[HN Gopher] Doors of McMurdo
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Doors of McMurdo
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 262 points
Date : 2022-12-15 17:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brr.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (brr.fyi)
| ilkkal wrote:
| I wonder if proper door operation is part of orientation:
| https://youtu.be/Wof0xPUmW38
| loufe wrote:
| I work at a large mining complex in Canada's far north. We have a
| mix of all types of door handles and mechanisms in outside-facing
| doors, like McMurdo, it would seem. Even the best of them fails
| to keep snow out and heat in when you get snow and ice caught in
| the door creases. Salt, sand, and shovel and pick are the motto.
|
| Thankfully, more doors are further off the ground because of
| permafrost. Having stability and door-jam-avoiding benefits
| simultaneously.
| loufe wrote:
| Permafrost stilts, for reference:
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/greenbuildingadvisor.s3.tauntonclou...
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Are the stilts connected to thermosiphons? That is a cool
| technology and application I learned about when reading about
| building larger structures in the far north.
| https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072021/thawing-
| permafro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosiphon
| https://dot.alaska.gov/stwddes/research/assets/pdf/erdc-
| crre...
| loufe wrote:
| Good question, honestly I'm not sure. I will try to
| remember to ask next time I fly up.
| JP_Watts wrote:
| Man this brings me back. I did a year at McMurdo in 2004. We got
| hit with such a bad storm that conex boxes were tossed all over
| the yards. Snow drifts covered up some doors, but... they opened
| inward ;)
| chrisbigelow wrote:
| See also: "Power Up: What Keeps McMurdo Going?"
| https://scienceroadshow.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/power-up-wh...
| greenhearth wrote:
| Love this blog!
| m463 wrote:
| I couldn't help continuing with "McMurdo's Automated Teller
| Machines"
|
| https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines
|
| This is fun and fascinating. I wonder how much critical minutiae
| from our daily life goes undocumented.
|
| for example:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/45rpmada...
| Magi604 wrote:
| These are fantastic, high quality posts.
|
| This is the type of stuff that sadly gets drowned out in the
| ocean of today's clickbait content.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| I don't tend to count (currently) #2 on the main page to be
| drowned.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series
| of organic responses to evolving operational needs._
|
| over time i have become more and more convinced that this state
| of affairs is _better_.
| notduncansmith wrote:
| That is the central thesis of The Timeless Way of Building by
| Christopher Alexander, which I highly recommend.
| conductr wrote:
| Don't live there anymore but it's basically why I actually
| liked no zoning in Houston
| teddyh wrote:
| "The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash
| effort. The system has been incrementally developed almost
| continuously since its inception. As the system has matured
| there have always been new features to add to those under
| consideration as others were implemented or discarded."
|
| -- Donald E. Eastlake, _ITS Status Report_ , AI Memo 238, 1972:
| https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238
| Georgelemental wrote:
| You may be interested in "Seeing Like a State" by James C.
| Scott, an entire book about this subject:
| https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
| odiroot wrote:
| It begins as a very interesting book (especially the forest
| management example) but boy is it slow. The author tends to
| repeat his point ad nauseam.
| mustachionut wrote:
| Also check out "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand.
| kapep wrote:
| I appreciate the beauty that comes with the organic evolution
| of these buildings but if it leads to a "break lock in
| emergency" door, it is definitely not better.
| lilyball wrote:
| That door's state is due to the key being lost, not due to
| organic growth.
| [deleted]
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| It's certainly incorporating local knowledge though
| bombcar wrote:
| Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP,
| or where transit lines are run _before the city builds up
| around them_. But only things that really _need_ to be master-
| planned do better when planned that way; much of the best
| "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects
| are organic and human-scale.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of
| options, and one of its key components, the congestion
| control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client
| choice. Both of these facts have led to significant
| improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by
| dumping TCP altogether, in large part _because_ TCP ossified
| due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when
| it isn 't. TCP, at least, is an anti-example to your point!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| So is IP - which version are we talking about?
|
| The out-of-address-space v4 that wasn't future-proof enough
| to conceive of more than 4 billion computers?
|
| Or the reinvented ipv6 that seems to have gone way too far
| in the other direction (and not just in terms of address
| size)?
