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Weird they don't stock UHT milk. I buy milk for 6 months and keep it in my pantry. I honestly can't tell the difference between modern UHT milk and mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway). They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. It would be fun to make your own cheese down there as a hobby!

Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting, I think. It forces you to expand your gastronomic horizons, explore the cuisine of different regional cultures. Some cultures don't use milk (and thus cheese or butter), some don't use much oil, some are vegetarian while some are nearly all meat. There's preservation by fermentation, by drying, by salting, by burying, by sealing in hardened butter. Some just eat a lot of soup. There's really an infinite number of dishes that express flavor, aroma and texture. If you ever get bored of your food, you can fix that.

(creds: I was down to McMurdo as a researcher three times)

I suspect this has to do with space and weight constraints, and probably a touch of old-school procurement practices.

In the not-too-distant past, basically everything was flown to south pole station, so weight was at a premium. Powdered milk weights a lot less than UHT milk. Now they do a traverse to the pole with sleds and tractors, so weight is less of an issue, but volume might still be.

On top of that, procurement may be slow to change. If, in fact, weight is no longer a constraint, it might take years for procurement to change to include buying UHT milk.

Whoa I had no idea:

"To reduce the cost and increase the efficiency and reliability of transporting fuel and materials to South Pole Station, USAP established an overland traverse route from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. The traverse route is approximately 1,030 miles long and took several years of route-finding to prove and to mitigate areas with crevassing. This route is traveled by the South Pole Traverse (SPoT), a tractor train that hauls supplies and fuel using specialized sleds. SPoT tractors ascend more than 9,300 feet along the route to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. On average, it takes 52 days for the round trip from McMurdo to Pole and back."

https://www.southpole.aq/activities/station-logistics.html

I am perversely drawn to applying to this job, even though I know it is at least 500% more shitty than what I currently do.

> ascend more than 9,300 feet

Ah yes, the Mountains of Madness pass.

(ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness)

My first thought was of the heavy swings used by Camp Century in the 1960s to haul construction materials and supplies to that project.

Except that MMS to AMS is seven times the distance.

And those SPoT tractor trains are averaging less than 3 kph / 2 mph for the round trip.

Reading this I am picturing a blowing blizzard and massive tractors crawling over the barren landscape. INTENSE!

It's both intense and the most boring thing you could imagine. Picture day after day in a tractor traveling across a white landscape with another tractor in front and another tractor behind. I have only traveled such things by snowmobile, but I've befriended a few of the traverse folks in Greenland and Antarctica and they described it as "intensely exhilarating and extremely boring".

One of those classic stressful but boring jobs. Nothing around you for a thousand miles and it takes 50 days but at any point you could fall into a hole and die.

[flagged]

Even if UHT wouldn't bust mass budgets for the trip, it'd have to be protected from freezing. I don't know what the SPoT capabilities are for non-deep-freeze er ... warm chain transport, but that's an additional logistical hurdle.

Liquids could also pose stability issues in transit, from sloshing and the like.

I'm surprised you can't tell the difference between UHT and regular milk. I've tried a few brands in the UK, and there's a clear difference in tea / coffee, and it's particularly marked if you're drinking milk on its own.

Maybe the UK is lagging behind on UHT? Or I'm just buying the wrong brand.

Coming from drinking Irish milk, American milk already tastes like water. I can understand UHT being interchangeable if the baseline product is already bland.

American milk is very varied, sounds like you’re describing plastic gallon jug skim milk. If you want something a bit heartier, you can probably find creamline milk from a local farm.

I have been reliably informed that homogenized dairy products increase inflammation, and so I've made efforts to purchase creamline products instead. It's been revelatory, the difference and enjoyment I derive from it. I've found Straus Creamery makes amazing milk and yogurt products. Sometimes the milk comes in a glass half-gallon with a $2 deposit and I return them to the store. It's kind of a game to scoop out a big plug of cream from the narrow-mouth bottle! I guess you're supposed to mix it into coffee or tea, but I just kind of eat it. Yummy. Also, this kind of milk seems to keep for a good bit of time and it goes sour very, very slowly. The fresh scent is very delicate.

The yogurt is likewise amazing. You can get European or you can get Greek, if you don't want to pay for water. I get the plain stuff and again, it's got delicate flavors and odor, not the real tang of plain mass-produced yogurt. It's great to mix with my Muesli or just have a few medicinal tablespoons every day. In fact, it's difficult to stop once I've started spooning it out.

Can you point to any documentation for the inflammation claim? A quick search didn't come up with much besides a study explicitly concluding the contrary: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09586...

