I had a colleague once who worked in antarctica for a while. She told me that according to a long standing tradition, every year after the last supply plane left for the winter and the base was buttoned up for a long dark wait until spring, the whole crew would gather in the lounge together to watch The Thing.
That's all I got, I just love this story and mention it every chance I get.
Yeah this is a thing at the South Pole Station however it's normally in the gym. They drag all the recliners, couches, and mattresses they can into the gym and settle in to watch all three versions of The Thing on the projector back to back.
I also liked hearing about the "Skua" barrels, which are local recycling (I can't/won't take this back with me to the mainland) named after the voracious local avians, a sort of Ur-seagull with their worst traits magnified.
A much more fun and less SEO/smarmy take on this topic is Nicholas Johnson's "Big Dead Place", originally a blog and later a book. It gives the flavor of working in the U.S. Antarctic program like nothing else does.
This was an interesting post, but it’s very transparently written for search engine optimization rather than readability. There are some great stories in there but the formatting was really hard to read as a human all broken into obviously search-friendly questions rather than an an actual flow—just makes it come across as robotic. It’s a bummer that blogging is in this state.
There's a lot of good info in the article, but it's kind of disappointing she didn't cover how she actually got the job. It's mentioned that the jobs are quite competitive and that people are wait-listed for years sometimes.
Oh wut? I got an interview from the first application, back in (checks bookmarks) 2012 (edit: It looks like they applied for McMurdo, not the South Pole). It was an odd one - the first question was what to do first when entering the server room. I'd actually read up on a few things, and the correct answer was to ground yourself to get rid of the ridiculous amounts of static electricity which builds up in a super-dry environment. Static discharge has killed a whole bunch of their equipment.
Another question was what I'd do if one of my family members had a medical emergency and could only be saved by an organ donation by me. In case of bad timing there next flight out would be in almost a year, so there would be nothing I could do. That one … was a bit harder to answer.
A friend of mine just did two stints down there -- first at a coastal base, and then again at the actual pole station. She's a nurse practitioner and decided a couple years ago to make hay while the sun was shining so to speak, since she was single and had no kids, so she started doing travel gigs.
One of them was waaay down at the tip of South America, doing health checks and COVID screening for folks headed to Antarctica. She got along well with everyone, and someone had to bow out of a posting at the coastal station, so she got asked. She did well there, and got the offer for the post at the south pole.
Oh, that's an interesting way in...working almost in Antarctica (Tierra del Fuego?) and being an obvious person to fill in for someone that had to cancel.
Presumably those positions are competitive also, given the unique experience. So, knowing if she was wait-listed, for how long, or if she found some way around that, etc...would have been interesting.
They definitely are competitive. Basically every resource gives the same advice which is:
- Apply to every position you can apply to and are willing to work if you get selected (which if you really want to get down there should be essentially all of them).
- Apply as early as you can (jobs get posted in the fall to early spring).
- Keep applying year after year because most of the time it'll take you several years before you even get a slot.
She got the job by applying, being qualified, and interviewing well. The only real life hack for most things is a combination of luck, work, and having a safety net if you fail. Come on, she listed job postings at specific companies categorized by function and international research organizations; were you expecting a secret handshake?
Considering it took 4.9 years from her first application to even hearing back, I'd wager that blindly guessing at it having been a straightforward process probably isn't as effective as it seems
there's a tourist camp just next to South Pole Station. When I was at Pole in summer '19-20 the tourist camp staff invited us over for Christmas (when I guess they had no tourists). The awkward thing is that the research station is supported out of McMurdo which is supported out of Christchurch, so follows NZ time, but the tourist camp is supported out of Punta Arenas, so follows Chilean time...
I met some of the tourists on New Year's during the ceremony where the geographical pole marker is moved (the ice moves a bit every year, so the pole marker has to be moved relative to the station so that it remains over the real pole). One guy apparently had kept applying to be a winterover for some experiments and wasn't selected so he just paid to go visit Pole anyway.
And then there are the adventurers, who randomly show up on skis or in an Arctic Truck..
And then there are the adventurers, who randomly show up on skis or in an Arctic Truck.
Really? That's a bit of a surprise (the random part). Like, if you have the means, you can charter a ship out of Christchurch, sail to Antartica, and go skiing without permits or notifying any of the bases? Wild.
“And then there are the adventurers, who randomly show up on skis or in an Arctic Truck..”
That’s an interesting point. A while ago I had a discussion with a flat earther who claimed that the military won’t allow anyone close to Antarctica. I told him I am pretty sure that people have crossed Antarctica by foot or even bicycle (heard this on a podcast). But I wasn’t sure how the permit process works and if there are limitations.
I know flat earth is stupid but it’s a good exercise to refute these people with knowledge you have. Turns out this is quite difficult because often you have only very vague knowledge of the details.
