9 ms·

The McMurdo Webcams

120 points by wankle 4y ago

wankle 4y ago
I wonder if diesel heating will be banned there. Geothermal is banned to avoid harming the environment. But, diesel is OK? Perhaps humans shouldn't be there until fusion is fully developed.
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  > “Temperatures may reach 8°C (46°F) in summer and -50°C (-58°F) in winter.” There’s no way I would trust my life to any fuel but diesel in this environment.
  - hammock 4y ago
    That, and/or seal fur
    - jibe 4y ago
      and whale oil
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        And a radioisotope thermal generator.
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    And yet today seems to be only -4°C
    - messe 4y ago
      So… within the typical range for summer?
      - jszymborski 4y ago
        I'm dumb and forgot for a moment that the southern hemisphere has opposite seasons from the northern hemisphere.
        LAC-Tech 4y ago
        People from the Northern Hemisphere don't occasionally forget this - they very rarely remember.
- briffle 4y ago
  They had a small nuclear reactor in the 60s. But removed it in the early 70s. Could be a perfect place for a new SMR. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
- sp332 4y ago
  Diesel heating for 1,000 people isn't going to make a dent.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    [dead]
  - wankle 4y ago
    I suppose but it's a scientific community. @briffle commented they had a small nuclear reactor in the 1960's. @l- commented geothermal is no longer banned. If a 1000 strong group of hardy scientists surviving at Antarctica need diesel fuel to provide heating and power then is there realistic hope of human exploration of other planets any time in the near future?
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Diesel is a "tragedy of the commons" type damage - your damage blends with everyone elses. Geothermal on the other hand is local damage - it will be blatantly obvious who exactly is responsible for any environmental damage. Top tip for polluters: If possible, give out pollution like CO2, because it's invisible and mixes with everyone else's CO2, and when global warming sea level rise wipes out pacific islands, you can shrug and point to everyone else. Whereas if you damage one specific area, some government might come and fine you or put you in prison.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    CO₂ is not "pollution", without it at at least 150ppm none of us would be alive for a lack of plant life. NOx and SO₂ are pollutants responsible for smog (etc.), better focus on those if you want to give an example of something which can be seen in the light you try to place CO₂.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  They used to have a small scale nuclear reactor run by the army but it was too difficult to maintain without issue so they ended up decomming it. At mcmurdo and scott, wind power, etc are healthily supplementing and slowly substituting diesel but ultimately arctic diesel will stay a staple because it consistently operates at extremely low temps. Especially inland where the temperatures are regularly lower than -70C. As for the geothermal being banned, that's because it takes a lot of digging and "permanent changing of the environment". Doubly so since the low temperature environment means you have to use a ton of additives in your transfer fluid to keep it from freezing up during condition 1. If the circulation loop blows, those additives will stay in the environment effectively indefinitely given the weather. So as much as I prefer geothermal, it makes sense why it's banned. Even if they just accepted the risk, they'd still need diesel infra in case of emergency or else there's a very real risk of people on station dying in the middle of a long, hard condition 1 storm which would prevent fly-ins from bringing emergency supplies. Also it's only mcmurdo(~1k people), scott(~70-80 people), palmer(~40-45 people), rothera(~150 people), and signy(~10-15 people) which have actual ground contact that aren't in a pristine field lab environment (like the dry valley) so there's only a few locations that could even use geothermal. The rest are either in field lab environments where you can't risk contaminating the ground or on ice shelfs where you have to dig down a few hundred meters or even a few kilometer to find anything other than solid ice. Of those few viable locations, only mcmurdo, scott, and rothera actually justify the infrastructure cost (with all but mcmurdo only having enough people to justify it in the summer months). So ultimately instead of choosing between maintaining diesel infra and maintaining both diesel infra and geothermal which both have their own problems you know have to address, they chose to just use diesel unless a project can prove the geothermal infra won't have con 1 failure and deep ground contamination risks.
- l- 4y ago
  The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty does not ban geothermal. Its surprising "scientific" exploratory attempts have not occurred given the proximity to Mt Erebus.
m348e912 4y ago