Unfortunately, I circulate in woke bubbles where accurate medical information is actively contradicted, rewritten, and suppressed, so it's difficult for me to come by. I read it in a book, by authors with proven credentials, a good track record, and the book is replete with accurate yet suppressed information. I seldom bother searching for more of the same while I live in this backwater, because none of the search results or websites I find will deviate from the establishment narratives.

My stomach can't stand non homogenized milk. My father, on the other hand, loves it. Both of us were raised on it, only I had to be trained with the stick to drink it as a child.

Both of us are lactose intolerant. God knows why he likes it and I don't.

By non-homogenized I mean straight from the cow, still warm.

So i don't like homogenization because it destroys the mouth feel. So i am sympathetic to what you are saying.

However, what would the mechanism be for increased inflammation caused by homogenization? Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're not correct, but I'm more inclined to believe that there is a hidden, highly correlated variable at play.

Regardless of whether it has harmful effects or not, the fact is that homogenization is a wholly cosmetic operation; it's done because urban middle-class consumers were supposedly grossed out by solids floating in their milk and having to deal with the separate elements; it's done more or less in denial of the nature of milk in its natural state. There's no benefit, other than looks and feels, that homogenization offers, so why go through that process, expense, and bother if it's pointless, and may in fact be harmful? Just put the milk on the shelves. I feel that the cream is lovely and I'm thankful that it's separate so it can be handled appropriately.

Plastic litres jug milk sold in Ireland and the UK is what both commenters were comparing to the bland UHT milk.

Generally everything is available in the USA, but there are some surprising cases where the default product is of noticeable lower quality than the default in Europe.

Not gonna comment on something as subjective as "quality", but just the taste of Coca Cola is noticeably different in the US vs at home in the EU.

High-fructose corn syrup is used as the sweetener in US Coca-Cola, rather than sugar.

Yeah, I’d say that the default in the US is generally cheaper and lower quality than the default in France, at least (no experience with Ireland).

I would say that default dairy and meat quality is roughly the same in France and Ireland. France has an edge on bread and pastries, while fruit and veg depends on the season but because so much more has to be shipped into Ireland, France gets the edge there too.

If you spend the same amount in US as France (milk _is_ more expensive in France), is the quality the same? This comment only seems to confirm that cheaper milk will be worse.

Just with https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings... the price is within 10%.

Are you just talking about normal milk in Ireland like this?

https://www.tesco.ie/groceries/en-IE/products/250005606

It's essentially identical to whole milk in the US. Nutritionally, compositionally, and flavor-wise.

I really can't imagine what you're talking about "tasting like water" unless you switched to skim milk or 2% in the US without realizing it?

Nope. American milk is pasteurized to a much higher temp. It lasts way longer. Irish goes off in days, US milk will last a month in the fridge. The extra pasteurization effects the taste and flavor.

I can't find any evidence to support that.

High-Temperature, Short-Time (HSTS) Pasteurization appears to be the standard in both Ireland [1] and the US [2] -- 71.7°C / 161°F for 15 seconds.

And I can tell you from personal experience that US milk goes bad in days as well, and has for decades. I don't know where you're getting the idea that it lasts a month in the fridge.

There are real differences in some foods between the US and Europe, e.g. American eggs are washed while European ones aren't. But fresh milk from the supermarket appears to be very much identical.

[1] https://ndc.ie/accordion/what-is-pasteurisation/

[2] https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/why-is-milk-pasteurize...

I also looked into this and couldn't find any reliable information on what pasteurisation method was actually used in the UK.

I did find that US allows the use of hormones to increase milk production. Possibly that's a factor? But very difficult to tell.

I can say in my personal experience that fresh whole milk in Europe and the US tastes the same.

I really don't know why the original poster claimed otherwise. Maybe it's just an urban legend in parts of Europe or something.

I live in the US but grew up on a dairy farm in Ireland. In my personal experience the two milks are very different.

I think mikk is disgusting, but even the few times I've tried it in the USA it's obvious there's something wrong, lower quality, with it.

Perhaps it's the homogenization. Too aggressive perhaps?

Or maybe the comparatively poorer diet/aggressive production schedule?

Not that Im surprised though. The one thing I throughly dislike about the US (otherwise I love it) is the low foods standards. My local WF doesn't hold a candle to the quality of any grocery story in any country Ive lived in.

> mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway)

At 2% I would not even bother considering this product as a milk.

I don't think you deserve all the down votes. I grew up in the U.S. in the 90's drinking healthy 1% or skim milk, then lived in Europe for two years drinking probably 3.5% or 4% and I tried going back to low fat milk and just can't. Whole milk all the way

The taste difference between 2% and skim is vast to me, but the difference between 2% and 3.5% seems much less noticeable. I regularly buy either 2% or whole for no particular reason other than my mood and they are interchangeable, at least to my taste buds. Skim milk is just milky water as far as I'm concerned.

