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Ch-Ch-Chatting With the South Pole's IT Manager
Have you ever thought about working at a place where the main worry is keeping the equipment from getting too cold? An excellent detailed interview with the IT manager of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Getting service is a little tough. They try to maintain at least a year's worth of spare parts.
Includes an interesting set of photos.
watch Clark. And watch him close.
"My computer froze!"
Being in Minnesota, I am used to cold weather, but -104F! I wouldn't go out in that with clothes on, let alone naked.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
When the machines get too cold, they install Microsoft products.
Then Satan shows up and heats up the joint.
It has to be much, much easier to overclock machines when you never have to worry about overheating. Who needs liquid cooling when you can have polar cooling?
I don't work in IT, but I would love to have a job at the south pole. Snow and cold any idea of hot weather. How people can stand heat I have no idea.
I'm thinking about moving to Alaska after I pay down some of my student loans. I have some relatives that live there and they love it.
Gone!
A high school buddy of mine went to the south pole a couple of years ago. Here's his blog.
I click the link, and the first image is of a very cold-looking guy standing next to the South Pole marker. Underneath it is a CDW ad that states "We're there.".
That may be the first time I've cracked a smile at an online ad.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Did anyone else read this as "ch-ch-chatting with south park's IT manager"?
Who lives at the south pole? Herschel the Hanukkah goblin you insensitive cod!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
There's me thinking the 'nsfw' tag on this article was just the /. crown trying to piss-off the guys who were trying to patent 'nsfw'. God, how wrong I was.
ilovegeorgebush
While I suppose it is a little offtopic, I noticed in the first picture that the elevation of the south pole is greater than 9,000 feet. I never knew that, and it really highlights the crappy conditions that must exist there. Even at 10,000 feet your body does funny things adjusting to altitude (source).
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
The antenna looks like it came from the battle of hoth!! Sweet!
Security software - BlackIce
Snow license Manager
Snow screen savers
Frozen Heads Software for the Macs http://frozenheads.com/
polar software for the helpdesk http://www.polarsoftware.com/
And of course Penguin everything
but the burning question: Does he type everything using the CAP lock ?
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It's because of the weather?
Isn't that a perfect situation to make use of Netburst-based Pentium 4 processors ?
All those pics are upside-down! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...was a little underwhelming, looks like it was done a pen plotter although it does convey a certain 70's scientific vibe. Also, where are the iceweasel/icedove/firefox/icewm jokes?
This site (www.bigdeadplace.com/) is dedicated to the stories of what really goes on at McMurdo. It's a very funny read; I haven't gotten around to buying the book yet.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
At 80 degrees north in Eureka, Nunavut, Canada, you would need to point an antenna horizontally to communicate with a geostationary satellite.
There's a photo of an satellite dish antenna pointing horizontally at the south pole. Is communication with that satellite only possible during certain times of the day?
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
If you RTFA, you will find that they only have connectivity for about 12 hours a day using at least 3 different satellites. The article is pretty interesting, go ahead and indulge.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The reason the guy keeps referring to his people back in Denver is because logistics and support for the South Pole station (and McMurdo, too, I think) are run by Raytheon Polar Services, which is based in Colorado. The Antarctic program is run out of Washington by the National Science Foundation, but they contract out the actual infrastructure, operations, and other support.
Did the satalitte dish photos remind anyone else of GoldenEye?
How'd they get pictures of my parents basement where I live? Oh wait, pictures of Antarctica, never mind. Still cold in both places though.
ping mcmurdo.gov
ping: unknown host mcmurdo.gov
What happened? Their ice foundation melted already? Roving gangs of starving polar bears finally cracked their nut? Some kind of cosmic driveby took them down? Or maybe the South Pole Station IT department repair to McMurdo's WAN is just glacially slow...
--
make install -not war
It's sort of the weather. It's cold and windy during the winter, sure. But, it's also dark - completely and utterly dark for months at a time during the dead of winter. There aren't any lights on the runway, or air traffic radar either, so there's a good chance the plane will smack onto the snow rather than land. It's very difficult to compact and maintain the snow/ice runway during the winter. If a plane were to land, they would have to keep the engines revved up and the plane moving - if they were to stop and shutdown the skis would freeze to the runway and the engines would refuse to restart.
also bear in mind that any plane they sent up there would almost certainly have to go through McMurdo. They generally use modified C-130s for their heavy transport, and they don't have tremendous range on one tank of gas. So, you'd need to get a plane first to McMurdo, which has its own difficulties of winter flying, and then head to the South Pole.
None of this is to say that they can't fly in during the winter. If the station were to blow up, for instance, they'd get some daring pilots to head in for a rescue. A few years back there was someone on the over-winter crew that needed treatment for breast cancer (it was the doctor, ironically enough), and they did some dicey flights for that (to send supplies, then for an early extraction). It's mostly that they prefer to not have to, because it's logistically difficult and mighty risky.
Why do photo's 1 and 7 both have signs that say "Geographic South Pole", when in the background of one photo is nothing but snow and in the background of the other there is a big building. Can't there only be one geographic South Pole? Both photos have pole markers.
I was at a deep field camp at about 127W 82S a few years ago and we could get Internet for about 3-5 hours a day as the GOES satellite poked up above the horizon. We just has a 6' diameter, fixed position antenna.
It's actually worse than that, because one of the satellites is currently unusable. Here's the daily connectivity schedule.
I shared this interview with the 7th graders in my computer lab today as an example of an IT career. They thought it was cool (pun intended) see, they are already geeks....
success often occurs in private, failure in full view
When I first saw it, I thought it said "linuxpenguingohome".
