Welcome back to part 3 of the Amundsen-Scott
South Pole station tour. In the first two parts I showed you guys the elevated station which is
the most active most lived-in part of the station, but there's another huge section of the
station that's buried under the ice that I've gotta show you. Down here, you'll find the
power plant, the Logistics Arch, fuel storage, and the vehicle maintenance facility. There's also
the ice tunnels but those will have to wait to be in a later video. I'll show you this layout again
as I walk you through it, but let's get this tour started at the beer can, the junction between the
elevated station and the subsurface sections. So once you get to the bottom of the stairs of the
beer can, you can now take this tunnel over here all the way down to the power plant, the Logistics
Arch, the fuel Arch, and the vehicle maintenance facility. So I apologize, it is a little dark down
here in the tunnels but it's the only way to get to the power plant and the water treatment plant
without actually going outside so here we are, two big doors. We use the tag in tag out procedure
when entering the plant. This is so we can quickly determine how many people are inside if there's
an emergency. With big engines and a lot of fuel around, there are very real risks, not to mention
the CO2 fire suppression system. If you hear the CO2 discharging you better get out fast. There
are three diesel generators in the power plant and each one is cycled between being active, being
on standby, and being down for maintenance. Our current power consumption is about 600 kilowatts
which is typical for the station. As you can imagine the power plant generates a lot of heat.
Obviously heat is valuable in a place like the South Pole, so this heat is transferred to an
anti-freeze solution and pumped throughout the station. So in this way the power plant is both
our source of heat and electricity, and everyone on station is very aware of how much we depend
on it to survive. So if we come down that hallway further past the power plant we actually come
here to the Logistics Arch which is this giant metal arch underneath the snow. I think there's
probably about 20 feet of snow on top of this right now but this is basically all our long-term
storage and our waste. so all our waste is sorted into Landfill, Recycling, cardboard, there's wood
scrap, electronic scrap, sanitary waste, ferrous metals... we basically try to sort everything as
best we can to the best of our abilities. this building here is where the supply and Logistics
office is upstairs and on the lower floor, actually I'll take you in there right now, is the
do not freeze area. So the ambient temperature in here is the same as the ice all around it which
is about negative 55 Fahrenheit and anything in here obviously is going to be frozen at that
temperature so if you have something that can't be frozen like for instance a gallon of bleach
or a carton of beer or something that you don't want to freeze and burst, you have to put it
in here. I'll show you what this looks like. all right obviously big heavy freezer door right
here, the stairway up to the supply offices right there, and then we have the big interior of
the do not freeze storage way down there. you can see Toni, this is where she works. if you
saw my interview with her this is where we did it right here. go check out my interview with her
and kind of kind of get a better idea of how this whole area works because this was her job over the
winter of 2021. so I'm going to go back outside, she gave me a dirty look so I'm gonna go back
outside, to the main Logistics Arch. okay and so as I said we have the waste separated, sorted
right here this all gets compacted and sealed and then it's either flown out or usually I believe
it's tracked out now on what's called the South Pole Overland Traverse, which is basically a
road train of a bunch of tracked vehicles that make their way from McMurdo Station on the
coast to here at the South Pole over land. That route was only just found and basically made
safe about 15 years ago and even every year it has to be rechecked to make sure the glaciers didn't
shift and make something dangerous. that is a much more efficient way to bring in heavy supplies,
like all the fuel we need for the generators over winter and it's also efficient for bringing out
waste and other heavy uh heavy cargo that we need to ship out. but as you can see as we come further
down the logistics Arch we have three layers of storage, all the food that we eat is mainly down
here, we grow a little bit of it in the greenhouse but most of it is frozen here. so pretty much
all the food we eat is Frozen at some stage so not a whole lot of fresh food, but that's just the
way it goes that's the logistics of it. oh here's some ice cream right here what is this rocky
road we've got a ton of Rocky Road ice cream, I know because I've eaten a bunch of it this
winter, another interesting thing you might notice is you see how much water vapor
is condensing as soon as I breathe out. let me do it towards a
light here so you can see... a ton right? so it's so dry here the air... or
so cold that the air will not hold any humidity, so as soon as you breathe out that water vapor
condenses like pretty much immediately, and it doesn't just disappear here in the logistics
Arch, it actually forms Water Crystals here on the side. now some of this is from people's
breath, some of it is just from water vapor kind of outgassing from the supplies that are all here.