2% is semi-skimmed. I can’t imagine confusing what with whole milk. Even 3.5% and 5% are quite different from each other.

Here (Ontario Canada) 5% is sold as light cream.

That's angry American guys, probably *grin*

The other guy deleted his comment, but:

> it's 3.5%.

Thanks, I know, I say this about the taste and.. texture? At 2% it's just a watery fluid with a hint of milk for me. Back when I had milk in ny house I never bought anything with less than 3.5%, it was pointless for me.

I don't think the UK pasteurizes their milk to the same degree as North America. When I lived in the UK a pint of milk would last a week or so at most, but here in Canada it can last a month.

> here in Canada it can last a month.

This seems to depend on the container as well as the brand / market segment.

"low end" Nielson / Sealtest / Beatrice in bags seems to last < 2 weeks, whereas stuff like Natrel / Lactantia / Nielson Truetaste in cartons seems to last around a month.

A month??? That’s definitely different.

UHT can easily last longer, it's shelf-stable (like literally on the shelf, no refrigeration needed) for months.

It's kinda wild it has as small of an impact on taste as it does. There's absolutely a difference, but it's surprisingly decent.

Oh, yeah, UHT can last for ages on the shelf. But I read it as referring to ordinary milk, in the refrigerator. "When I lived in the UK a pint of milk would last a week or so at most" sounds about right for that.

I personally think there's a big difference in taste, and I don't use UHT unless I really need to, but I'm sure that's partly just snobbery. You're right that it's perfectly OK for most purposes.

I've tried UHT-processed milk in other countries and agree with you that the flavor is bizarre; usually the stuff is sold in TetraPak containers ime. But in the US, I can't tell the difference in flavor compared to non-UHT milk - Horizon was the first brand I noticed that sells mostly UHT milk products but nowadays, most grocery store-brand milk is UHT processed and it seems fine.

I live in the UK and always thought UHT milk was horrible. Recently I spent some time in Spain where all the milk is UHT (presumably because of the climate). At some point I realised I couldn't tell the difference, or at least it wasn't horrible. However, I was only consuming it heated up, like in a café con leche. Maybe that's why GP can't taste the difference?

Could be! I imagine I also notice the difference because I usually use UHT when I've run out of fresh milk. So the taste of coffee with fresh milk is pretty recent, vs travelling to another country.

I'm sure if I was using UHT every day I'd start to forget the difference.

I agree that the difference is very noticeable, but it's still small enough that if OP was, say, a smoker they might not be able to notice it.

In my personal experience I prefer the taste of UHT over traditional milk. I do however buy UHT from a local dairy.

UHT milk doesn't generally make good cheese. It can be used to make some simple cheeses, like ricotta, but the high temperature changes the proteins enough to make most rennet-curdled cheeses fail.

https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/fun-along-the-whey/problems-w...

I've heard that you're more likely to have success with reconstituted dry milk than with UHT milk, but I haven't tried it.

> Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting

Eating by the seasons is mundane and normal almost everywhere in the world.

For certain definitions of "almost everywhere", I suppose? Care to define that more rigorously?

Most American city-dwellers I know wouldn't be aware of in-season food items, and wouldn't care either, because grocery stores stock almost everything year-round, so if you're meal planning based on what's in season it's nearly an afterthought, or superfluous. Growing food in the desert and importing it from the Southern Hemisphere really works to blur those lines for us. When I was preparing fresh meals at home, I considered eating what's in-season and paying attention, but that turned out to be a lot of pointless work.

> For certain definitions of "almost everywhere", I suppose? Care to define that more rigorously?

Good question. In my experience it's people who don't live in very developed countries plus people who shop at fresh food markets and countries that have a culture of not eating a lot of processed food e.g. in good part of Europe plus people who live in the countryside.

Let's say maybe 90% of human population.

Usual definition of "almost everywhere" does not include American cities but almost everywhere else.

Are you sure? Obesity, caused by eating processed food, is normal almost everywhere.

I doubt this. Obesity, caused by eating processed food is certainly happening in many places, but outside the USA I don't think it's normal

> They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter.

From a prior post [1], the no-flight period for the South pole is ~8 months, which really stretches the shelf life of UHT milk.

[1] https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out

If you ignore the "best by" label on UHT milk, it can easily (safely) last 8 months. Especially if you store it at 32/33° F.