The first trip to the south pole by cycling however was actually by tricycle by a researcher[2] who was riding alongside the South Pole Traverse[3] which is a tractor + sled motorcade for hauling cargo and supplies to and from the south pole station.
If you engage with a flat earther you have already lost. Anyone who genuinely believes in a flat earth has closed off their mind to information that refutes their beliefs. If their mind were open, they wouldn’t believe in a flat earth.
There are now over 100,000 tourists visiting Antartica per year [0], while the working population maxes out at around 5,000 [1]. So, in fact, the overwhelming majority of visitors to Antartica pay for the privilege.
This is true however very few tourists who visit Antarctica actually ever do more than step out onto the ice or the shore for a fairly short amount of time, often not even at all (just cruising along the coast). Those that actually venture inland are few and far between.
If you can get a slot with one of the contractors for the USAP, you'll almost certainly get a chance to do a lot more than the average tourist.
> While there are a select handful of tourist expeditions that offer overnight experiences in Antarctica, the only people who actually live on the ice are those working at research facilities.
Wow, I never noticed that before. It is probably because to the English brain Antarctica sort of has the feel of a mile high platform of ice, but it is certainly interesting that we use "on" vs. "at"
It's common for islands, and Antarctica is somewhat island-ish. For Long Island (New York), you say "on" it, and anyone who says "in Long Island" gets laughed at. I think the same goes for the Hawaiian islands and places like Key West. Although, funnily, we do say "in Manhattan", not "on" for that one.
Kind of. Many are military. When my coworker (in Iowa) was there in the 80s, he was the only non-military over-winter person there. He worked for the weather service.
Military personnel get paid to be where they are, they don't do it for free... and they get some of the best social benefits of any citizens in the US.
Sure, but I've definitely never met one who was angry about their government pay, paid college, or allmost fully government sponosered healthcare, they're angry about HOW these things are enacted more than anything else for the most part not that they're being offered to them in general like the majority of the public would benefit from as well.
The point is that it's never executed well. Socialism sounds great on paper when people are perfect. But they are not. They never will be. It will therefore never be "done the right way this time" and we will keep using it as an excuse to worsen peoples' livelihoods equally, decrease peoples' income with which they decide what they want to use to pay for, and to put down dissidents. As it always has.
Capitalism is the worst type of economic strategy, except for all the others.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
I assume it's the Navy doing the work, maybe the Army. If either branch is like the Air Force then they'd get some nice additional money for working there. You get a nice pay bump for working in Alaska and the North Pole. I assume it's the same, plus this would be out of country, so tax break.
But yes I get your meaning. Military is assigned work, they go where they are told.
Just to expand a bit since I didn’t have the time when I posted, I’m looking for a new career and aircraft mechanics are moderately in demand in my area.
There are two Part 147 AMTS schools nearby, one is a program for high schoolers exclusively and the other plainly states the program is $35000 in total. For comparison. In state tuition costs for an Aerospace engineering degree at a nearby university are around $27000 for four years. You could learn to design aircraft cheaper than to repair them. Even worse is the mechanic jobs don’t pay so great. I see a lot starting around $18/h.
I don’t think anyone is particularly raring to go live on a continent where the warmest month is December. With perks like “in December and January the monthly average high temperature may occasionally rise above freezing” - doesn’t that just make you instantly fall in love?
If you want to live somewhere cold alaska is probably the better choice, since you get to enjoy all the lovely things in life like Amazon delivery.
Chile and Argentina have ostensible towns on the peninsula (basically one each), in which even a few children have been born, but I'm not sure the degree to which it's possible for someone to actually get up and move down there purely on their own whim.
They do sound like they're basically just remote small towns. See for example https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/world/americas/chile-anta... which describes the Chilean one. Honestly it sounds like Chile and Argentina are both doing this to spite each other.
Stupidly I accepted a DB admin job in a cowboy real estate firm there, that mostly took care of all the abandoned strip malls and some former strip-malls-now-crack-dens. Knew I'd made a bad mistake on minute one, day one of that job.
Good for you, if you kept going it goes on to complaing about... Antarctica being too white also. I'm sorry, a scientist in Antartica and you are spending your down time shadow boxing racism and sexism?
> Antartica: Is the harsh conditions and weather actually a form of redlining?
As a non-white woman I appreciate she is sharing details about race and gender. If the ratios are so extreme, then these aspects would have been a relevant part of the experience. If you're a white man, I understand how you might be annoyed as it may feel like she's throwing jabs at your club.
It is a club in the sense that people self sort by ethnicity and gender in many social settings, and exclusion/discrimination against nonwhites & women is a well documented phenomenon.
People sort into groups that have similar interests. This article is an example of it. Hey guys, who wants to go spend a year living in the middle of nowhere, in an ice cold region, dark enough to drive people insane, for mediocre pay?
