Ice must flow!
That ice sheet is](First complete map of Antarctica ice flow - NASA Science)
That ice sheet isn’t sitting still.
I was assuming this would be for storing solar from the summer. Wind would be very difficult in Antarctica for several reasons.
In theory, that would work. In practice, it would be such a huge amount of machinery, number of blocks, etc. that it wouldn’t be practical. Here’s a good explanation about why we aren’t using gravity storage (other than hydro) in any great amount:
Interesting. Possibly 800 feet annually but “that ice moves by slipping along the ground it rests on” so structuring the surface or submerged into the sheet will both be moving the same.
No doubt it would be a technical challenge to design ones for the specific conditions, including temperatures and extreme wind forces. What problems are you thinking that would be insurmountable?
In point of fact the concept is hydro gravity storage. 
The reason pumped hydro works is that the scale of the hydro moved is sufficient for the task. The challenge would be to engineer a means to move enough mass of ice enough distance to store adequate energy. And the comparison for practical would be to the cost and long term reliability of alternative energy storage options.
The biggest problem with an Antarctic colony is that other than a few select locations it’s all glacier ice. There’s nothing to mine, nothing useful as a building material, nothing that can be used to make anything. Not even rock to build with directly, use as filler in concrete, or soil for growing crops in greenhouses. Ice. Drill through the ice you say? Drilling through over 10,000 feet of ice is non-trivial and that’s before you can actually extract anything from the underlying bedrock. How the heck do you prospect for anything through miles of overlying ice? And as mentioned upthread glacier ice flows; inches per year but it flows. This for example defeated a plan to establish forward nuclear missile bases in Greenland. It also complicates relying on ground-based transport because routes have to be re-graded every season to fill in any newly opened crevasses in the ice.
The second biggest problem is energy. The South Pole might be the hardest location on Earth to make a go of solar power, and see above for difficulties in obtaining any mineral sources of energy.
There’s just too little to work with. In some respects Mars actually offers a richer bounty for sustaining human settlement.
ETA: rather than fart around with trying to raise and lower solid blocks of ice as weights, it might be less impractical to add some sort of antifreeze to ice to keep it in liquid form at Antarctic temperatures.
I mean, everything would be very difficult in Antarctica for several reasons. The question is just whether wind is less difficult than other options.
Near the shore there is (practically) infinite amount of water – and Antarctica has mountains – assuming one could keep the fluid liquid, are there good locations for pumped “hydro”?
There is enough aquatic life in the area to support 10s of millions of penguins, seems you could support quite a few humans based on krill or whatever the lowest practical food chain thing that can be harvested.(penguins apparently taste bad, and may not be the best source). Whales?
How about greenhouses on the peninsula?
Brian
Yes the peninsula is technically Antarctica, but I feel like that’s cheating.
As others said, you need 6 months of storage to cover winter. That’s impractical unless you synthesize liquid fuels from the excess power generated in summer.
Mars has less light, which you can just compensate for with more panels. But its nights are just 12 hours, which current battery tech can handle. So it’s no problem as long as you dust them off from time to time.
They’ll reduce solar output, but not to zero. A colony would probably have to curtail industry when the storms are going. But they aren’t going to destroy machinery or cover them with large dunes or anything.
Certainly. I’m not claiming that Mars is easier. Just that not everything favors Antarctica.
Though MrDibble’s cite of exposed coal seams is interesting. Very Frostpunk to burn coal in the dark winters at your last outpost of civilization.
Of course, the only reason you’ll still find exposed coal seams anywhere on Earth is because it’s difficult to extract it for other reasons. If it were easy, we’d already have burned it.
But, again, everything is hard in Antarctica, and it’s just a question of what’s less hard.
Sorry in turn to be That Poster myself. Oops on me.
Yes, it’s “until further notice”.
UFN is such a universal corporate / government bureaucracy term that I don’t even see it as an acronym anymore. It’s simply a word that means roughly “indefinitely” or “forever, most likely”.
I know the feeling well. To me, “SOP” is a word, and I use it automatically. I’m always amazed when people don’t know it but apparently a lot of folks don’t; I think I even asked here on the Dope and few people were familiar with Standard Operating Procedures.
There was a bit more to it than that. Not the least of which was their duplicity in concealing sneaking in auxiliary items. Had they conducted themselves in a more rigorous scientific manner, they might have got additional funding.
But in addition to the bio part of it not working, there was the issue of infighting. This turned out to be a bigger problem than originally assumed.
Biosphere 2 failed for many reasons. But what really failed technologically was creating a closed cycle atmosphere. Which certainly is a cautionary tale for e.g. Mars colonies. But is utterly irrelevant to Antarctic colonies.
The Norwegians tried it, or was it the crazy Swedes? It didn’t work out so well due to an unexpected visitor. Just ask MacReady and the crew (assuming they lived).
If a Mars colony is mass producing liquid oxygen in quantities sufficient to fuel return trips to Earth, I presume that imperfect closed cycling would be tolerable in the mid-term.
Biosphere 2 was a weird attempt at replicating Earth’s biosphere at a small scale. It was sorta bound to fail, and doesn’t say much about actually engineering a closed system.
If you were really serious about it, you’d use genetically engineered algae for a whole lot of stuff, especially oxygen and food production. And you certainly wouldn’t bother with… chickens and goats. A self-sustaining colony is going to be vegetarian until it grows by a lot.
I dunno; chickens are pretty sustainable. They’re a good method for turning human-inedible food scraps into human-edible high-quality protein.
TWO good methods, in fact.
Chickens would probably be the first vertebrate I’d add, but most food scrap is gonna go into the composter at first. And I suspect insect protein is going to be the most efficient animal source for a while.
A small colony just doesn’t have much room for complicated feedstock loops. Too much inefficiency and too much exposure to risk in case something goes wrong. When you get to 100k people, then you can add chickens.
The Transantarctic Mountains present more than “a few” locations.
We only really know of coal and iron ore resources, but that’s only because mineral exploration in Antarctica is banned. Given its geological variability, there’s absolutely no reason Antarctica wouldn’t have all the mineral resources of every other continent (except bauxite).