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > where transit lines are run before the city builds up
| around them.
|
| I'm not sure even this is true. The city may not build up in
| the way the planners anticipated. Even if it does, it will
| change over time.
| alksjdalkj wrote:
| They aren't independent, the city will tend to build up
| along the transit lines due to the easy access to transit.
| E.g., the NYC outer boroughs and the DC metro area.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| That may be true for immovable train lines, but vehicle
| transit such as buses have routes which are subject to
| change, and therefore developers cannot depend on the
| transit lines being there in 10-20 years.
|
| Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants
| to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus
| stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be
| circulating consumers around places they will spend
| money.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic
| wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as
| bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to
| be circulating consumers around places they will spend
| money.
|
| This is circular reasoning though. Bus lines go to the
| mall, but malls are built where the bus lines go. Malls
| use a lot of space, so carving out a little bit for
| transit is easy.
| wins32767 wrote:
| Consider the income levels of the staff that work at
| shopping malls and what that implies for their ability to
| pay for reliable personal transportation.
| thewataccount wrote:
| From my experience playing factorio, the best way to
| approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to
| allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space
| between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably"
| arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this
| is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain
| minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road
| to 3, etc.
|
| You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of
| what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve
| space past that to accompany further expansion.
|
| The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing
| some sanity to the underlying infrastructure.
|
| * This will likely apply to anything that needs both
| preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases
| bombcar wrote:
| You see stuff like that done in some places (eg:
| https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 - the "highway" has
| space all around it for expansion, and has had that for
| decades from when there was nothing there)
| microtherion wrote:
| That looks like an utterly car dependent community. I
| don't think you can have walkability without fairly dense
| construction.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is
| cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you
| know where the density is but you have to get the land.
|
| In the cases I know of the density followed upon building
| the line, but that may not be universally true.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| Maybe not so much the where, but the how (zoning regs)
| matter. In SLC, the roads are pleasantly wide for a city
| it's age. Turns out they had to be wide enough for a wagon
| to turn around.
|
| Trying to avoid painting yourself into a corner without
| over thinking is the game.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| I've been thoroughly enjoying this blog and I'm looking forward
| to read about the heating infrastructure there!
| flobosg wrote:
| Related: I enjoyed Maciej Ceglowski's articles about Antarctica -
| https://idlewords.com/antarctica/
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Funny that this should pop up just as I'm reading the illustrated
| version of "At the Mountains of Madness" (H.P. Lovecraft)...
| anthk wrote:
| I tought the same.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I find everything about McMurdo fascinating because it's such an
| extreme place. I looked at every one of these doors and read
| about them. And a friend of mine from college worked (works?)
| there after and has cool stories to tell.
|
| Like penguin feces smells _awful_ because it 's predator feces
| raised to the fish power.
|
| And emperor penguins are _huge_ , and if they whack you with
| their wings they can break finger bones.
|
| And people who newly arrive look "orange".
|
| And this wasn't from him, but some other documentary: Chips left
| out don't go stale because the air is so dry. In fact, _they may
| get crispier._
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's a very cold place right...? And a place where energy is
| insanely expensive because all fuel has to be shipped thousands
| of miles?
|
| So energy efficiency is paramount.
|
| So why are these doors, even the modern ones, just a few inches
| thick? I'd expect to see the doors being 6 inch thick foam, and
| every outdoor door to be a double door (ie. into an entrance
| room, and another door into the rest of the building, such that
| only one door is ever open at once, to prevent heat loss).
|
| I'd expect all the walls to be 12 inches thick (with 10 inches of
| foam) too - and again, this doesn't seem to be the case.
| danielvf wrote:
| McMurdo has a deepwater port, and a lot of fuel storage tanks
| as a part of its facilities. Tankers and can just drive up in
| summer and offload large quantities of fuel. It's not like the
| South Pole station where everything must be flown in. And the
| "waste heat" from the generators making electricity is routed
| throughout the base and used for heating.
|
| Not to mention almost a megawatt of wind turbines in the near
| constant wind.
|
| A study on the feasibility of electric vehicles had the
| expected cost of electricity per kWh at the base lower than
| California residential rates.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| McMurdo during the summer routinely gets above freezing and
| isn't all too different from Alaska or northern Canada in the
| early spring. During the winter of course it gets cold.
|
| As for power, McMurdo has a mix of power sources including a
| number of renewables. For about a decade ('62-'72), McMurdo
| also had a small nuclear power plant on site as well. This was
| also only a few years after McMurdo was established ('56). So
| there was definitely a time where energy was not particularly
| expensive and the greater issue was the cost per kilo for
| shipping supplies.