For some people that sounds like an awesome adventure. For others its incomprehensible why anybody would even consider it. And these sort of interests, for both genetic and cultural reasons, are not going to be evenly distributed. It doesn't mean that e.g. hiphop or basketball is excluding non-blacks anymore than death metal and swimming is excluding non-whites.
There is a very obvious reason why “going on an adventure for mediocre pay” would be both more feasible and appealing, to members of a financially advantaged group.
It’s absolutely incredible that you’re ascribing this as a cultural phenomenon!
You're saying this as though the reason most people there are able to go is by living on savings. I don't think that's true - anyway with bread and board covered it's more likely to push away those with dependants than economic class. As someone who'd really like to work for my country's arctic/Antarctic program, I think the biggest barrier is getting qualified to work there, which is stuff like mountain leader courses etc. Mountaineering is not exactly a cheap hobby, but it's also fair that they only want to hire people with ice survival experience.
As for the sexism angle - yeah I can 1000% percent see being suck in a base for 6 months with nowhere else to go can be an extremely daunting prospect
It’s not just about being able to live on savings. When you come from a poorer community you can’t really afford to take on an expensive education and mediocre pay, because the outcome of that expensive education generally requires you also support your parents/family that helped you get there.
But moreover yeah, richer families can do more outdoorish activities like mountaineering and that feeds back into the loop of even being interested in something like this.
Many, and in America I'd dare say most, people just don't really like doing outdoor things. It's some of the cheapest entertainment you can have, as many parks and locations are completely free. You don't need to full on belaying to have a great time. All you really need is a tank of gas, a bus ticket, or a bike. There are just dramatic cultural differences that drive people in different directions.
Programs like ROTC/JROTC also offer countless outdoor opportunities alongside other possibilities for personal enrichment. I'm vehemently antiwar/hegemony, but I think training offered by ROTC/JROTC is extremely valuable for anybody and everybody. It's also completely free.
this is speaking from the perspective as if that's all that happens, which its most definitely not
i can show you plenty of anti-white racism in the crime statistics, especially from people who are ungrateful to be allowed into the greatest countries where they're given better opportunities than 99% of the world population, isn't that crazy?
The whole ungrateful immigrant thing is really long in the tooth, man. Are their children supposed to be “grateful” too or can they be just as dissatisfied with their lives as the “indigenes”?
This is phrased as if you can't talk about the salience of a minority race and gender experience without racist and sexist deification of the minority and, as if by Netwon's third law, shitting on the majority. That's limited to the blurb, but it's still hurtful and inflammatory. It makes me wish we could just merge those forces back to neutral so we least seem like we're egalitarian (the pamphlet told me that was the goal, I recall).
I think it's difficult to dissociate this from the "how much can a banana cost?" style harmful ignorance. It makes sense to me that a woman who feels like she experienced sexism at the workplace from men have a poor opinion of the men there. Should she not say as such to make an appearance of neutrality, when she didn't experience a neutral or egalitarian environment?
>It makes sense to me that a woman who feels like she experienced sexism at the workplace from men have a poor opinion of the men there.
This does not make sense to me. I've experienced poor treatment from whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays. Should I have a poor opinion of whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays?
It seems a similar leap from her own experience and anecdotal reports from coworkers to tarnish the 700-ish strong male pop of McMurdo as "mediocre."
I mean, this is also obviously an anecdote. In her experience, she worked with mediocre men. I think we're all intelligent enough to recognize that she's obviously talking from her experience.
>I think we're all intelligent enough to recognize that she's obviously talking from her experience.
She is talking from her experience, sure, but she's certainly going well beyond that!
>There’s a phrase I heard tossed around that I think is pretty accurate: Antarctica: Full of badass women and mediocre men.
But even more than epistemology, this is uncivil. Polite society is made up of small restraints for the sake of others. This represents one more crack in that.
It's curious to me, that you're concerned she's extrapolated her experience to some set of men in Antarctica, and you've extrapolated her behavior to a crack in all of polite society in turn.
I found it interesting. My expectation was that in a tight, isolated community of mostly scientist and associated personnel, people would know better. Apparently not.
If you have to get mad about something, be mad about the guys who decided to behave like assholes. Part of the problem is that when that happens the rest of us don't do anything about it.
At least in bases from other countries (i.e., speaking from personal experience), a majority of the personnel, at least during the winter, would come from the military. In those specific countries too, at least, military personnel did not correlate with (well)educated people, so sexism was also common.
I'm very sympathetic to your discomfort as a reader, but it seems odd to air it in a subthread that discusses how ~50% of the population can't even be in Antarctica as a worker without experiencing a lot of discomfort.
Did you guys actually read that article, or only the pretty colorful boxes? Because the text right before that fancy box explains why that phrase came into existence.
