I appreciated their other article: where OP explains how there are two segments of the antarctic research station: an American one, and an NZ one.
Their bank loses their mind when their bank card is physically used in America and then in NZ 30 minutes later and OP has to clear up how that isn't impossible.
> Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.
> Credit card companies have a hard time with this.
Low-tech solution: get two credit cards, use different cards for different locations. Draw an eagle on one and a kiwi on the other so it's easy to keep them straight.
They don’t take credit card at McMurdo, it’s cash only. There are two Wells Fargo ATMs in the main building. Cash that is spent on station gets recycled back into the ATMs. The New Zealand base does take card however.
So you're saying that the author of this article forged their credit card receipt and is lying through their teeth? Why would they do that? Is it possible your information is instead outdated?
It's easy to wonder why most of the world struggles with clean water until you realize every township in the Western world basically has the equivalent of world class manufacturing floor run by a handful of elite microbiologists.
It's pretty formulaic. Head to Amazon and get a copy of Metcalf & Eddy and start treating wastewater.
The real issue is that wastewater treatment is energy intense. It takes a lot of horses to keep the smelly water bubbling, and the heavy sludge circulating where it needs to get to.
Removing emerging contaminants like PFAs is even more energy intense, requiring heavy pumps to push water through filters.
But it's money well spent if you value a clean environment.
Now consider the lakehouse your family enjoys in the summer - where does the wastewater go? Does it go to a septic system? Is it short circuiting straight into the lake?
The core technology is pretty much set in stone already. I wonder when software development finally reached stability like this where there is no major advancement left anymore.
> The core technology is pretty much set in stone already. I wonder when software development finally reached stability like this where there is no major advancement left anymore.
Software people have embraced what I like to call the "useless side-grade."
Once there's no major advancement left anymore, people will sell random differences as major advancements, and we'll churn by rewriting everything in the next new framework, forever.
I've been trying to point this out to my colleagues repeatedly, somebody posted a react discussion about new suspense APIs, the only response I could summon was
New septic systems are basically mini treatment plants. The amount of equipment it needs are pretty wild. They also (at least in NJ) need twice yearly inspections by professionals.
This is how it is where I live. My “septic” is a self-contained wastewater treatment plant that must be inspected semi-annually and actively maintained. The effluent is technically potable. It uses about 25% of my total electrical consumption.
Our septic is gravity fed on a small hill. It is very basic, and we do not need multiple inspections per year. Are you sure these aren’t County required inspections? I live in Hunterdon County and never heard of it.
That said I know it depends on your land conditions and geography.
I think the inspection requirement is fairly new, and only kicks in with new systems. That being said, at this house the water table is quite high. The well serving the house is only about 90 ft deep.
The one at the house I lived at a year ago was essentially a big container in the ground, having been there about a decade+ just doing its thing. We just had to be real careful not to use bleach/sodium percarbonate/etc so not to kill everything living in it. This is in Colorado.
I worked in an envronmental lab as a teenager and am still in awe of what percentage of toilet paper was in treated sewage water.
In 2022, the fine cellulose that could be holding onto finer particles of..... stuff, pale in comparison to microbeads that make it through multiple stages of sewage treatment.
The microbeads breakdown even further, so this only means that the treated sewage may contain more contaminates (not to mention PFAS) than anyone cares to admit.
New construction in the 21st century at least has the knowledge of the additional need for filtering on premises, regardless of source (municipal, desalination, rain water, well water, etc).
Very entusiastic blog as well. Author writes with very bright eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm.
If you raised a family on distilled water and filtered out the contaminents, I'm sure other than high insurance rates in healthcare pools, you'll be fine :)
Edit: How could someone not like this comment and ruin my perfect karma :0 /s? There has been funk in the water for decades. If it has already caused birth defects, undiagnosed ailments or anything, it was already a known fact.
PBS Terra had an tour of this waste water processing plant along with other episodes on how it is to live at the McMurdo station. An interesting fact is food doesn't get spoiled there so you can keep it around for a long time.
Offtopic, but for how interesting, and likely expensive, that series was, I'm surprised by its relatively low view count. That video didn't even break a million! Compare that with, oh, this random 3Blue1Brown video [1] that has 1.5M views.
Unfortunately, I suspect it is proof that YouTube is not the place for high production value documentaries.
It's fun thinking about McMurdo as it relates to what long term habitation would be like on some place like the Moon or Mars (except this is like easy easy mode).
The waste there would actually be super valuable for growing food in.
Sludge has been used as fertilizer... though this is also why there are some huge areas contaminated with PFAs-- they got dumped down drains and ended up in sludge sold off as fertilizer.
A groups of substances that are useful to give plastics certain qualities. They are currently unregulated, and, due to their small size, found pretty much everywhere, including in our bloodstream.
Several of them are "forever" substances that will take a very long time to break down. It's one of the reasons off-gridders are recommending not to drink unfiltered rainwater, even in climates where it was traditionally safe, because PFAS are found in dust. Dust forms the basis for raindrops.
Scientists and the general public are starting to become concerned about these substances, and at least one preliminary study indicates they might interfere in the body's ability to react correctly to vaccines. More studies are needed, and given the potential for long-term effects, the studies might take a long time.
