Just looked at the claims from the earlier link. I can understand why Norway has a claim (initially) but why does it maintain the claim? They are so far apart (The UK as well for that matter).
Is there a strategic/ economic reason for any country maintaining any claim to an area?
Did you hunt or fish there, and did you eat any of the local wildlife? If so, how was it?
I don’t have anything to ask, but I’d just like to say that since I’m currently living through a frigid Canadian winter, I don’t really envy people who have gone to Antarctica. 
Cold weather… shrinkage… need I say more? 
Going to Antarctica is something I’ve wanted to do for ages, and since I’ve been reading a lot of Antarctic literature lately, it’s become something I want to do very badly!
Doggo, how did you handle the isolation and darkness if you were there over the winter? Was your schedule mostly working (in winter, or at any other time) or did you get plenty of opportunities to relax?
I think it would be cool if you could just walk us through a “typical day”. Be as brief or as detailed as you like.
What questions are you not able to answer? 
I’ve been interested in Antarctica and Tibet since early childhood. I was raised on exploring/mountaineering books.
My great-grandparents were missionaries in western China (think Sichuan) in the 1890’s, and brought back Tibetan artifacts.
I almost got to Tibet in 1989, but Tiananmen Square quashed that for me. Instead, I went to northern India (should’ve gotten to Leh in Ladakh, but tourists were being shot at – the trip was rerouted en route), Nepal, Sikkim (Gangtok!), Thailand, and Japan. It was still pretty interesting, and by that late date Lhasa had already been trashed 
I ended up in Alaska for a number of years and seriously pondered trying to land a job in Antarctica. But I doubted my “psychological” condition & dental health, so never even applied. Pity!
Thanks for sharing. I have no immediate questions. Maybe later in life I can take a cruise 
Seriously, it is great you got the chance to go. mrAru’s uncle was a supply pilot for the base back in the early 60s.
They are not Norwegians, they’re crazy Swedes.
Do they have any sled dogs there? Are they looked at suspiciously? (The Thing).
Seriously, I would like to know more about some of the living conditions there. How much time do people spend outside? Do people go outside in the winter at all?
Has anyone done any skiing or snowboarding in their spare time (that would be something - to ski and/or snowboard Antarctica).
Is the night sky ever clear - what can you see constellation-wise?
What happens to the camps’ trash and waste? Is it packed out of there?
Are there any crimes, or fights? How is discipline handled? Are there guns?
What is the food like?
Thanks for starting this, Doggo!
For one there are significant, or at least very promising, mineral deposits in Antarctica, IIRC.
I can answer some of these for the Pole. I haven’t spent any time elsewhere on the continent though so the answers may not be accurate for all the bases.
That’s exactly why we use snow machines instead of sled dogs now. 
There actually aren’t any animals at all on base.
The living conditions are a lot like being in a college dorm. You get your small room (without a roommate) in the main station. If you’re unlucky, get get to live in one of the small buildings outside - the hypertats. The rooms are about the same size but there’s no running water so you have to go to an outhouse or hoof it over to the station. Funnily enough, there is wifi in the hypertats, not that it means anything most of the time as the satellites aren’t always visible.
The rooms in station have phones and ethernet connections. They also have electric lights (instead of relying on the windows, like the hypertats.) The rooms are on hallways that have bathrooms (including a couple showers). Each week, you’re allowed two 2-minute showers. It’s not so bad though because of the coldness and the dryness, nothing really smells and I think that the bacterial growth is also inhibited.
In the station, there are lots of fun things to do - we have lounges with pool tables, darts, big screen TV’s, etc. There’s an arts and crafts room, a gym, a music room, an exercise room, a sauna… There are also a ton of events scheduled every day. (These are run by whoever wants to do them. For instance, if you feel like teaching a kung fu class while you’re there, then you start a class and put it on the schedule.)
As far as being outside goes, it depends on your job. I was outside 12-14 hours a day for mine (although parts of that were spent inside for eating lunch, using the outhouse - if that can be considered “inside,” cleaning up equipment, etc). If you work an IT job, you might not leave the station at all unless you make an effort to.
During the winter, people definitely go outside but I think the trips are shorter. I don’t really know much about that yet but a couple friends are wintering-over this year so, in a few months, I’ll know more.