I was curious what time it was there since there didn't seem to be much activity. Looks like McMurdo is on New Zealand time (GMT+13).
- dchristian 4y ago
  Yes, it's NZ time. Since most of their flights and logistics are through NZ it makes the most sense to use that time zone. The sun just orbits and never sets. So any normal day/night cycles doesn't exist. There are other (smaller) bases on the Antarctic peninsula. I don't know what timezone they use. Their supplies are coming in from Chile or Argentina.
hiidrew 4y ago
recommended: https://brr.fyi/ https://brr.fyi/
guestbest 4y ago
I wonder if any international criminals have sought to evade capture on that continent. It would be the closest thing to going to Mars
- barbecue_sauce 4y ago
  They would have to be extremely well prepared and avoid contact with any research station personnel.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Criminals, no. But Werner Herzog's documentary on people that work at the research station (Encounters at The End of the World) paints a fascinating picture of the people that decide to basically leave modern society for months/years at a time. You definitely have to be a special type of person and even a borderline social outcast to make it a regular job. One of the researchers he interviews about it describes how he lives life with no real home and always has a bag packed with enough essentials to go hike out into the wilderness anywhere in the world--Herzog asks to see the bag and the person happily pulls out an enormous pack and starts pulling out stuff like an inflatable pack raft, stoves, tents, etc. The big point is that you have to be a special kind of person that's not really attached to modern society to go live and work at the end of the world.
  - etrautmann 4y ago
    Yes and no. There’s 1000 people down there and plenty of them have relatively normal lives back home for ~7 months or the year. Some do travel the world and then come back to McMurdo every year.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >You definitely have to be a special type of person and even a borderline social outcast to make it a regular job. Many, many years ago I was in the Army and served with a man, Corporal White, who was the oddest person I had ever met. He was probably the best soldier I have ever seen, but refused to take anything seriously and treated the Army as a game to be played (as one should). Anyway, he put in a DA4187 form, a personnel action request form, with roughly four words on it: "request duty in Antarctica", it worked its way up the chain of command, and after several months a telegram (the army sent telegrams called PERSGRAMS up until the late 90s!) arrived assigning him to duty in Antarctica. He spent about six months down there, in his words "moving around barrels and crates and playing Nintendo", and came back engaged to a scientist. Now he and his wife are itinerant adventurers and I don't think they've lived anywhere for more than six months in the last 25 years.
Nitrolo 4y ago
I always imagined these antarctic stations as a kind of spaceship, with a lot of technology and effort poured into them but maybe a few dozen scientists at most operating everything. Instead this is a whole town! Wikipedia says the population is 1000 people in the summer, which is probably 20 times more than I would have guessed. Fascinating, thanks for the link!
- etrautmann 4y ago
  Yep, it’s more like a petrochemical tank farm in terms of general vibe. I spent a month down there and it’s a weird and fascinating and wonderful place.
- invalidator 4y ago
  McMurdo is on the edge of the continent, at sea level. It's harsh, but not extreme like the things further inland, such as Amundsen-Scott (at the geographic pole), or Concordia (over 10,000 feet elevation in the middle of nowhere). Those look closer to the spaceships you envision.
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    I never would have guessed that it's highest point is 16K ft. That's fairly impressive.
FpUser 4y ago
Place looks busy. Like a town now.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  It's summer. Gotta get things done while the weather cooperates.
gsmo 4y ago
It's buried on the site but they also have a fantastic photogallery: https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#1-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#1-1expanded To add: a while back I discovered who this guy did a slice-of-life video journal of his time in the south pole station. Super interesting! https://www.youtube.com/@GoneVenturing/playlists https://www.youtube.com/@GoneVenturing/playlists
- DontchaKnowit 4y ago
  If anyone can tell me what the hell I am looking at in image 37, I would be forever grateful. I can't even imagine seeing that in person I'd lose my everloving mind.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Click through https://photolibrary.usap.gov/PhotoDetails.aspx?filename=2022June19-crabeater-teeth-Dan-Costa.jpg https://photolibrary.usap.gov/PhotoDetails.aspx?filename=202... Crabeater seal with serrated teeth.
  - SapporoChris 4y ago
