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.

Re:The one bright side to such an environment

[myvirtualid]

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.

Geosynchronous satellite dish at that lattitude?

[Chris Shannon]

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?

Re:Why they cannot get supplies/parts during Winte

[Deep Penguin]

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.