|
| Of course now that shipping logistics are mostly ironed out and
| nuclear was deemed too problematic, various fossil fuels are
| used for power and heating a good chunk of the site (whatever
| the scattering of renewables can't handle).
|
| Wind Turbines: https://brr.fyi/media/hut-point/town.jpg
|
| PM-3A Nuclear Site:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/PM3Anucl...
| musha68k wrote:
| Just the article I come here for, thanks for sharing. Fitting
| background ambience for reading: https://youtu.be/870PlmjnLHw
| [deleted]
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Antarctica Condition 1 Weather [1]. Her giggle in this video
| always cracks me up. _Waaaaaaaahhhhh!!!_
|
| https://youtu.be/qz2SeEzxMuE
| [deleted]
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Classic "Condition Fun"!
|
| Antz and Christine are great - recommend "A Year On Ice".
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| The first thing I think about isn't snow or handles, it's the
| framing. Poor framing results in door sagging which results in
| sticking, wearing or even broken doors. A handle you can replace
| pretty easily with basic tools (and a crescent wrench and square
| tube works as a handle in a pinch). A poorly hung door requires
| more skill.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| This made me homesick for Antarctica.
|
| Tempted to do a "Doors of Erebus" in this style... They would
| mostly be tent flaps, but there is a garage door and a really
| great outhouse door.
| xwdv wrote:
| How can I do a stint in McMurdo?
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Unless you're a scientist or researcher in a field that would
| be performing research at McMurdo, your best bet is probably to
| apply for a support position with one of the organizations or
| parner institutions listed here:
| https://www.usap.gov/jobsandopportunities/
|
| Though as the blog mentions in an earlier post[0], you may have
| to re-apply repeatedly over the course of several years.
|
| [0]: https://brr.fyi/posts/basics
| rootbear wrote:
| I kept hoping I could trick NASA into sending me down there for
| a few weeks. Surely a senior Linux/Unix admin would be useful
| there? Ah, well, there's always the tourist option.
| focusedone wrote:
| I dunno who's writing this, but they write very well and about
| interesting things. Really enjoying keeping up with this blog!
| dheera wrote:
| I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts.
|
| In an environment where you presumably know every single human on
| the site and there are probably no other humans in any direction
| for 1000 km, is there a need for locks on anything other than
| bedrooms and bathrooms?
| _dain_ wrote:
| > I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts.
|
| to keep the Thing out
| jamincan wrote:
| McMurdo is one of the major logistics hubs for the entire
| continent, this means that it has a relatively high population
| (~1000 in summer), but also that a lot of people pass through
| on their way to other parts of Antarctica. It's definitely not
| a situation where everyone knows everyone else.
| mastax wrote:
| Probably just a more secure way to latch the door when there's
| lots of wind and snow attempting to push the door in.
|
| Also lots of standard doors come with deadbolts pre-installed
| or at least a deadbolt hole drilled through.
| jccooper wrote:
| Mc Murdo is not the ISS. I think it's telling that it's
| referred to as a "town". Plenty of unauthorized personnel.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Penguins. Penguins can't open deadbolts.
|
| (/s, obviously...)
| bell-cot wrote:
| But if you merely hide the key under the doormat, a Yeti
| _can_.
| petsfed wrote:
| The threat is not from strangers, but from fully vetted and
| trusted community members having some kind of psychological
| event that leads them to bad actions.
|
| The various entities working at McMurdo do pretty thorough pre-
| deployment psych evals to try to catch the kinds of people who
| would break vital equipment (think furnaces, or water-treatment
| equipment or high-cost/one-of-a-kind research equipment) or
| equipment necessary to fix vital equipment. But there's really
| no guarantee until you're out there that any given person is
| actually trustworthy. To say nothing of emergent psychological
| events that would drive a person to do such a thing. And
| anyway, the kind of person who _wants_ to go to Antarctica
| frequently doesn 't conform to our expectations of what a well-
| adjusted personality looks like. When your threat model is
| "trustworthy community members who occasionally and
| unpredictably become threats", you lock doors.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Interesting link at the bottom: https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-
| automated-teller-machines
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Sites like this are exactly why the internet was invented.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| What's really nice is they have an RSS feed, so after one of
| these posts showed up on HN a month or two ago, I've been
| following all their posts since.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Therefore I try to stay in the tail:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
| hiidrew wrote:
| I've been following this blog since someone posted it a few weeks
| back. Aweosme reads imo, satisfies my childhood curiosity of
| Antarctica and I appreciate all the photos he includes.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| One thing I learned from those doors was to dry my hands really
| well after washing them, I froze to the handle a bunch of times
| in the beginning...