it's kind of like freezer burn if you've ever seen like frost kind of gather on food in your deep
freezer freezer that's pretty much what it is, but just the big you know, elephant sized
version of that. so you get all these hese crystals that form they're really pretty
and they're really fun to also knock off anyway really satisfying you
could spend probably a whole season in this Arch alone knocking
off knocking off all the crystals. now this has been built up over years. I've had
some people ask you know hey do you ever have to go through and purposely knock these crystals
off does it get too heavy? if you think about it there's you know 20 feet of snow on top of
the arch already these crystals weigh almost nothing compared to that so it's not a problem
for the Arches, you know structural Integrity to have these all sitting here as far as I know.
and it takes so long for them to build up that we don't really make a point out of you know clearing
them out, but it is fun to do. at the back of the logistics Arch is this hallway which leads back
to the fuel Arch. now if you imagine we run on generator power here exclusively. we have three
different one megawatt caterpillar generators only one of them's running at a time but still
massive amount of fuel consumption. I think it's usually about 45 gallons of fuel an hour
and if you think about that times nine months, and that's how much fuel we need over the winters.
and I believe there are 45 massive steel tanks and each one holds 10,000 gallons and so she's talking
about 450,000 gallons of fuel back there in the fuel Arch. and that's also the same fuel used for
all the aircraft for all the tractor Vehicles we have and also for the generators so it's kind
of like a one fuel fits all situation down here which helps immensely with the logistics
of getting fuel in the first place. so yeah that is the logistics Arch, the do not
freeze area, and the fuel Arch. I didn't go back in the fuel Arch because I don't think I'm even
allowed back there, I've never actually seen it myself, and I don't know where the light switch is
either. continuing on from there the next doorway over is to go to the vehicle maintenance facility
and the carpenter shop. this way actually leads to the outside you can see the sunlight kind of
streaming through at the end there and that's kind of where the cargo comes in from either the
Overland Traverse crew / the tracked cargo crew, or the airplanes comes into the Cargo Office
right there. all right but let's actually go over to the vehicle maintenance facility and
see if I can show you guys around over there so again vehicle maintenance facility
or vehicle Arch is another Arch slightly smaller than the logistics Arch but similar
concept. it's under snow right now held up by these arched metal girder structure
things. okay and then come in here this is the carpenter / sheet metal Workshop,
things like that. we do have one Carpenter over the winter who does all our carpentry
work, he's kind of like a multitasker also, he does a lot of the facilities work. but yeah
this is the carpenter shop and then through here is the vehicle maintenance facility. there's the offices right here, and then the
reason I come down here most often is to check the AED. we have AEDs all around the station,
that's an automatic electronic defibrillator in case anybody has a heart attack or goes into a
ventricular fibrillation we can defibrillate them. but yeah that's most of the reason why I come down
here. okay and then come in here to the garage and right now they've got a lot of the vehicles
out for a flight that just came in so they can offload the cargo from it easily. but you got the
LMC right here, we've got the big cat right here, and then you got the small cat down at the
other end which has a little WALL-E tag on it. and the other ones are out right
now including the snowmobile but this basically where all the vehicles get worked
on the maintenance gets done the oil gets changed the sometimes the engines get rebuilt
as well we take you for a quick walk around here now I am wearing my jacket just because I
came in from the the other Arch where it's you know an ambient temperature of -55F,
the ice temperature, but it's not actually cold in here, it's actually pretty warm,
so nobody has to work in icy conditions. all right heading back out through here show you guys a little bit of a shop you believe
there's some Machining and some welding tools here any kind of parts that need to be fabricated
for the vehicles can be done in here as well, yeah pretty extensive setup, pretty good pretty
nice garage from what I've heard from otherspretty well kept and well stocked so yeah,
that's the vehicle maintenance facility.
