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Comment by walrus01

12 hours ago

If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse

https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...

Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.

11 comments

walrus01

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brookst  10 hours ago

I am adopting “Furthest possible end of any logistics chain” as a more refined version of “middle of fucking nowhere”. Thank you.

  • walrus01  10 hours ago

    It would probably be harder if they wanted to put it, for instance, on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, but for sure the literal south pole is pretty damn expensive on a $ per kg to get stuff sent to. And on an ongoing basis to sustain operations 24x7x365 (it's my understanding it runs almost entirely on diesel fuel and/or Jet-A for a big-ass set of generators).

    • r58lf  6 hours ago

      It is expensive and it doesn't need to be there, but the reason its at the south pole is that the US has money for SOMETHING at the south pole. They want to maintain a presence at the south pole for international relations reasons. To be consistent with insternational treaties they need to do science there.

      So, the US/NSF is like "we have a bunch of money to do science, but it has to be at the south pole". People like Halzen who had a crazy idea go to NSF and say how can I get a bunch of money to do this. NSF says, we don't have that kind of money in our physics budget, but if you were to do it at the southpole we could fund it.

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    • brookst  10 hours ago

      For sure, there are more difficult places, but I don’t think there is any conceivable place where the supply chain runs through the South Pole on its way. I hope not.