Definitely. Snowboarding at the pole might be pretty boring because it’s really flat. (Can you cross-country snowboard?) Skiing is one of the hobbies that people engage in, though. There were skis propped up all over the place around station. During our annual Race Around the World, we had a few people skiing, too.
It’s clear a lot. I know you can see the auroras - they’re really vibrant, I’ve heard. I would assume you could see a lot of stars because there’s not a lot of light pollution, however, the snow also reflects a lot of light so I don’t really know.
Exactly. Everything gets packed up and shipped out. The exception to this is the human waste at the station. So, we have these things called Rodwells. Basically, they drill down and melt a bunch of ice which creates a small underwater reservoir. The water is pumped out and that’s where we getting our running water. Once the Rodwell is empty, they drill and new one. The old, empty one - well, it gets filled with waste.
Most of the stuff that leaves the station is recycled though. We had about 3,000,000 different recycling bins (mixed paper, plastic, paper towels, food waste, light ferrous metals, etc). We also have a “non-r” bin for things that just can’t be recycled. The only thing I ever put in non-r was a pair of earplugs.
The only thing that happened while I was there involved a missing 6-pack of beer. The result was an email to everyone on the station reminding us that it was Christmas time and we needed to respect each other’s property.
In general, nothing is locked at the station. My bedroom door had a lock, but it didn’t work. (I didn’t even actually try it till the last day, and just because I was curious - I hadn’t realized it had a lock before that.) People just seem to get along and to respect each other’s stuff. I think I’ve only heard of one exception to that, which is the treatment of the common spaces, in particular, the lounges. There’s a lot of drinking that goes on in the lounges and drunk people don’t always clean up after themselves so, sometimes, the lounges can get kinda trashed. We just get emails about that, too.
It’s awesome. I never eat as well at home as I did at Pole. We have a cafeteria (that’s free - everything but the store is free) and our chefs our amazing. Our head chef was actually interviewed by Gordon Ramsay a few weeks ago. Anyway, breakfast always involves eggs and hashbrowns of some sort. There’s usually bacon or sausage, too, and you can have toast and coffee. Sometimes we also have fruit and yogurt. On Sundays, we have brunch and you can order an omelet. For lunch and dinner, the menu is really variable but almost always good. We’ve had spaghetti, Antarctic cod, German food, etc. There’s always a vegetarian option, too. Oh, and lots of desserts. I had so many cookies and so much ice cream while I was there. I didn’t actually lose any weight (which is really common because of the altitude and the cold).
On holidays, there are special dinners. Christmas, we got Beef Wellington and lobster (with a lot of great side dishes). We also had Christmas cookies and truffles for dessert. The next day, the chefs had use the leftover lobster to make breakfast quesadillas. I think we had sushi that day, too…
This was my typical day (not a Sunday, because we didn’t work then):
Wake up early, 5:30-ish to check the internet/make phone calls. If it’s a shower day, take my 2-minute shower. Get dressed in street clothes (or long underwear/whatever I was going to wear under my cold weather gear). Go to breakfast around 6:45am. Eat with the people that I worked with. Chat for a little bit. Back to my room at 7:15 so that I could put my cold weather gear on and maybe check email one last time.
7:30, meet at one of the station exits for “carpooling” to work. Ride on the snow machines out to the work site. (It was about a 20 minute ride for us but we were kinda far away. Almost everyone else was closer to station than us.)
Good day: work from 8 am to 6pm and then ride back to the station in time for dinner and to visit the store (that’s only open from 6 to 7).
Bad day: work from 8am to 8pm and then ride back to the station and eat leftovers.
When we were at work, we didn’t go back to the station for lunch. One person would go back, pack up some coolers full of food, and then come back to camp. We’d end up eating sometime around 1 or 2 pm.
After work and dinner, there were various options for entertainment. The satellites wouldn’t be up till 11pm so there was no internet in the evenings, unless you stayed up late (but it was iffy that the satellite would actually work at 11). Generally, we hung out with each other and talked, watched TV shows (on DVD), or went to the sauna. All of those usually involved drinking to some degree.
Then, sometime between 9pm and 2am, depending on the person and the night, we’d go to bed.
