Slashdot Mirror
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.
"My computer froze!"
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.
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?
Apparently not: The FA mentions that they are at 12,000 feet, so they have a real problem with computer fans not being able to move the thin air.
Other effects of the thin air include laptop disks that don't spin properly, because they are built to float on a layer of air and are designed for near-sea-level densities. The air is also very dry, leading to increased risk of fires and disk failures caused by static.
Fire is a huge problem in general, because in the winter they have no choice but to fight and extinguish. Relocation isn't an option. Very interesting article.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
All those pics are upside-down! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
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.
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.