    You referred to 37, but I suspect you meant 35. Or we have very mindsets on what is impressive. All of the images have captions describing what they are. https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#37-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#37-1expanded A bird, that's a bird... https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#35-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#35-1expanded two different colored auroras. Today I learned that auroras come in a variety of colors, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora
    - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
      strange, I think it was cause I was on Mobile that the numbers were different. Also why I couldn't see the explanations. I was referring to #49. The explanation says its a "Little earth composite of the sky". Still no idea what that means.
earthscienceman 4y ago
It's so funny to be watching the recent HN obsession with extreme environments. It seems to be more focused on Antarctica, which is kind of the "charismatic megafauna" of polar research. Having lived in Greenland and on icebreakers, I can assure you that the world of polar research is weirder than you might ever imagine. In particular with respect to the size of these communities. McMurdo is effectively a remote city. But life at south pole, summit station, east grip, dye2, svalbard and onresearch ice breakers would be what you should look into if you are curious about these sorts of things. I'll link to a (small) selection of my photos from Russian icebreakers below that I've shared before. Also also. Check out the Russian drifting stations for truly insane stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7
- sebmellen 4y ago
  Amazing photos! I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Parazynski (an incredibly impressive emergency medicine physician, astronaut, and adventurer who was the first person to summit Mt. Everest and go to space), and he said working at the McMurdo base over the winter was perhaps the hardest thing he’d done. He also said alcoholism is incredibly prevalent in polar regions during the winter. Curious if you’ve seen the same thing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_E._Parazynski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_E._Parazynski
- downvotetruth 4y ago
  What's bigger than a house with an indoor pool, burns 70 tons of fuel in a day, puts out a load of noise and smoke for a town and cuts ice in half? A Soviet machine made to cut ice in half in both directions!
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    70 tons a day?!? I can see why they are trying to make these nuclear powered now
  - thedrbrian 4y ago
Jolter 4y ago
Looks like 503 Hugged To Death Error.
- system2 4y ago
  I am getting 503 as well. HN hug wouldn't be 100,000 sessions per minute. Strange.
dchristian 4y ago
It's amazing that they have the bandwidth for this. I assume there is a US or NZ based server that serves the world, but still. I was there in the 92-93 season. We were lucky to have e-mail back then. We did our own special internet link for a project that used spare bandwidth on a non commercial satellite. We had 1.544mbit up and 9600 down. We sent what would eventually be called motion jpeg for "video". There was no audio. The satellite dish was pointed 3deg below the horizon; but we were on a mountain, so that was fine. McMurdo is a fabulously weird place. The US Navy manages all the food/fuel/housing logistics. Then you get the researchers coming through to do projects. They may be working from McMurdo, but most are just be gearing up to go out on the ice. These are often grad students, researchers, and faculty. So the average IQ is much higher than your typical ski town. The staff that works the station is there because they like the environment. You find people with college degrees doing maintenance and safety trainings. Most are just there for the summer season (which is now). Some will winter over. Most of the fuel and cargo comes in once a year. The ice breaker is at the ice dock, so that can happen any time now. Everything else is flown in/out from NZ at considerable expense. Early in the season the ice is thick enough to land jets like the C-5 and C-17. While they are in the ground, they have to move them every few hours to keep the ice from cracking under all that weight. By this time in the season it's probably just C-130s doing everything. Once the sun goes back down, all flights cease and there is nothing can get out for 9 months.
- sbarre 4y ago
  > It's amazing that they have the bandwidth for this. We seem to have broken that bandwidth because I'm getting a 503 now!
  - smcin 4y ago
    Now I'm getting a 504. Must be popular today.
    - stevenjgarner 4y ago
      They must be loving HN right about now.
AviationAtom 4y ago
Y'all killed it...
notfish 4y ago
This is only recently possible! They just got starlink: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-service-antarctica https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-service-antar...
jhoechtl 4y ago
> was there in the 92-93 season. We were lucky to have e-mail back then. Wow, that was an achievement back then. Started university in 95 and having your own email address provided by the university was a big thing back then.