Sundays, we had off so those looked a lot different. Got up late, had brunch, hung out more, etc. We were also in station when the internet was up in the afternoon (noon to 5pm-ish) so that was nice. Some Sundays, we would do work, too, though.
I know we worked a lot, but it really felt pretty good to be doing it. There was a lot of camaraderie and a sense of being really productive.
Neat thread! I wanted to know about this:
I was about to start a thread, “Antarctica- resource bonanza?” Maybe you can tell us. The continent was once part of Pangea, so plants used to grow there and presumably were turned into coal/oil/natural gas? And, I’ve learned on this board that most of our gold comes from meteor strikes, so I’m guessing the ones that landed in Antarctica were never dug up by humans…
Is my speculation correct? What other kinds of resources are found there, and how feasible would it really be to extract them?
Hi, I’m back again. Lot of questions there, so bear with me.
I can’t see how to put lots of different quotes in the same reply, so it’ll be seperate posts.
Thanks for helping out Seren. However, the Pole station, build over thousands of feet of snow, and with a shorter summer season is rather different from Scott Base, and the base in 1977 was completely different from the one there now, as all the old buildings, bar one, have been replaced.
When I was there it was more like living on a frontier, and we really did it rough, but I’d say it’s more like an office job now.
To answer the question, I wasn’t at South Pole so no, I didn’t join the 300 club. At McMurdo they had a version where you ran naked, except for boots, jumped into the sea, and ran back to the hut. Unfortunately, I missed out on that.
Money of course.
At the moment exploitation is prohibited, but if that changes, everyone wants to be in, so they maintain their claims. The US and Russia don’t recognise claims, and build bases all over.
I camped one time in a tent that covered an exploratory well.
I was the doggo, or doggies dad, or the doghandler, whichever you please.
I was the only person, other than the other doghandler, that hunted for food ( scientists hunt seals, penguins, birds and fish but only for scientific reasons ) as we fed the dogs with seal meat.
I used a 303 rifle and killed 52 seals, which was the official allowable number.
Parts of the seals were shipped home for scientific research.
All dogs were removed from Antarctica many years ago, so only scientists get to kill local wildlife now.
The base did get to eat sealmeat once, though there were no requests for more,
and once a very large fish ended up as dinner.
However, all rations were shipped in from New Zealand, as nothing was grown down there for nutritional reasons.
I think it gets colder in Canada than at Scott Base.
Our cold was very dry, so over -30 C it was not bad at all. It was only if it was windy that I had to be careful- wind chill factor.
I think we got down to -50 C, but that is nothing on South Pole.
By the end of winter, I had aclimatised sufficiently to go outside in a single layer track suit.
Our highest temperature was 4 C and we went outside for a BBQ.
It’ll be brief.
Got up about 7am and had breakfast;
wrote the official diary from day before;
went out to feed the dogs;
spent the day working ( 6 1/2 day week )- maintaining sledges, harnesses, checking the dogs, repairing my clothes, cutting up dead seals with a chainsaw, filling ice melter containers with a big digger, bulldozing snow from around the base, base repairs. Basically whatever needed doing. It would take way too much time and space to give a list of all my different jobs;
Had lunch mid day and two tea breaks;
I stopped at 6pm, though official knock off time was 5pm. I had too much work to do to accomplish within an official schedule;
Had supper;
took dogs for a run. That lasted till about 10pm;
let dogs off for a run around;
secured dogs on the dog lines;
Sometimes dropped by the bar for a game of pool or a chat before bed.
In winter, I didn’t take the dogs out after supper and we had a movie every evening.
Anything about things I didn’t do, like the science, or on other bases.
Just random questions:
What months of the year is it dangerous to be there? I’m pretty sure they have to evacuate during certain months because it’s just too dangerous.
If you pooped or peed outside, how dangerous would it be? Could it kill you?
When I was in Korea during the winter, my pee would steam when it hit the urinal. Anything unusual like that happen in your latrines?
I’m making a wild guess here that pipes would have a high chance of freezing and bursting. How do you prevent that with water and sewage lines? Have you ever seen a toilet explode?
I would imagine that it would take more calories to maintain your body heat. How much more do you eat there than your home?