always the tourist option.
- dheera 4y agoI'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts. In an environment where you presumably know every single human on the site and there are probably no other humans in any direction for 1000 km, is there a need for locks on anything other than bedrooms and bathrooms?
- _dain_ 4y ago> I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts. to keep the Thing out
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoPenguins. Penguins can't open deadbolts. (/s, obviously...)
- bell-cot 4y agoBut if you merely hide the key under the doormat, a Yeti can.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoMy wife points out that you can't hide it on top of the doorframe either, since the Yeti is taller than you...
- jamincan 4y agoMcMurdo is one of the major logistics hubs for the entire continent, this means that it has a relatively high population (~1000 in summer), but also that a lot of people pass through on their way to other parts of Antarctica. It's definitely not a situation where everyone knows everyone else.
- mastax 4y agoProbably just a more secure way to latch the door when there's lots of wind and snow attempting to push the door in. Also lots of standard doors come with deadbolts pre-installed or at least a deadbolt hole drilled through.
- irrational 4y agoWhen I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.
- milliams 4y agoOSM seems to have it quite well mapped: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-77.846323&mlon=166.668235&zoom=12#map=15/-77.8462/166.6745 https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-77.846323&mlon=166.6682...
- c0nsumer 4y agoOf course, I wanted to know what "FSTP Snow School" was, but garbage blogspam gives first-search-results like this: https://mapcarta.com/N8759058406 https://mapcarta.com/N8759058406 <sigh>
- foobarbecue 4y agoI can help! I went through it 7 times. FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the "field safety training program" and basically it refers to the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in McMurdo. Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year and instructors). I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too, including how to travel on sea ice, and some mountaineering. We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke was "the F stops here." I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so... around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the building fulla chicks...
- rexarex 4y agoI think this is called ‘happy camper’ and there is a light version where you just learn basics so you can go travel off station.
- m463 4y agoI couldn't help continuing with "McMurdo's Automated Teller Machines" https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines This is fun and fascinating. I wonder how much critical minutiae from our daily life goes undocumented. for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/45rpmadapter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/45rpmada...
- rexarex 4y agoI sat beside the mechanic for the ATMs on my flight in. He got to be there for a week and do a little ATM stuff and then go home. He was cool.
- musha68k 4y agoJust the article I come here for, thanks for sharing. Fitting background ambience for reading: https://youtu.be/870PlmjnLHw https://youtu.be/870PlmjnLHw
- hiidrew 4y agoI've been following this blog since someone posted it a few weeks back. Aweosme reads imo, satisfies my childhood curiosity of Antarctica and I appreciate all the photos he includes.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoThe first thing I think about isn't snow or handles, it's the framing. Poor framing results in door sagging which results in sticking, wearing or even broken doors. A handle you can replace pretty easily with basic tools (and a crescent wrench and square tube works as a handle in a pinch). A poorly hung door requires more skill.
- greenhearth 4y agoLove this blog!
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoI find everything about McMurdo fascinating because it's such an extreme place. I looked at every one of these doors and read about them. And a friend of mine from college worked (works?) there after and has cool stories to tell. Like penguin feces smells awful because it's predator feces raised to the fish power. And emperor penguins are huge, and if they whack you with their wings they can break finger bones. And people who newly arrive look "orange". And this wasn't from him, but some other documentary: Chips left out don't go stale because the air is so dry. In fact, they may get crispier.
- JP_Watts 4y agoMan this brings me back. I did a year at McMurdo in 2004. We got hit with such a bad storm that conex boxes were tossed all over the yards. Snow drifts covered up some doors, but... they opened inward ;)
- foobarbecue 4y agoThis made me homesick for Antarctica. Tempted to do a "Doors of Erebus" in this style... They would mostly be tent flaps, but there is a garage door and a really great outhouse door.
- cryptonector 4y agoInteresting link at the bottom: https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines
- nxpnsv 4y agoOne thing I learned from those doors was to dry my hands really well after washing them, I froze to the handle a bunch of times in the beginning...
- ilkkal 4y agoI wonder if proper door operation is part of orientation: https://youtu.be/Wof0xPUmW38 https://youtu.be/Wof0xPUmW38
- chrisbigelow 4y agoSee also: "Power Up: What Keeps McMurdo Going?" https://scienceroadshow.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/power-up-what-keeps-mcmurdo-going/ https://scienceroadshow.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/power-up-wh...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- focusedone 4y agoI dunno who's writing this, but they write very well and about interesting things. Really enjoying keeping up with this blog!
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoI guess there are no nightclubs at McMurdo. Because, fire code@!
- somekyle2 4y agoThere are in fact a few bars which might be called nightclubs.
- rexarex 4y agoThere’s 2/3 bars and a bunch of different parties thrown on different weekends. No wall to wall people though most people need to get up early.
- mjhay 4y agoSadly the bars no longer serve liquor, due to incidents.
- rippercushions 4y agoCitation needed. My counter evidence is from 2022: https://drunkard.com/08-04- https://drunkard.com/08-04- southpole/
- mjhay 4y agoCitation: I have actually drank at the bars in McMurdo. Your link is Pole, not McMurdo. It sounds like that is people bringing their own, or buying from USAP for the field, which is allowed. It may have changed, but when I was there, McMurdo bars only served beer and wine.
- bizzyb 4y agomcm has two bars, they both absolutely serve liquor. source: me, a current bartender here in mcmurdo.
- mjhay 4y ago
- CobaltFire 4y agoThe simple type of handle, if anyone is interested, is extremely similar to a shipboard "dog" for a hatch. Very practical and simple.
- supernova87a 4y agoI'm a bit interested to know whether locks that face the outdoors in this place have special considerations against freezing up?
- macshome 4y agoGreat pictures, but I’ve never seen someone call a doorknob a “rotating handle” before. I guess that is what it is, but there also is a word for it, “doorknob”.
- deepsun 4y agoLooks like they don't really care about heating, as many buildings don't have a vestibule. Where I came from (cold winters) most buildings have a very small room at the entrance, kinda like airlock.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoThis is clearly an homage to one of the best photo essays ever: The Doors of East St. Louis https://doorsofeaststlouis.com/ https://doorsofeaststlouis.com/