More Answers

OK, so here are some more answers to questions.

The scientists are studying everything you can possibly think of. Global warming, volcanology on Mt Erebus, how penguins can stay underwater for so long with so little oxygen, how the sea life can survive in such low temperatures, weather, how thick the ice was 2 million years ago, etc. Someone told me that a few years ago, someone got a grant from an art foundation to come out with a bunch of big blue balls and put them on the ice and take pictures from a plane. So I guess you can get money to come down here and do pretty much anything.

The permanent ice really is permanent. I had a hard time picturing exactly where I was in the grand scheme of things until I saw a few of those.

This is the best map picture I can get. It's from 2003, and the line coming in is the shipping channel the ice breaker is making so that the supply ships can come in to the pier. You can see where McMurdo is, and the line that goes west from McMurdo is basically the line where the annual sea ice ends, and the permanent sea ice begins. If I had access to photoshop or something, I could draw in where the various runways are, but that's a basic view...Let me know if that helps.

Anyway, McMurdo has about 1200 people in the summer, give or take. It's really a transient population since the beakers are only here for about 6 weeks or so at a time, and they come in and out from the field camps as well. McMurdo itself is about 1.5 square miles. There is only one firehouse in town, and then the one at the airfield. In December, we close the Sea Ice Runway, and open Pegasus Runway, which is on the permanent ice shelf, and Williams Field, which is on snow (and only gets the ski planes). There is also an airfield at the South Pole that has 4 firefighters.

There are 2 and a half seasons down here. Winter, Summer (which we are in now, and is also called Mainbody by some) and Win-Fly. Win-fly is in August, and is the time when they bring in a small amount of people to start learning the jobs from the winter-over people who are leaving. Most people who come in August leave in February at the end of the summer, but several do stay and winter-over, and leave the following October (thus spending 14 months in Antarctica). Some of the summer people also stay for the winter. There usually ends up being about 200 people here over the winter. From what I hear, the sun sets sometime in the end of March, and doesn't rise again until sometime in August. I've heard from a lot of people that winter-overs are slightly crazy by the end of the season. During the winter, regular temperatures can get down around -60F, with windchills around -90F or so. At South Pole, they have what they call the '300 club' which is when you spend as much time in a 200F sauna as possible, then run outside when it is 100F below. Needless to say, there are no planes during this time, so anyone who winters over is pretty much stuck here until August, when the weather breaks enough to start getting planes in and out.

The ice on the annual sea ice runway is currently about 12 feet thick or so (this is over an average of about 1000 ft of 23F ocean). In December and January, the temperatures are at or above freezing, so the top layer of the ice melts and gets very slushy, and it is no longer safe to land multi-ton, multi-million dollar planes on it (I hear that it costs about $2 million for ONE C-17 flight to get here), so we move operations to a place where the ice is about 100 feet thick (it's too far away to be efficient enough to use all the time). The ice melting is helped by the ice breakers. This year they are using a Swedish ice breaker called the Oden, which can break up ice that is about 16 feet thick.

The ice pier isn't made of ice, but it is stuck in the ice until the ice breakers come through.