120 points by wankle 4y ago

I wonder if diesel heating will be banned there. Geothermal is banned to avoid harming the environment. But, diesel is OK? Perhaps humans shouldn't be there until fusion is fully developed.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago
> “Temperatures may reach 8°C (46°F) in summer and -50°C (-58°F) in winter.” There’s no way I would trust my life to any fuel but diesel in this environment.
- hammock 4y ago
  That, and/or seal fur
  - jibe 4y ago
    and whale oil
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      And a radioisotope thermal generator.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  And yet today seems to be only -4°C
  - messe 4y ago
    So… within the typical range for summer?
    - jszymborski 4y ago
      I'm dumb and forgot for a moment that the southern hemisphere has opposite seasons from the northern hemisphere.
      - LAC-Tech 4y ago
        People from the Northern Hemisphere don't occasionally forget this - they very rarely remember.
briffle 4y ago
They had a small nuclear reactor in the 60s. But removed it in the early 70s. Could be a perfect place for a new SMR. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
sp332 4y ago
Diesel heating for 1,000 people isn't going to make a dent.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
- wankle 4y ago
  I suppose but it's a scientific community. @briffle commented they had a small nuclear reactor in the 1960's. @l- commented geothermal is no longer banned. If a 1000 strong group of hardy scientists surviving at Antarctica need diesel fuel to provide heating and power then is there realistic hope of human exploration of other planets any time in the near future?
londons_explore 4y ago
Diesel is a "tragedy of the commons" type damage - your damage blends with everyone elses. Geothermal on the other hand is local damage - it will be blatantly obvious who exactly is responsible for any environmental damage. Top tip for polluters: If possible, give out pollution like CO2, because it's invisible and mixes with everyone else's CO2, and when global warming sea level rise wipes out pacific islands, you can shrug and point to everyone else. Whereas if you damage one specific area, some government might come and fine you or put you in prison.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  CO₂ is not "pollution", without it at at least 150ppm none of us would be alive for a lack of plant life. NOx and SO₂ are pollutants responsible for smog (etc.), better focus on those if you want to give an example of something which can be seen in the light you try to place CO₂.
CuriousCosmic 4y ago
They used to have a small scale nuclear reactor run by the army but it was too difficult to maintain without issue so they ended up decomming it. At mcmurdo and scott, wind power, etc are healthily supplementing and slowly substituting diesel but ultimately arctic diesel will stay a staple because it consistently operates at extremely low temps. Especially inland where the temperatures are regularly lower than -70C. As for the geothermal being banned, that's because it takes a lot of digging and "permanent changing of the environment". Doubly so since the low temperature environment means you have to use a ton of additives in your transfer fluid to keep it from freezing up during condition 1. If the circulation loop blows, those additives will stay in the environment effectively indefinitely given the weather. So as much as I prefer geothermal, it makes sense why it's banned. Even if they just accepted the risk, they'd still need diesel infra in case of emergency or else there's a very real risk of people on station dying in the middle of a long, hard condition 1 storm which would prevent fly-ins from bringing emergency supplies. Also it's only mcmurdo(~1k people), scott(~70-80 people), palmer(~40-45 people), rothera(~150 people), and signy(~10-15 people) which have actual ground contact that aren't in a pristine field lab environment (like the dry valley) so there's only a few locations that could even use geothermal. The rest are either in field lab environments where you can't risk contaminating the ground or on ice shelfs where you have to dig down a few hundred meters or even a few kilometer to find anything other than solid ice. Of those few viable locations, only mcmurdo, scott, and rothera actually justify the infrastructure cost (with all but mcmurdo only having enough people to justify it in the summer months). So ultimately instead of choosing between maintaining diesel infra and maintaining both diesel infra and geothermal which both have their own problems you know have to address, they chose to just use diesel unless a project can prove the geothermal infra won't have con 1 failure and deep ground contamination risks.
l- 4y ago
The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty does not ban geothermal. Its surprising "scientific" exploratory attempts have not occurred given the proximity to Mt Erebus.