| irrational wrote:
| When I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary
| building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so
| large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to
| find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Kim Stanley Robinson's _Antarctica_ , a twenty-minutes-into-
| the-future ecothriller, is much recommended reading for anyone
| who'd like to know more about McMurdo, the South Pole Station,
| and about the history of Antarctica's exploration and its
| geography and ecology. As is usually the case, KSR has
| definitely done his homework. (Disclaimer: you might fall in
| love with Antarctica, or at least develop a serious crush, as a
| result of reading this novel.)
| milliams wrote:
| OSM seems to have it quite well mapped:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-77.846323&mlon=166.6682...
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Of course, I wanted to know what "FSTP Snow School" was, but
| garbage blogspam gives first-search-results like this:
| https://mapcarta.com/N8759058406
|
| <sigh>
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I can help! I went through it 7 times.
|
| FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the
| "field safety training program" and basically it refers to
| the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's
| contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with
| fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in
| McMurdo.
|
| Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone
| at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you
| would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up
| camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one
| night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year
| and instructors).
|
| I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too,
| including how to travel on sea ice, and some
| mountaineering.
|
| We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke
| was "the F stops here."
|
| I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so...
| around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the
| building fulla chicks...
| vikingerik wrote:
| You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large
| building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for
| snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for
| Antarctica articles.
|
| (McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New
| Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in
| relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to
| anywhere else.)
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Near? It's 99 miles!
|
| https://distcalculator.com/distance-between/106093/New-
| Zeala...
|
| "If average speed of your car will be standard for this route
| between New Zealand and McMurdo, Antarctica and road
| conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to
| arrive to McMurdo, Antarctica will be 1 hour."
| jkonline wrote:
| I think distcalculator is buggy:
|
| "Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99
| miles.
|
| If average speed of your car will be standard for this
| route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road
| conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to
| arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."
| duskwuff wrote:
| It appears to return "99 miles" for _any_ pair of
| locations, even between a location and itself, or to
| nonexistent locations (like "Narnia").
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That site is getting confused by New Zealand's _Antarctic_
| Scott base.
|
| NZ proper is about least 1,500 miles from Antarctica.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Scott Base is easy walking distance from McMurdo, not 99
| miles (or 100 kilometers and 100 miles and 100 nautical
| miles - that site is quite confused!).
|
| Both are actually in New Zealand depending on the
| purpose, due to the Ross Dependency[1]. For instance,
| most of those folks in McMurdo station have longer NZ
| visas than typical US tourists visiting NZ would get (3
| months), because when they fly down to The Ice they're
| not technically leaving the country.
|
| An interesting corner case is when something happens at
| one of the US stations in the Ross Dependency, which New
| Zealand wants to investigate. The Rodney Marks death[2]
| is a particularly well-known example.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Dependency
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Marks
| billforsternz wrote:
| I'm typing this in New Zealand at latitude 42 degrees south
| (so about half way from the equator to the pole). So no, not
| near NZ, a bit less than 1/8 of the circumstance of the Earth
| away, maybe 1/10, more than 2000 miles.
| irrational wrote:
| That isn't what I was thinking of. I wasn't even aware there
| was more than one research facility in Antarctica. I was
| going purely off of the name.
| vikingerik wrote:
| That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were
| thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since
| that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the
| location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base
| to be.
| kioleanu wrote:
| It's big enough that they have a bus to go around. It's called
| Ivan the Terrabus.
| pkaye wrote:
| I know McMurdo station is getting a major overhaul so all these
| doors will probably be replaced.
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/antarcticas-agi...
| mlindner wrote:
| Makes sense. Some of these doors the latches look close to
| breaking with door jambs that have partially been eaten away by
| use.
| sgt wrote:
| Can they be replaced by Star Trek like doors that go..
| TSHHHHHH... ? A friend is asking.
| akiselev wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for cause you'll accidentally get
| doors with one of those ghastly Genuine People Personalities.
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