What?
Well, I don't know but the story sound similar to a friend of mine. But he moved to Hawai instead, which I think is a choice I would also vastly prefer.
;-)
Still I must say; He definately has a cool job.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I'm not exactly sure when Chris' tour is up, but I'm sure I'll hear about it, since he and I live in the same town. He and my brother both served on the student volunteer force in Amherst, MA, and that's what he's doing up there now-- fighting fires. Well, he would be anyway, if there were any. Chris seemed hell-bent on doing something crazy after college, and I remember him asking me a million questions about hiking the AT, but I guess he opted for something way crazier!
Since your post got modded redundant, it seems the mods agree with you. :)
It's more than just cold and windy in the winter. The temperature floor for an LC-130 (C-130 with skis) is -50C. Even in the summer, they don't land when it's colder than that. The various hydraulic systems (including the ski-retraction mechanism) don't work well when it's too cold. As for "leaving the engines running", they do that in the summer.
To come down here in the middle of winter, they would do what they did in April, 2001 for a medevac of a different doctor, send a Twin Otter from Canada. It has a shorter range than an LC-130, so it has to fly down the Americas, hop over to Antarctica at the Drake Passage, refuel and switch from tires to skis at Rothera Base, then fly to Pole and refuel here. They do that at the beginning of every season, then reverse it to go home.
The situation you mention was in 1999, and involved an air-drop of supplies from a C-141, then a C-130 showing up about two weeks early, in mid-October, weeks after the sun rose. The Twin Otter medevac was in full dark and around -80F.
All that being said, yes, it is difficult, and it is risky. It had better be a matter of life or death to bring a plane here between late February and early October. If the station did blow up, and there were no immediate life-threatening injuries, there are plans to be able to survive for weeks/months in either the B-wing of the new station (it can be split in half for a catastrophic fire in the A-wing) or in other buildings that can be heated without depending on the main power plant. The winter crews are large enough that it would take five or six Twin Otter flights to evacuate the station. That would be incredibly tricky to accomplish. An air-drop would be orders of magnitude easier, especially since until 1995, they used to do that every winter.
"In the past year we put up a really cool system"
"Liquid water is such a hot commodity"
and the diagram with the hydraulic press. Think of the incredible shrinkage that must come with -100F temperatures and how that displacement of fluid forces blood to all your other vitals to keep you from going into shock. It's just physics.
Dont they make hermetically sealed hard drives anymore?
Damn, I thought you were talking about the hip-hop clothing company "South Pole". Too bad the ch-ch-chatting isn't scra-scra-scratching. Interesting article anyway. Can I still get some swag?
If you're at the same longitude as a geosyncronous satellite with 0 inclination, it will be on the horizon at approximately +-82 latitude. So you'd never see it from the poles. You can only see geosyncronous satellites from the poles if they have an inclination > about 8 degrees, and then only for a fraction of the day. Active geo comm birds will typically have far less inclination then this, as it will degrade service for anybody not actively tracking the satellite. Typically, you'll only see this kind of inclination in older satellites which have run out of gas for station keeping, or have had some other failure of stationkeeping.
Looking at the 3 birds they are using:
GOES 3 - Launched 1978, Inclination 14.15 degrees
TDRS 1 - Launched 1983, Inclination 12.9 degrees
MARISAT 2 - Launched 1976, Inclination 13.5 degrees
(data from Space-Track.org)
These birds are almost certainly out of gas, and so are drifting through the geosync belt and generally considered a hazard to navigation. Current practice is to boost satellites out of the geosync belt before they run out of gas, even if the payload is still operating. At this point, it's not generally useful to the operator, so it's shut down. It would take several years for its inclination to perturb to the point of being useful for the polar station anyway.
So - given the way we now operate satellites, they may not have comm available from geosync birds when these 3 satellites finally die. And the kluge they have working for iridium doesn't provide nearly enough bandwidth - not to mention that it must be enormously expensive.
I misread the headline as "Ch-Ch-Chatting with South PARK's IT Manager", and I thought "If the IT manager has crutches and a speech impediment, this is the greatest headline ever."
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Thanks for answering. That's really interesting.
It seems geosynchronous satellites are not the best tool for the job here. They could put some in polar orbits, or maybe use a natural satellite.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Hermetic seals tend to fail, and when the breathing starts moisture wicks in, condenses, and does not leave. You end up with an enclosure full of water. Hard drives have always been made with breather elements that filter out dust but allow the internal atmosphere to reach equilibrium with the atmosphere outside the HD.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
A fellow slashdotter has an absolutely fantastic collection of stories from his time working in Antarctica, primarily at Dumont D'Urville and Concordia Station (which is actually quite a bit more isolated, and colder than the south pole itself).
It's filled with plenty of nerdy anecdotes, including the difficulties of running laptops in Antarctica (hint: don't bother), and a few jury-rigged experiments that would make MacGyver proud.
If you have a good bit of time to kill, I strongly recommend reading through everything he's got. It's fascinating, inspiring, and really deserves to be bound up into a book someday.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Santa shows up and heats up a joint?!
Rock on, reefer Santa, rock on!
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
licet differant, aequabitur
After living and working in Alaska for a number of years, I think I could handle it. Eventually I'll have lived and worked on all seven continents ... now if only I could get that Antarctic job down I'd be set. I have a feeling that those positions are few, and difficult to come by.
If you like the article above, you'll get a *lot* more nerdy info from a mate of mine who runs IT for a big project at the south pole:
http://antarctica.kulgun.net/blog/
For example this post on communications at the pole - very readable.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.