But more practically, there are different types of containers for UHT milk hermetically sealed to different extents. The more expensive kinds can last years. The US Military says 10 months for "normal" UHT milk stored under "normal" conditions [0]. The more expensive kinds can go much longer.

[0]: https://www.dla.mil/Troop-Support/Subsistence/Operational-ra...

I'll also add, most food products down there are "expired" already. When I was down there, it was often a challenge to find the oldest piece of food. I think we found 5 years + beyond the Best By date.

Best by dates for shelf stable/frozen food are often not safety related, so the antarctic program just charges forward with whatever they have.

UHT milk is terrible. As a brit, when I'm abroad I notice it immediately and it ruins an otherwise good cup of tea or coffee.

Milk freezes well. If they can afford to carry UHT milk all the way there, then you might as well take the fresh stuff and freeze it. Then it'll keep.

It freezes well but will spoil between 2-3 months. Maybe the much lower temperature would delay spoilage a bit more?

Most milk is ultrapasteurized and homogenized, making the difference between shelf stable milk pretty unnoticeable. Good cream-top milk is on another plane of reality.

It does taste significantly worse than fresh milk if you're not used to it, but definitely better than powdered milk.

And bad news is you can't really make decent cheese out of UHT milk, since the proteins have been denatured by the heat.

Really surprised you can't tell the difference between regular milk and UHT. I always assumed UHT was the inspiration for the Dog's Milk scene from Red Dwarf!

Anchor Full Cream Milk Powder. Powdered, but some of the best milk we've ever tasted. Great for lattes and mochas. IMHO much, much better than UHT. From New Zealand, so wouldn't even have to ship it very far. Expensive, though, ordering it in the U.S.--equivalent of 22 liters is over $50. Popular in Dominican Republic and think other parts of Lat. Am., so can probably get it cheaper.

There was a Googler who spent some time at the South Pole station and gave a talk about it. I won't name him here, but maybe he's reading this?

What I recall was him walking around and over the actual Pole and trying to get his GPS to register 90.0 degrees. It wouldn't go beyond 89.999.

Hackers would probably also love to consider that a lot of hardware that has code that depends on lat/lon for internal calculations can have all sorts of weird problems. When you are exactly at the pole longitude can switch from +180 to -180 rapidly and that can be a catastrophic edge case for anything that needs to do positioning.

I had the pleasure of watching an expensive drone crash into hull of a ship and sink into the ocean at the north pole for this exact reason.

Since all the longitude lines converge there, that's expected behavior, right?

How was your food up there?

How come you were at the North Pole?

There are scientific, mining, and pleasure trips

Hah, I also tried this over the summer. Closest I could get was 89°59.9990'S:

https://brr.fyi/assets/misc/gps-01.png

Very amusing to do a few "laps around the world" and watch the longitude go haywire.

Hi! Like everybody here on HN I love your site. Have you tried on a Garmin handheld too? It seems like something brr.fyi would pack for the trip

Why wouldn't you name him here?

Why do you care?

Well, I personally would be interested to see the talk/learn more about those in tech who have gone to the pole.

There are several Polies here (and folks who've spent time in other cool places - Ross Island, Greenland, Atacama Desert come to mind) and at least some are in tech.

My Pole experience is a bit dated, but happy to chat about it. Blog from that is https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/

(also, I dig the single-page latex resume format!)

I've been at these two places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert%2C_Nunavut

And yes: It was cold.

About food there were supplies almost every week as far as I remember, but I believe we got UHT milk.

Hah thank you! LaTeX was the easiest way to avoid using a WYSIWYG editor

I'll check out that blog, thanks for linking!

well, since someone else named him (and btw, I just thought it was rude, that's all):

I think this is the talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

Glad you're being conscencious but why would it be rude to name somebody who wants to share their amazing experience? In fact, I think in today's world or would be rude not to promote their name and story link to their video.

Pablo Cohn, I believe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

yup. It didn't occur to me that it was on YouTube.

Always love when this blog is posted. Seeing the day-to-day in one of the least mundane places humans exist is a special kind of interesting.

The author has the same curiosity I have in how the mundane is provided, in perhaps the least hospitable inhabited place on the planet.

I see these and I say "oh yeah, that Antarctica blog that I tell everyone about."

I have always loved reading about people who live in extreme environments. It's also a great topic in science fiction.

Not sure how to explain my attraction to these stories, but as someone who lived for many years in the San Luis Valley ( https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149599/san-luis-val... ) it's easy to relate.

I spent a year in the SLV, what a cool place! Great rock climbing, mountain climbing, skiing, biking, at such high elevation. The deer everywhere. Gorgeous weather (usually). Cool junk yards. Some great gems hidden away…

Definitely want to spend more time there.