> dealing with misogynistic comments and just overall disappointing behavior from quite a few less than stellar men was a regular occurrence at work for me and my female coworkers.
Subjective judgements on behavior, from someone who complains that there are too many white scientists.
Pardon me if I take their judgement with a grain of salt.
The entire article is incredibly poorly written, to boot. I was expecting to see a credit card advertisement any second. “Use my referral code and you too can fly to Antarctica for free!”. Actually - the majority of points/credit card referral sites have higher quality writing.
I mean, let's view this charitably. It makes total sense for a woman, who feels like she received misogynistic comments from men at her workplace, to have a poor opinion of the men there. I also don't know if it's really good faith to dismiss a woman saying something was misogynistic as subjective. Of course being a bigot is kind of subjective-- the bigot just thinks their prejudice is normal/true. I wouldn't trust any of the male scientists to say "no of course misogynistic comments didn't happen"; they're guys and, speaking as a guy, it's a blindspot for most men when they make women uncomfortable.
I also charitably don't think there's anything wrong with being suspicious of a very obvious lacking in racial diversity. Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip. [edited to add: a commenter below clairified this particular station is operated by the US, which is majority white, and scientists even moreso. I was assuming stations are operated with international cooperation :) ]
> Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip.
This was a trip to McMurdo Station, which is operated by the US, which is majority white as of the 2020 census (58.9% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino"). In 1956, when McMurdo was established, the US was nearly 90% white. If anything, it would be a statistical anomaly if there were too few white people, considering that the science community is whiter than the country as a whole.
The GP's point stands, still: though the OP's article doesn't explicitly say that the lack of racial diversity in McMurdo is a problem, it's implied. Why is it a problem? I don't think anyone at McMurdo is complaining about minorities coming in.
Not only that, but racism/sexism is too good to let go. People will always find another casus belli. White people still have most of the world's wealth, so, even when whites are the minority, they still deserve to be subalterned. And hey, they did that to other races for most of history, so it's all fair!
The only winning move is not to play these shitty games.
Oh okay, I thought this was a station that was hiring internationally or something like that. I guess I'd be curious then if the station was significantly whiter than the science population of the US. Again, this is trying to observe this in a good faith as a reasonable thing to say/do. I'm assuming this is a reasonably competent person, and I can definitely see in modern day it might be something worth commenting as noticeable to be in the company of almost exclusively white people.
One of the greatest fallacies of the modern identitarian movement is that every subsection of society, no matter how you slice and dice it, must reflect the composition of the society as a whole. There's no reason why this should be the case, because different cultural subgroups value and prefer different things.
"Too many white scientists" carries exactly the same amount of meaning as "too many black NFL players" (over half are black, compared to 13.6% of the population) or "too many male roofers" (95% are male) or "too many female special ed teachers" (84.2% are female); that is to say, it carries no meaning at all.
Once you free yourself from the plausible-sounding but false idea that the composition of subgroups must necessarily reflect the composition of the whole, a lot of today's racial divides and those who fan those flames are evident for what they are: those with agendas that benefit from pitting people against one another.
> I'm now convinced you have a mental disability. Are you high or retarded
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone or how right you are, or you feel they are, or you feel you are.
> Why exactly should the expectation of justification go one way but not the other?
The existing conditions in Antarctica.
The idea that sexism is an absolute abhorrent behavior (with a focus on either or both genders) is not something to promote, despite the fervor in recent years. The sexes have a different representation in the arctic and pointing them out is akin to pointing out that a lot of left handers apply to NASA. I wouldn't call something garbage because I'm offended someone held up a patch that says "Only left handers are in their right mind".
Getting upset at this writer/article/situation is not constructive. Nor is the condemnation a fair editorial critique, imo.
Language is contextual. A woman who has seen repeated instances of male misbehavior is within her rights to record her feelings about it — “the men here are mediocre” in this context is clearly not talking about all men but her feelings about the shitty men she encountered, and also pointing at a pattern of what happens when there are a large number of white males vs more diverse settings (this isn’t unique to Antarctica — Google has this problem). Mistreatment of women in such settings is well documented.
It’s like if you say “my job sucks” — not all parts of your job may actually suck, just the parts you hate. Or “the government is corrupt” most folks would infer that you are talking about a specific subelement.
If we lived in a society where women routinely mistreated men then flipping the statement wouldn’t be offensive. What makes it offensive flipped is mostly that generalizations about women typically encode harmful falsehoods that come from generations of patriarchy. You could not flip her statements in good faith because women do not treat men the way she described anyway.
As a progressive I hate that it isn’t simple as much as everyone else. But to fight for equality is to understand that the origins of the fight come from unwanted asymmetry and of course that’s going to be reflected in discourse.
That's all I got, I just love this story and mention it every chance I get.