m348e912 4y ago

I was curious what time it was there since there didn't seem to be much activity. Looks like McMurdo is on New Zealand time (GMT+13).

dchristian 4y ago
Yes, it's NZ time. Since most of their flights and logistics are through NZ it makes the most sense to use that time zone. The sun just orbits and never sets. So any normal day/night cycles doesn't exist. There are other (smaller) bases on the Antarctic peninsula. I don't know what timezone they use. Their supplies are coming in from Chile or Argentina.

hiidrew 4y ago

recommended: https://brr.fyi/ https://brr.fyi/

guestbest 4y ago

I wonder if any international criminals have sought to evade capture on that continent. It would be the closest thing to going to Mars

barbecue_sauce 4y ago
They would have to be extremely well prepared and avoid contact with any research station personnel.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Criminals, no. But Werner Herzog's documentary on people that work at the research station (Encounters at The End of the World) paints a fascinating picture of the people that decide to basically leave modern society for months/years at a time. You definitely have to be a special type of person and even a borderline social outcast to make it a regular job. One of the researchers he interviews about it describes how he lives life with no real home and always has a bag packed with enough essentials to go hike out into the wilderness anywhere in the world--Herzog asks to see the bag and the person happily pulls out an enormous pack and starts pulling out stuff like an inflatable pack raft, stoves, tents, etc. The big point is that you have to be a special kind of person that's not really attached to modern society to go live and work at the end of the world.
- etrautmann 4y ago
  Yes and no. There’s 1000 people down there and plenty of them have relatively normal lives back home for ~7 months or the year. Some do travel the world and then come back to McMurdo every year.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >You definitely have to be a special type of person and even a borderline social outcast to make it a regular job. Many, many years ago I was in the Army and served with a man, Corporal White, who was the oddest person I had ever met. He was probably the best soldier I have ever seen, but refused to take anything seriously and treated the Army as a game to be played (as one should). Anyway, he put in a DA4187 form, a personnel action request form, with roughly four words on it: "request duty in Antarctica", it worked its way up the chain of command, and after several months a telegram (the army sent telegrams called PERSGRAMS up until the late 90s!) arrived assigning him to duty in Antarctica. He spent about six months down there, in his words "moving around barrels and crates and playing Nintendo", and came back engaged to a scientist. Now he and his wife are itinerant adventurers and I don't think they've lived anywhere for more than six months in the last 25 years.

Nitrolo 4y ago

I always imagined these antarctic stations as a kind of spaceship, with a lot of technology and effort poured into them but maybe a few dozen scientists at most operating everything. Instead this is a whole town! Wikipedia says the population is 1000 people in the summer, which is probably 20 times more than I would have guessed. Fascinating, thanks for the link!

etrautmann 4y ago
Yep, it’s more like a petrochemical tank farm in terms of general vibe. I spent a month down there and it’s a weird and fascinating and wonderful place.
invalidator 4y ago
McMurdo is on the edge of the continent, at sea level. It's harsh, but not extreme like the things further inland, such as Amundsen-Scott (at the geographic pole), or Concordia (over 10,000 feet elevation in the middle of nowhere). Those look closer to the spaceships you envision.
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  I never would have guessed that it's highest point is 16K ft. That's fairly impressive.

FpUser 4y ago

Place looks busy. Like a town now.

joezydeco 4y ago
It's summer. Gotta get things done while the weather cooperates.

gsmo 4y ago

It's buried on the site but they also have a fantastic photogallery: https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#1-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#1-1expanded To add: a while back I discovered who this guy did a slice-of-life video journal of his time in the south pole station. Super interesting! https://www.youtube.com/@GoneVenturing/playlists https://www.youtube.com/@GoneVenturing/playlists

