As I understand it, mercury freezes at -39C, at which point it becomes a metal which has similar properties as tin. As I further understand it, the South Pole is generally colder than this.
Would there be any advantage to using mercury as a building material, if one wanted to build a structure on the South Pole? E.g. would it be far less brittle than other materials?
Do we have a way to extract enough mercury to feasibly build anything of any size, at a reasonable cost?
It’s toxic and even somewhere like the Vostok research station, which was the coldest ever reliably recorded natural temperature occurred is generally several degrees above -39C in the Antarctic Summer. It doesn’t seem like a good idea
Steel is pretty ductile (although I’m not sure how well that holds at -40 degrees), it’s very strong, cheap, lighter than mercury, non-toxic, doesn’t melt very easily and we’ve got many years experience building things out of it. I can’t think of any reason to use frozen mercury.
If you want a building material that is readily available and transitions from liquid to solid at the kinds of temperatures the arctic/Antarctic experiences, how about ice? It’s free, non-toxic and easy to work with. I’m not sure about ice but I can tell you that snow is a great insulator.
and it can be welded.
You can weld mercury, too. Same basic process: apply localized heat at the boundary between two solid mercury parts until they start to melt. Add filler metal if necessary (from a rod of solid mercury). The good news is that you probably wouldn’t need a multi-kilowatt welder to weld on mercury in Antartica, since it’s already very close to its melting point.
maybe even applying some of the substance in liquid form would provide enough heat.