It's such a special treat! I really love it.

Micro-related: A Place Further than the Universe - a lovely anime about four high school girls going to Antarctica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Further_than_the_Unive...

One of my favorite anime series! It is one of my top recommendations for newcomers to anime. I'm looking forward to the long-overdue Blu-ray release in North America by Anime Limited.

Thanks for recommending this. It's on crunchyroll and I just started watching. Couple episodes in and loving it.

I'm surprised the greenhouse isn't larger and/or there isn't significant research there about growing under man-made conditions. I would think for example NASA might be able to use it as a research center while also benefitting the diets of the rest of the researchers there.

Wouldn't a larger greenhouse require more power and therefore more fuel for the generators? I would figure that's a major reason why.

I was wonder why they don't have chickens somewhere so that they can have fresh eggs/meat/etc. It could potentially be a good way to re-use food scraps, although I'm sure they're already doing something useful with those.

> I was wonder why they don't have chickens somewhere

It's probably a bio security thing. If these chickens escape into the wild there's the risk of infecting the local bird life with new diseases or viruses that the local population have no defences against.

If the chickens escaped, wouldn't they be frozen solid in minutes and effectively biologically inert?

You'd be OK at the pole, but somewhere like McMurdo? It's often mild enough for a chicken to survive in the summer for a while, certainly long enough to interact with local wildlife.

Plus, scavengers would still be an issue with dead birds.

[dead]

If the goal is to research growing in man made conditions then you don't really get anything out of the logistical difficulty of Antartica. The natural conditions are the whole point.

The research is not just "we can grow things", but what is required to do it successfully long term, with significant logistical challenges.

You would also bring value to the inhabitants of the base, so it's not just the gain in knowledge.

And people think we're gonna colonize mars. We can't even colonize the south pole, a much more hospitable environment.

I'd argue that we absolutely could colonize the south pole if people were as excited about it as we are about colonizing Mars. I think it's less that we "can't" and more that governments don't really care about it as much.

It's instructive that none of the solutions proposed for growing fresh food on Mars have been tried at either McMurdo (which is a huge and lavishly outfitted research base) or the South Pole.

This is part of what I think of as the Martian fallacy, the idea that stuff that's hard to do on Earth somehow becomes easier on Mars.

Well some of the solutions have been tried elsewhere. It's not hard to simulate "no stuff from the outside", that's not something you need to go to the south pole to do. There is an argument to be made for the disease vector thing, but even that would probably be cheaper to do in a completely closed loop system somewhere more hospitable.

Sure, but the point is not whether or not the thing has been tried. It's that at McMurdo they haven't tried them.

Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate.

We can't survive as a species with all our eggs in one basket (pun intended, given the context) where a single rock flying through space can wipe out all the gains of our civilization.

In the long term, this will require planetary-scale terraforming.

In the short term, this will require seasonal unmanned supply drops and so the experience will not be dissimilar to McMurdo and Mars Colonists will also be cooking their "last egg of the year"

In the medium term, I have to imagine we will have to conduct experiments with either developing livestock on Mars, or growing satisfactory animal protein replacements in a lab.

> Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate.

I don't know why people say this like it's a fact. It'd be cheaper to fix the planet. Even if it weren't, the moon is many magnitudes closer. Also, "terraforming" mars isn't even possible. Mars has no magnetosphere - if you managed to create an atmosphere at all, it would be promptly blown away by solar winds and radiation.

Solar winds aren’t literal winds. The atmosphere doesn’t just “blow away” on a windy day.

When people say the atmosphere blew away they mean over a period of millions of years. We can easily resupply an atmosphere every million years.

The south pole IS colonized. There is literally a colony there since 1956

A colony implies sustained long-term habitation by the same people; that's not true for the South Pole station, which is a research facility where people rotate out.

As far as I know, the only country to try colonizing Antarctica proper has been Argentina, with a small number of families settling at Esperanza Base (at the north end of the Antarctic Penninsula) and a big fuss made about the first kids born on the Antarctic mainland.

Chile maintains a little civilian settlement called Villa Las Estrellas on an offshore Antarctic island with similar motives as the Argentines. Everyone else just ignores this embarrassing rivalry.

Checking via Wikipedia, the entire population of the continent (not just ASSPS) is 4,000, in the summer. It drops to about 1,000 in winter.

As you note, there've been several births (Wikipedia states 11), with those listed being Argentine.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica>

I interpret the OP's use of the term "colonize" to mean "permanently relocate to"

Well, there are a lot of international agreements to NOT develop Antarctica, and instead keep it as pristine as possible.

