October 2018 – On 9 October 2018, a stabbing occurred at the Bellingshausen Station (станция Беллинсгаузен), a Russian research station on King George Island.[18] The perpetrator was Sergey Savitsky (Сергей Савицкий), a 54-year-old electrical engineer.[19] He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest[19] multiple times.[20] 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.[21]
Interesting the guy survived. I wonder if the cold actually helps survival from wounds.
In any case, the long list of professionals going crazy suggests the conditions at the stations cause emotional instability - I assume being stuck with a stranger in a confined space for long periods of time. They should build bigger stations, and under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave (and feels they need to commit arson to do so).
Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them.
Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.
Just getting to this, I didn't downvote, but I still disagree with these points.
> Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naïve
I didn't mean literally cannot leave, I mean choose to leave, i.e when safe to do so, rather than being forced to stay by naval order or contract. Though admittedly it's hard to find if that is the case in some of the historical examples.
> shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet
Why? If you commit human beings to an environment you either allow the conditions that will keep them sane, or you call the whole thing off. As soon as you decide the difficulty is surmountable, you lose this excuse, because not doing it is also an option.
Would you build a station without a toilet or food? Then why not extra space? Skipping both will save money/effort, yet "there's more to living than just surviving" - both are requirements. If providing extra space is too hard, then the whole thing is too hard.
The previous point only compounds this: "you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely" - If you can't control how long they'll be there, ensure the environment is one they can remain emotionally stable in, or don't send them there at all.
I wonder why no one tries to colonize Antarctica as a stepping stone for future space colonization. We can test and develop our greenhouse and energy tech there. E.g. create a colony that gets all its energy from solar and uses it to grow greenhouse plants supplying most if not all of its food.
There’s no sun in the winter for solar, and the winds are often too high for wind power - they’ve got I think three turbines over at Scott, just around the corner from McMurdo, but they only cover a small percentage of their power - the rest is diesel.
They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill.
In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything.
Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel!
As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.
And it is likely still orders of magnitudes easier than actually living on Mars. So you'd expect that long before a Mars mission is feasible/desirable Antarctica would be colonized.
Probably, but those optics are almost as bad as mildly irradiating the port of Dunedin (yeah, that happened) and then shipping it on to California and Georgia for internment.
For a long while, waste management at McMurdo was “tow it out onto the sea ice, and wait for summer”. The sound is littered with who only knows what.
Some parts of the world luckily still seem to run on this obscure ancient thing called morality, trump didn't have time to mess up this part of the world
Sometimes treaties are made and nobody needs to be threatened for people to keep them. That's what it means to be in society. If you cannot have treaties without the threat of outside violence you are in a primary school playground.
Try not paying your taxes, or paying fines, resisting bailiffs, and yet refusing to go to court/jail and see how things work outside the "primary school playground". You'll see it is all based on the threat of physical force, even if you can't see so. If violence is the last resort, is is by that measure the "foundation" of society, if not the basis.
That said, the international community is not "society". You can have all the treaties you want, the threat of violence comes when nations care to break them.
> ... and the winds are often too high for wind power ...
Maybe this is a great candidate for vertical axis wind mills / turbines?
As I understand it, vertical axle don't suffer the red-lining problem of horizontal axle / fin based turbines, and while generally less efficient than conventional wind turbines, they'd ultimately be more effective in this environment.
>They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill
How did they F that up? The Russians manage to successfully use nuclear power for similarly remote stuff and it works well until locals decide they want to steal parts to sell for money (which is a problem you don't have in Antartcia).
None of the marines, the army, nor the Air Force have successfully fielded nuclear power. The navy is the only branch to pull it off. It might be harder than you think.
The Russians are using thermopiles driven by radioactive decay, not actual reactors that go critical. Such devices are indeed quite stable for decades unless they get targeted by scrappers. A few hundred watts from a large RTG is a drop in the bucket compared to the power required to keep a base going, so those aren't applicable.
If you need a transmitter or relay station hundreds of miles from people to run for years without fueling... RTGs are an option for governments.
Supposedly, it would be difficult to set up for space exploration there given the Americans are [apparently, allegedly, rumoured to be] using it as a covert military missile silo[0].
