Antarctica List
(Submitted by Andrew S)
My father was in Antarctica as a civilian contractor for NSF, and had some interesting stories. and some rules. Note this was a very small station and crew. The cook, medic, diesel mechanic, carpenter, station manager, Ornithologist, and weather radar operator (My Dad). Only 6 people were there at a time, the station manager had broken his foot over the summer, and was flown in to see if the carpenter needed to be flown out. Manager stayed, carpenter left.
1. Never go out without telling someone.
2. When the Ornithologist is talking like a slowed down tape over the radio, it’s hypothermia. Call the medic, don’t say “come listen to this!”.
3. Don’t feed french fries to the seagulls. It annoys the Ornithologist.
4. Don’t name the seagull you feed, even if it is after the ID band colors. (Yabby, yellow aluminum black black yellow)
5. Don’t reply to the President’s Christmas greeting to the troops.
6. Especially if you are just an NSF employee. (it got as far as Hawaii before the base chief stopped it and sent a sternly worded warning back.)
7. Don’t use standard diesel to fill the massive tanks. It freezes. (This one is for the Navy)
8. If you wake up in the middle of the night during a cold snap, the silence means the diesel generator just stopped.
9. Do not attempt to melt the diesel sludge in an iron pipe with a welding torch. (Not my dad, they used a diesel space heater which worked.)
10. Do not attempt to explain Star Wars to the winter crew with only the novelization. (My dad was in the winter crew, so the book was the first Star Wars he had ever seen.)
11. Don’t offer to settle arguments by “taking this outside.” It’s -25, and the medic likes to stay bored. (Not my dad.)
11. NSF doesn’t like having to ask the Argentinians to fly someone in and someone else out in the middle of winter.
12. Don’t use the sea lions as stepping stones. they might not do anything about it, but the medic doesn’t want to chance it.
13. When telling your replacement about the job, don’t leave out the terrible seasickness on the 4 day boat trip down.
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October 19th, 2009 at 4:55 am
Good list! Screw Antartica. First post!
Still hung-over, cant say anything witty… Even my Captcha sucks. I fail at life today.
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Shadowydreamer reply on October 19th, 2009 11:11 am:
I’m curious.. Who gives a crap about who posts first? Doesn’t posting first just mean you’re an insomniac? Perhaps in a strange time zone? Stalking Skippy?
Is life so meaningless that posting first on a blog is a highlight for some people?
Y’know.. just askin. :P
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LT Ronald reply on October 19th, 2009 11:16 am:
It means that you have to report to work too damn early with a hangover, and get to leave something witty that others see first!
Unfortunately said hangover keeps anything witty from coming out. I manage an ammunition supply point, so yeah, that is pretty much the highlight of my day on a monday, because no-one uses the ranges on a monday.
Does that answer your questions?
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Shadowydreamer reply on October 19th, 2009 12:20 pm:
So you’re saying I’m trying to pick a fight with a hung over member of the military with practically unlimitted acess to ammo? :)
Captcha : traction poof. That’s what happens when you try to backtrack on ine, I guess!
October 19th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Re #9: It sounds incredibly dangerous. In fact, I’m sure someone with more experience than me can list a dozen reasons why it IS dangerous. But when your choices are fire under the diesel tank or two different ways of freezing to death, it works. (I’ve been there, though my uncle was the one to light the fire – and refused to allow anyone else to so much as leave the furthest building while he did so.)
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Schwal reply on October 19th, 2009 5:35 am:
Like I said, They fixed it with a diesel space heater under the pipe with a tarp as a tent over it. They stopped the mechanic with the welding torch very, very, very quickly.
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Jim A reply on October 19th, 2009 6:27 am:
There’s a probably apocryphal story about some French youths who found an old WW1 shell. They wanted to remove the fuze as a souviner. Of course it was rusted on solid. Somebody had the bright idea of heating the shell with a blow torch to loosen the fuze. The reason that we know this is that one of the crowd thought this was a BAD idea and left.
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GBlair reply on October 19th, 2009 8:38 am:
Well as far as I am aware, heating diesel in a confined space is part of what makes a diesel engine work. The other part being explosions.
I will admit that my knowledge of engines is basic at best but I would say it was a bad idea.
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Schwal reply on October 19th, 2009 9:49 am:
One of the things that makes diesel so popular for military use is that it is significantly harder to explode than gasoline.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_fuel#Use_as_vehicle_fuel
Diesel engines differ significantly from Gas ones in that there is no spark plug, the high pressure alone ignites the mixture.
So while heating the pipe alone probably wouldn’t have caused an explosion, rapidly heating an iron pipe from -25 to 200 degrees might cause a crack, and an open flame would light the fuel.
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RandomZero reply on October 20th, 2009 7:07 am:
It undoubtedly was. It just wasn’t as bad as the alternatives (sit there and freeze, or freeze on the two-mile hike through three feet of wet snow in -40 weather just to get to the vehicles). Needless to say, we never visited in winter again.
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October 19th, 2009 at 10:01 am
personally i’ve always found diesel to be an utter bitch to ignite.
#12 – Why not?!
#11 – Again why not?! Gives the cheating bastards something to do ;)
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Schwal reply on October 19th, 2009 10:29 am:
This was happening during Operation Condor. And the Argentinians were the only ones with a ski plane close enough to get there.
Are the cheaters NSF or the Argentinians?
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CPL Ted Bronson reply on October 24th, 2009 2:44 am:
True, diesel is harder to ignite than other fuels. But they were using a welding torch, which will ignite pretty much ANY fuel, in addition to a lot of other things…
captcha: we dowry — Do we now? Well, there go the last of my cattle…
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Enigmatick reply on October 28th, 2009 9:27 pm:
Just outta curiosity, CPL Bronson: are you a Heinlein fan?
CAPTCHA: duskier in – in WHAT?
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CPL Ted Bronson reply on November 14th, 2009 5:36 am:
Indeed I am sir, although around these parts I’m suprised that someone hadn’t noticed sooner…
October 6th, 2013 at 4:05 am
I have to say, from experience, that all the above “diesel and welding torches don’t mix” stuff is… a load of rubbish.
I have on numerous occasions used oxyacetylene kit to weld diesel tanks with the diesel still in them. It’s so much easier than trying to get it all out. And tiny leaks are much more visible when it’s only just stopped glowing. If you let it go cold before checking for leaks it’s easy to think there aren’t any and then find the new paint peeling off again a week or two later.
Usually there is a dim orange swirl of flame coming out of the filler cap hole for most of the operation but it’s no big deal. The welding torch produces way more heat. The burning diesel only produces a few candles’ worth.
When the thing being welded is a 55-gallon drum half full of diesel rather than a wee tank, then rather than a continuous swirl of flame, it tends to go “whoomph” when it ignites and blows itself back inside the tank where it promptly goes out. This then repeats at intervals of several seconds. It’s not much of a whoomph; there’s a much bigger one when your central heating boiler fires up.
The point is that almost nowhere is the ratio of diesel vapour to air within the combustible range; either there’s too little air or too little diesel to burn. And even when you do have a combustible mixture, it doesn’t burn very fast, so nothing spectacular happens. It’s entirely different from a diesel *engine*, where combustion is taking place at several tens of atmospheres of pressure and goes much faster.
It’s one of those cases where what everyone *thinks* is true is actually complete rubbish, and nobody ever bothers to find out if it really is true – or even think about whether it might not be true. Which means that people like me get to save ourselves a lot of hassle and also have the fun of watching ignorant spectators freak out.
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