Very much recommended! It was going to be made into a TV show apparently.
I first came across Johnson's work in his Shark Fear: Shark Awareness, which is more of a zine mocking fear mongering post 9/11, and about those deadly deadly sharks.
This gave me fond flashbacks to the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. There's lots of details about this type of infrastructure necessary to support human habitation, to say nothing of kickstarting terraforming. Worth a read if you haven't already.
Honest question: Can you grow anything out there? I guess you could do indoor farming, but maybe it's more than enough "compost" they're producing there?
It would be interesting to know if an analysis of it (when in the US) could tell some things about how the station is doing.
Not sure about McMurdo, but South Pole Station has a greenhouse, which is an awfully nice place to stick your head into now and again if you're doing any amount of time there. They grow tomatoes and lettuce, among other things, that sometimes make their way into salads for folks on-station.
I've been several times to the Pole for work (years ago), and going into the greenhouse and smelling tomato plants after days on end of smelling nothing but people, galley food, cleaning products, and fuel exhaust, is a pleasant memory.
They do not (or at least did not) use human sewage for fertilizer there -- unlike at McMurdo, human waste at Pole does not get shipped off station.
McMurdo used to have a greenhouse too - it was small and homey and lovely, in one of the cargo yards. It didn't produce nearly enough food to be useful for the summer population (except maybe fresh herbs), and from memory got torn down sometime around 2010.
I wintered at Pole, and in that rather fractious winter, I think one of the worst points was when it was decided that the whole crop in the greenhouse needed to be purged. The head of maintenance had broken the Rodwell (water supply), so there was a reasonable desire to reduce water consumption. But, somehow, that morphed in to "shut down the greenhouse", despite it being a closed-loop system... That winter, we had a very comfortable reserve of fuel, and of course South Pole Station sits on a whole lot of ice.
They would have way more sludge than they would have any use for (I understand there are a couple of greenhouses at some of the bases, but that's it). So they're not going to just dump it in one of the least polluted places in the world...
We have been dealing with American shit for years.
More seriously, it is weird. It would seem a good opportunity for us to solve one problem and benefit in some other way as a reciprocal arrangement. For example, US air supply options are likely vastly superior to ours.
I'm guessing the waste removal program isn't optimised for raw shipping costs.
They only do one ship-load per year (deliver all supplies, take all waste back). Overall logistics (including regulatory compliance) might actually make it cheaper to have a single destination, rather than stopping over in NZ to offload some of the simpler to dispose waste. Actual shipping costs are probably in the noise floor after everything else.
It's also possible the program has been partially optimised for pork barrel politics.
Island nations tend to be very against the introduction of organic stuff for fear that it might disrupt their fragile ecosystem. And solid residuals from wastewater treatment are very much the kind of organic stuff that is problematic to import.
I was wondering about the "Activated Sludge Troubleshooting Chart", which turns out not to be some McMurdo internal documentation, but a commercial product sold as a poster... for US$94.95! https://www.tetratech.com/en/markets/one-water/solutions/was...
That was very interesting. I did some Googling and my country ships back ~5.5 tons of '20% dry sludge' per year back to New Zealand from Scott Base.
It looks like McMurdo is drying out the sludge more. My back of the envolope calculations based on an old article [1] are that McMurdo could be shipping as much as 50-80 tons of dried sludge back to the USA each year
Years and years ago, I went on a tour of the Paris Sewer (museum). It was billed as a cool and interesting thing to visit, and while there was a lot of neat stuff to see and learn, we rushed through it as fast as possible to get out of the smell.
When I was there in 2000 it definitely had a smell, but it wasn't terrible.
Some years later I got around to reading Les Miserables, and it goes off at one point on a long digression about the construction and history of the Paris sewers, which was really interesting.
In my city they use organisms to process wastewater and the smell is quite remarkable. There is one section right at the beginning that smells like sewage, but the rest of the processing plant smells like freshly turned dirt in your garden, albeit stronger. Many years ago before they modified the process the smell was horrible.
The smell in the secondary tanks - aeration - is surprisingly inoffensive. The smell for the tertiary tanks can be even a little sweet smelling. In the digestion tanks it's pretty much odorless.
It depends on the input of course. I presume it's mostly food scraps and human waste. Nothing industrial.
What browser did you use? The images do have 180 degrees exif rotation flag if you check the exif metadata. Maybe your browser doesn't respect the flag?
The interior of the building that houses the tanks does not appear to be explosion protected. Not a waste water process expert but I thought it's somewhat normal to have hydrogen sulfide and other flammable gases be generated by the bacteria breaking down the sludge.
I was watching a documentary on cruise ships the other day where I noticed they similarly blurred out a screen in the ship’s wastewater processing room. Why is this information sensitive?
for the ships I'd imagine it's for obfuscating how much they're dumping for environmental regulation reasons. they leak shit and oil everywhere they go, basically.
probably true for mcmurdo, but it could also be that any/all real data about the place is banned for outside use. i wouldn't be surprised if you could predict number of people and other details by looking at sewage flows.
Their bank loses their mind when their bank card is physically used in America and then in NZ 30 minutes later and OP has to clear up how that isn't impossible.
> Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.
> Credit card companies have a hard time with this.
https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans
Edge cases mang!