Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil McAvity
I remember chatting with a guy in a chat room ~20 years ago whose name was something like "DanInAntarctica". I can't remember if it was a video chat or just text but after a while of seeing this guy in the chat room, it suddenly dawned on me, this fucking guy is chatting from fucking ANTARCTICA! I can't remember what he did there but he wasn't on holidays
Thanks for the pics, they're interesting even though they are the furthest thing, in every sense of the word, from skyscrapers
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When I was there, of course, there was no internet. Just short wave radio, frequently rendered useless by sunspots, solar storms etc.
But there are a variety of people doing a variety of things down there. In summer, the largest group are the scientific personnel like, I assume, SIGSEGV. Nearly all these people have grants from the
National Science Foundation Office of Polar Progams to do research in the Antarctic, most of which is uniquely helped by that environment whether it's perhaps cosmic ray research, looking for meteorites, researching the food chain of the exceptionally rich polar oceans, looking at global warming as it effects the polar ice cap or even various forms of medical research (when I was there, a group of anesthesiologists was looking at the diving response of Weddell Seals and a virologist was researching the transmission of cold viruses in the closed population of an Antarctic base in winter).
Besides these scientists, there are all sorts of logistics people from the medical staff, aircraft pilots and so on to cooks. When I was there most of those people were Navy personnel although, while there, the Navy was reimbursed for our pay by the National Science Foundation which ran the program. My understanding is the flying is now done by Air National Guard members rather than the Navy's VXE-6 squadron in my day (which then had the world's only ski-equipped C-130 aircraft).
Also, it should be recognized that McMurdo has a neighbor and there's a lot of interaction (or, at least, was--I took care of their medical needs as well as McMurdo's). That would be New Zealand's Scott Base which is a few miles away "over the hill".
This is Scott Base as it apparently is today (it was much smaller with just a few dozen people in my day)--McMurdo is literally over the hill in the background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Base
New Zealand maintains a claim to a large pie-shaped wedge of Antarctica which it calls the "Ross Dependency" and it even issues Ross Dependency stamps which are used for snail mail from Scott Base (under the Antarctica Treaty, such claims are held in abeyance until and unless the Treaty is allowed to lapse). In effect, then, the US McMurdo base is a guest of New Zealand within the Ross Dependency.