Bah, we'll just melt the place and make it hospitable. You know, at the expense of everywhere else. Good practice for colonizing Venus though. :)

You forget indigenous tribes in Siberia, some of them experience -70C without modern technology.

The indigenous people of the Arctic have gear that's very competitive with modern kit. I've only been down to somewhere below -50C (where my thermometer stopped), but the stuff I had for that wasn't nearly as good as the fur clothing I've seen Inuits use.

various places say you can keep unwashed eggs in a fridge for up to six months: https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-long-do-farm-fresh-eggs-l...

> Unwashed farm fresh eggs last for two weeks to a month at room temperature. After that, you must store them in the fridge. If you refrigerate freshly laid eggs, they should last for three to six months in an airtight container.

However, Americans have an obsession with washing eggs, which makes them not last as long. I wonder if they could get permission to have unwashed eggs.

Unwashed eggs can also be stored in a water-lime solution for potentially years. It's called water glassing.They might not taste as good as fresh eggs, but like for an omelet with flavorings, you probably wouldn't notice, and you definitely wouldn't notice for baking, but I guess there are powdered eggs for that.

The last flight was 4 months ago, a washed egg probably wouldn't have survived this long.

It would be interesting to know where the supplies come from -- do the American ship everything halfway across the world from the USA, or buy things from New Zealand?

both. (for mcmurdo/south pole) most of the dry/canned/frozen food is procured in the USA and loaded on a vessel in port hueneme for the once a year resupply vessel. "freshies" are ordered from new zealand and flown down on available flights.

I wonder how much trouble keeping chickens in the greenhouse would be. I feel like some partially agua culture setup that’s closed loop and consumes the compost could work well, but is probably too expensive in terms of heated square footage to make sense.

I'd be concerned about the health risks. Poultry can spread a few nasty bacterial diseases to humans, and in a closed and isolated environment like this contagion is surely something to be strenuously avoided.

Sure but these chickens would be isolated from the outside world, like a lab setting, so how would they come in contact with something that could harm humans?

classic paper from 1973: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3862013 "An Outbreak of Common Colds at an Antarctic Base after Seventeen Weeks of Complete Isolation"

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ has the full text.

Oh, like raised from the egg kind of situation?

I think there still an issue of cross contamination with things that don't grow on humans or objects, but love chickens in the air or incidental dusts.

> Sure but these chickens would be isolated from the outside world, like a lab setting

Until one day that security setting breaks down.

There's something comical about having freezers in Antartica, even when you understand the reason why they are there.

Technically they are warmers :)

The freezers are in the heated main station, however since the "waste heat" from the generators is put to use it's not as inefficient a system as one might assume.

The comical part of the food storage situation is that the station was basically built without anywhere near enough of it. The main "dry store" is in a room on a different level from the kitchen, labelled "Science Storage", and most of the near-to-hand frozen stuff is on an outside loading deck near the galley.

I have no insights beyond what I read in the OP, but my point was that those freezers are actually warmer than outside. So "anywhere near enough" might in fact be enough if you can store deep-frozen things outside on the loading deck.

You only need enough freezer capacity to "warm up" the outside stuff to normal freezer temperatures (the article mentions this). This only depends on the warm up time, and number of people / consumption rate. Mission duration only impacts how much outdoor space is used.

My observation is based on spending over a year in that station, and being close with someone who was a chef there.

It really isn't as simple as those "only" statements. There are other uses for freezers than warming stuff up to normal freezer temperature. The on-station food storage situation is a real hack. Shoveling snow off boxes of food in your too-small outdoor deep-freeze doesn't need to be part of the chef's job. Reading red printing on those cardboard boxes, is rather difficult under the red light that tends to be preferred outside in winter.

Why can't they keep chicken??? Chicken need water and layers pellets (which store fine). You get fresh eggs every day and free manure to use in your greenhouse! I really don't understand why they don't do it.

Interesting idea but there might be some issues.

I think this would dramatically increase ventilation needs. How many people are on base? Remember, you're not even getting 1 egg per chicken per day. At that point, you're in the chicken farming business, not the science base business.

Also, how long would the chickens last with zero exposure to natural sunlight and cramped conditions? It could be hard on them.

That’s literally what a factory farm is so there’s no issue with that.

There's no other factory farms in Antarctica that I'm aware of, I think it's exponentially more difficult to establish and conduct such an operation there is my point.

Well, there's bird flu...

Not if they hatch them from eggs there isn't. And it's not like they're going to keep them outdoors.

Chickens get sick from wild birds... No wild birds here.