DontchaKnowit 4y ago
If anyone can tell me what the hell I am looking at in image 37, I would be forever grateful. I can't even imagine seeing that in person I'd lose my everloving mind.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Click through https://photolibrary.usap.gov/PhotoDetails.aspx?filename=2022June19-crabeater-teeth-Dan-Costa.jpg https://photolibrary.usap.gov/PhotoDetails.aspx?filename=202... Crabeater seal with serrated teeth.
- SapporoChris 4y ago
  You referred to 37, but I suspect you meant 35. Or we have very mindsets on what is impressive. All of the images have captions describing what they are. https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#37-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#37-1expanded A bird, that's a bird... https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#35-1expanded https://photolibrary.usap.gov/#35-1expanded two different colored auroras. Today I learned that auroras come in a variety of colors, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora
  - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    strange, I think it was cause I was on Mobile that the numbers were different. Also why I couldn't see the explanations. I was referring to #49. The explanation says its a "Little earth composite of the sky". Still no idea what that means.

earthscienceman 4y ago

It's so funny to be watching the recent HN obsession with extreme environments. It seems to be more focused on Antarctica, which is kind of the "charismatic megafauna" of polar research. Having lived in Greenland and on icebreakers, I can assure you that the world of polar research is weirder than you might ever imagine. In particular with respect to the size of these communities. McMurdo is effectively a remote city. But life at south pole, summit station, east grip, dye2, svalbard and onresearch ice breakers would be what you should look into if you are curious about these sorts of things. I'll link to a (small) selection of my photos from Russian icebreakers below that I've shared before. Also also. Check out the Russian drifting stations for truly insane stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_ice_station https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7

sebmellen 4y ago
Amazing photos! I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Parazynski (an incredibly impressive emergency medicine physician, astronaut, and adventurer who was the first person to summit Mt. Everest and go to space), and he said working at the McMurdo base over the winter was perhaps the hardest thing he’d done. He also said alcoholism is incredibly prevalent in polar regions during the winter. Curious if you’ve seen the same thing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_E._Parazynski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_E._Parazynski
downvotetruth 4y ago
What's bigger than a house with an indoor pool, burns 70 tons of fuel in a day, puts out a load of noise and smoke for a town and cuts ice in half? A Soviet machine made to cut ice in half in both directions!
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  70 tons a day?!? I can see why they are trying to make these nuclear powered now
- thedrbrian 4y ago

Jolter 4y ago

Looks like 503 Hugged To Death Error.

system2 4y ago
I am getting 503 as well. HN hug wouldn't be 100,000 sessions per minute. Strange.

dchristian 4y ago

It's amazing that they have the bandwidth for this. I assume there is a US or NZ based server that serves the world, but still. I was there in the 92-93 season. We were lucky to have e-mail back then. We did our own special internet link for a project that used spare bandwidth on a non commercial satellite. We had 1.544mbit up and 9600 down. We sent what would eventually be called motion jpeg for "video". There was no audio. The satellite dish was pointed 3deg below the horizon; but we were on a mountain, so that was fine. McMurdo is a fabulously weird place. The US Navy manages all the food/fuel/housing logistics. Then you get the researchers coming through to do projects. They may be working from McMurdo, but most are just be gearing up to go out on the ice. These are often grad students, researchers, and faculty. So the average IQ is much higher than your typical ski town. The staff that works the station is there because they like the environment. You find people with college degrees doing maintenance and safety trainings. Most are just there for the summer season (which is now). Some will winter over. Most of the fuel and cargo comes in once a year. The ice breaker is at the ice dock, so that can happen any time now. Everything else is flown in/out from NZ at considerable expense. Early in the season the ice is thick enough to land jets like the C-5 and C-17. While they are in the ground, they have to move them every few hours to keep the ice from cracking under all that weight. By this time in the season it's probably just C-130s doing everything. Once the sun goes back down, all flights cease and there is nothing can get out for 9 months.

sbarre 4y ago
> It's amazing that they have the bandwidth for this. We seem to have broken that bandwidth because I'm getting a 503 now!
- smcin 4y ago
  Now I'm getting a 504. Must be popular today.
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    They must be loving HN right about now.

AviationAtom 4y ago

Y'all killed it...

notfish 4y ago

This is only recently possible! They just got starlink: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-service-antarctica https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-service-antar...

jhoechtl 4y ago

> was there in the 92-93 season. We were lucky to have e-mail back then. Wow, that was an achievement back then. Started university in 95 and having your own email address provided by the university was a big thing back then.