from Hacker News

South Pole Water Infrastructure

by loeber on 6/8/24, 5:41 AM with 63 comments

  • by theideaofcoffee on 6/8/24, 1:57 PM

    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.

  • by namanyayg on 6/8/24, 11:11 AM

    Always great to see a brr.fyi post on HN.

    Living in the south pole is basically like living on an alien planet.

  • by langsoul-com on 6/8/24, 1:51 PM

    To think that beneath the south pole lies a metric shit ton of shit.

    I think some things are better left unknown.

  • by perihelions on 6/8/24, 11:26 AM

    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.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Nuclear_power_...

  • by davidw on 6/8/24, 3:36 PM

    These are the sorts of deep dives into something interesting that I've always enjoyed on HN.

    I was also a bit surprised by everything being in Fahrenheit, even in the pictures.

    The ice tunnels are really cool. Having grown up with Star Wars, who wouldn't love those?

  • by anself on 6/8/24, 10:50 AM

    Where did the wastewater go before the first rodwell was finished?

  • by Metacelsus on 6/8/24, 1:34 PM

    >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.

  • by ta1243 on 6/8/24, 1:35 PM

    I was shocked that such a scientific station is using Fahrenheit to measure the temperature of the water

  • by robocat on 6/8/24, 9:45 PM

    A friend working up North said they collected the meteorites after melting the snow they used for water.

    I wonder if there is a little pile of meteorite dust at the bottom of the rodwells.

  • by photochemsyn on 6/8/24, 3:39 PM

    Fascinating!

    >"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.

  • by jsjohnst on 6/8/24, 1:29 PM

    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.

  • by immibis on 6/8/24, 1:59 PM

    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!