I want to know who got that egg, and how they decided. Egg lottery?

I'm going to assume it's like the scene from Don Rosa's Hearts of the Yukon.

https://ibb.co/8rw8VdF

That or planned out ahead of time. Like, there's 10 people and 120 eggs? Easy division.

I like the blog being called "brr".

I learned that powdered milk makes perfectly fine yogurt and after that keeping some as emergency storage hasn't seemed so depressing

How do people deal with zero humidity? Does everyone use a CPAP to sleep?

I'm fairly certain the air will be conditioned and inside humidity kept to an acceptable standard.

Indoor air is heated but not humidified. Relative humidity outside is high, but the temperature is very cold, so the absolute amount of water in the air is very low. Bring that same air indoors, heat it up by ~150 degrees Fahrenheit, and the resulting relative humidity is very low.

Hard to measure at such low numbers. I have a handful of cheap consumer-grade sensors with me, and they all report "0%" or "lower limit" or equivalent. I can't share readings from official NSF-owned equipment.

Static buildup is a real issue. It's muscle memory now for me to ground myself before touching any electronics. There's makeshift grounding points (metal tape, metal frames, etc) everywhere. I'm still not used to the little shocks every time.

I humidify my bedroom at night using portable humidifiers. This takes ~1.5 gallons of water per night, which is deemed an acceptable use of water. Most people do this. I can get my room up to ~15% humidity with a reasonable amount of effort. The difference in sleep quality is noticeable.

Frost buildup is a real issue in humidified spaces, given the temperature gradient to the outside, even with triple-pane windows. The greenhouse has no exterior windows, so this isn't a problem.

The greenhouse is kept at ~25% relative humidity. It's the only place on station with infrastructure in place to provide humidity directly through the HVAC system.

Much appreciated for expanding on the humidity thing.

> Static buildup is a real issue. It's muscle memory now for me to ground myself before touching any electronics. There's makeshift grounding points (metal tape, metal frames, etc) everywhere. I'm still not used to the little shocks every time.

I did wonder about that, and so it is a thing you need to learn to live with. As I'd mentioned in a comment below, I had the misfortune of working in a newly built data centre where the HVAC was still being commissioned/tuned that caused the humidity to drop severely in the rack zones. It was a right pain in the fingers being zapped frequently as we moved racks and other non-electronic infrastructure into place. But it was also comedic as well as you could regularly hear quiet yelps and expletives from others in the team as they too were being zapped :)

Wouldn't you need additional fire suppression at those levels of humidity? It's more dry than Southern California during the Santa Ana winds!

From the article: "The greenhouse is a volunteer affair, and it yields enough for herbs and the occasional salad! It’s also the only place on station with humidity! Since the rest of the station has near-zero humidity, it’s a treat to spend time in here."

I'd have to question what "near-zero" actually means. I don't doubt that outside the humidity is super low, but inside I have my doubts.

Super low humidity increases the risk of ESD which wouldn't be fantastic for any electronics.

You'd need to walk around with a grounding strap all day otherwise you'll be zapping every bit of metal you encounter. I worked in a newly built data centre where the air conditioning (not the chillers) wasn't tuned quite right and the humidity dropped so low that we were being zapped left right and centre. So I'd love to see the actual figure they're using as "near-zero".

Among other factors: humidity, even at modest levels, means frost and ice accumulation in any spaces with a thermal gradient.

Given that there's a roughly 150F / 85C temperature differential from the inside (assuming ~70F / 20C interior temperature, and -70F / -55C exterior), and that it never thaws, this means frost/ice accumulation is probably a major structural hazard. Even if it was possible to humidify interior spaces, it might be avoided for that reason.

(I'm of course speculating, though based on discussion of PassivHaus designs in Fairbanks Alaska and the attention paid to moisture, vapour barriers, and frost accumulation, as well as an earlier article I believe linked to HN showing the cold food storage at ASSPS which included massive amounts of accumulated frost, and that I suspect just from moisture contributed by the breathing of occupants / workers within the cold (ambient) storage structure.)

I talked about this with an architect friend, who also mentioned that at-scale humidification is difficult, expensive, and prone to molding. In thinking about air exchange, it seems like they would have to desiccate the outgoing air and shift the moisture to incoming air, which would have to be a challenge.

Interesting.

I've heard of heat recovery on air exchange, but never humidity recovery.

I'm not sure to what degree water is readily available at ASSPS (yes, there's snow all around, but it's cold, and actual precipitation is low), but humidifying air is ... reasonably low-cost, modulo thermal budget for melting snow/ice in the first place.

