Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2012 - 18:33
Forums
Antarctic Sub Glacial Lake and Stream Studies

Hey dad!

Myself and some fellow electrical engineering students have been keeping up with the blog and had a couple questions:

See the red and green flags everywhere, presume they're so you know where stuff is if it gets covered in snow. What is the significance of the two colors?

What fuel do both McMurdo and your drill site generator run on?

What kind of changes are there to electrical systems to keep them operating in the cold climate?

Fri, 11/09/2012 - 11:15

Mike LeBaron

Hi Nick and fellow engineers,As future electrical engineers you should be interested in those items - you may want to come down here to work some day - it could be a great experience for you.
The flag colors actually don't have consistent meanings. Generally if you see a row of red and/or green flags it marks a route that you should/must stay on. Usually this is to avoid things like crevasses in the ice that you could fall into and not be found for a very long time. The center line of the ice road out to the runway is also marked by a "stripe" of red flags. They also are used to mark locations so you can find things that may become buried by drifting snow. There's one other color I didn't have a picture of and that's black. Black means stay away, do not enter or approach. Black flags might mark danger areas or possibly the location of a research project test area or sample site that they don't want being disturbed.
Most everything here runs on diesel. The main camp is powered by diesel generators and most of the larger portable generators are also diesel. Some smaller systems are gasoline fueled. The other big fuel use is Jet A - airplane fuel - used in virtually all aircraft and helicopters. I heard that they have enough fuel storage here to be able to operate for 3 years without resupply. There are quite a few very large fuel storage tanks and another 2 million gallon tank is currently being built.
Thanks for sending in questions - get some of your other friends to log in and enter some questions.
Hope the helicopter project is going well.
I don't know of any special changes they've made for the climate. I think the biggest issue may be wind. The transmission lines are all above ground on normal wooden poles that are planted into the permafrost. The poles are not very high up in most places and they use special separator devices to keep the lines together between poles - I'll post a picture just for you guys. Once you get into buildings everything is normal 110 volt, 60 cycle power like we use in the U.S.