This is a great travelogue. I've always wanted to visit Antartica, and now I have a reason to. (On of my HS teachers spent a summer at Scott Base, the NZ one near McMurdo; I didn't realise they are in walking/skiing distance).
It is a very different environment with different challenges, it isn't that useful an analog. Many of the Antarctica challenges relate to the ice.
One thing it does share (on smaller stations, not McMurdo) is the isolation and the impact on social structures. Concordia, run by the French and Italians, it has an ongoing relationship with the European Space Agency.
I imagine you can get a similar effect with an underground bunker without travelling to the pole. You'd have to the bunker would have to derive all it's needs from a solar-cell-like electricity feed, and the solar-panel tech could probably be developed independently from the colony project.
Maybe you could even remove the air from a case if feasible?
I doubt they would try to bury missiles under the ice. The US tried to build a base underground in ice in Greenland and it was was abandoned due to shifting ice. The last thing you want is your missile silo tipping over or squeezing what's inside.
I'd love to spend a year there, but what always stopped me was communication. The Internet in Antarctica is absolute shit because geo satellites are only barely visible, sometimes.
Starlink might finally fix this problem. Anybody know the current status of Internet access at McMurdo?
36 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] threadOctober 2018 – On 9 October 2018, a stabbing occurred at the Bellingshausen Station (станция Беллинсгаузен), a Russian research station on King George Island.[18] The perpetrator was Sergey Savitsky (Сергей Савицкий), a 54-year-old electrical engineer.[19] He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest[19] multiple times.[20] 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.[21]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442
A remark from the article comes to mind:
"If you’ve got a bunch of pessimists together, then nothing is going to happen other than misery."
In any case, the long list of professionals going crazy suggests the conditions at the stations cause emotional instability - I assume being stuck with a stranger in a confined space for long periods of time. They should build bigger stations, and under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave (and feels they need to commit arson to do so).
EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted..
Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them.
Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.
> Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naïve
I didn't mean literally cannot leave, I mean choose to leave, i.e when safe to do so, rather than being forced to stay by naval order or contract. Though admittedly it's hard to find if that is the case in some of the historical examples.
> shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet
Why? If you commit human beings to an environment you either allow the conditions that will keep them sane, or you call the whole thing off. As soon as you decide the difficulty is surmountable, you lose this excuse, because not doing it is also an option.
Would you build a station without a toilet or food? Then why not extra space? Skipping both will save money/effort, yet "there's more to living than just surviving" - both are requirements. If providing extra space is too hard, then the whole thing is too hard.
The previous point only compounds this: "you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely" - If you can't control how long they'll be there, ensure the environment is one they can remain emotionally stable in, or don't send them there at all.
They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill.
In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything.
Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel!
As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.
Wouldn't it be better left in Antarctica than where ever else it was dumped?
For a long while, waste management at McMurdo was “tow it out onto the sea ice, and wait for summer”. The sound is littered with who only knows what.
In this case the result might have been the Russians deploying nuclear energy or even weapons there.
That said, the international community is not "society". You can have all the treaties you want, the threat of violence comes when nations care to break them.
Maybe this is a great candidate for vertical axis wind mills / turbines?
As I understand it, vertical axle don't suffer the red-lining problem of horizontal axle / fin based turbines, and while generally less efficient than conventional wind turbines, they'd ultimately be more effective in this environment.
How did they F that up? The Russians manage to successfully use nuclear power for similarly remote stuff and it works well until locals decide they want to steal parts to sell for money (which is a problem you don't have in Antartcia).
If you need a transmitter or relay station hundreds of miles from people to run for years without fueling... RTGs are an option for governments.
[0]: https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuBrQLMUAZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acSpI9mheAI
Most of Canada and Russia (still) qualifies for that in the winter, and there's more frequent airline service.
One thing it does share (on smaller stations, not McMurdo) is the isolation and the impact on social structures. Concordia, run by the French and Italians, it has an ongoing relationship with the European Space Agency.
Maybe you could even remove the air from a case if feasible?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
Starlink might finally fix this problem. Anybody know the current status of Internet access at McMurdo?