That second greenhouse picture is a nightmare! If it were anywhere else on the planet, I'd say someone needs to trim the tomatoes and give them some breathing room to avoid fungal infections but the low humidity and the carefully cultured environment probably take care of that.

I remember when I first learned about pruning. Tomato plants were way more organized after that!

Before that I was optimizing for growing as much and as fast as possible. It’s fun but it’s a mess.

That tomato plant looks like something out of a pulp-era comic book - It Came From The Greenhouse!

Does anyone know how to get a foot in the door for jobs in places like this? Not necessarily Antarctica, could be Greenland or other remote, harsh places. I am a regular software engineer from the EU, would be over the moon to pursue something like this

Long-term stays is going to be a lot harder than shorter visits. Need/option for such travel tends to be explicitly called out in job descriptions by scientific agencies/institutes running such things. If you're not at it from a scientific angle, expect it to be technician roles (and thus adjust year salary expectations accordingly)

What about short-term stays? Is it usually only as a visitor, or there might be volunteering opportunities?

This is the sort of content that makes the internet so amazing, someone sharing a slice of life from so far away and so remote that 100 years ago this would've been unimaginable!

This expedition gives us a peek at the future life of habitats outside of Earth. It makes one very thankful for the planetary environment we live in.

I was going to suggest they do what they did in Vietnam when the couldn't get milk for coffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_coffee

But then I remembered I'm reading an article about the last egg getting used up.

It feels to me like all the described problems should be something we will encounter in space. If we want to grow beyond this planet, isn't that a good motivation to solve them down here?

November?! How hard could it be to supply the station with fresh food once a month?

It's really hard! Reasons include:

- Ambient temperatures too low for most fuels and lubricants, and out of spec for most other parts of the aircraft

- No hope of rescue if the plane goes down or gets lost

- No reliable way to light the runway. In the past they've used gasoline filled drums, but it can get so cold that the gasoline vapor pressure is too low and it won't light.

- Extreme isolation—there's really nowhere a flight can divert to south of New Zealand apart from McMurdo, which has its own problems

Remember that the South Pole station is just a small structure on top of a featureless high plateau. There are no paved runways, navigational aids, no heated hangars, no infrastructure of any kind to support aircraft arriving in the dead of night. The risk has been worth taking for urgent medevac flights, but no one is going to gamble with aircrews' lives over a bunch of eggs.

It's not hard, just expensive. Airdropping supplies through winter was routine until it was cut for budgetary reasons.

At the South Pole? A 2011 midwinter airdrop of emergency medical supplies was treated as a big deal; when did it become routine?

It was routine up until IIRC 1996-1999 (which lines up with when they switched over from Navy to National Guard operation).

You sure we don't have an austral winter/calendar winter misunderstanding here?

The source I remember was specifically criticising the media coverage of the later one.

I find that a weird comment when he just explained why it was hard.

I wonder if a one-way UAV cargo plane could make the trip. Might not be worth it for eggs, but maybe something more important.

Planes like C17 can overfly and airdrop stuff.

https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/up-on-the-...

See one of their previous posts: <https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out>

They could easily have a few chickens running around in a small area and have fresh eggs year round. Feed the chickens table scraps plus free choice chicken feed. Gets rid of a lot of the waste.

Fresh milk can be frozen but I think it is only good for 6 months. And it has low calorific density so probably not ideal for (the south pole I am guessing?)

Imagine how many fresh vegetables they could have with a miniaturized nuclear reactor on-site!

The limit right now is how much diesel they want to waste. Imagine the alternatives!

No need to imagine; it's been tried - McMurdo installed a nuclear power plant back in 1962. The reactor proved to be expensive and unreliable, so the Navy removed it a decade later. Cleaning up the mess took another seven years.

That’s annoying. It’s the perfect place for a reactor. Infinite heat and running water would make a real difference.

I remember reading that the range of nuclear subs isn't limited by air or water or power (obviously) but by the need to restock fresh food.

Fantastic blog on infrastructure at the bottom of the world from the perspective of an IT guy. Super cool stuff!

This is what it will be like in a mars colony. I hope I get to visit and experience that one day.

What about penguin eggs?

This is the south pole, near the center of the continent. Penguins are coastal.

The penguins are also protected. You’re generally not even supposed to touch them, let alone eat them.

That's also a reason, but the closest penguin being 500+ miles away through the Antarctic winter seems like a much larger barrier.

Does eating an egg count as eating a penguin?

Let's not get all philosophical here

Let's not get all political here

I don't think even the most rabid pro-choicer would consider an unfertilized egg alive.

I thought the link was gonna be this... https://egggame.org/

I was not expecting the last egg to look like that.

What a cool blog!

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