A tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - Part 1

Alright you guys here it is, the grand tour of the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. I thought the natural place to start was here on the observation deck, so let's get started. So before I show you the inside, let me just do a quick overview of the elevated station.

It's made up of 2 main pods, A and B, and each of these are separated into 4 sections each. I'm starting the tour over here on the left at the Observation Deck, and in this first part I will be moving along the entire length of the station on the 2nd floor. In part 2, I'll be moving back in the opposite direction on the first floor.

Along the way I'll be showing all these rooms and points of interest. Check out the video description for a link to this map if you want to use it to follow along. So most of the exits and entrances to the station have a vestibule-like area.

It's kind of like our airlock, although it's not for air, it's for the heat. So when you open a door directly to the outside you don't let all the heat out. Kind of this double-door system to make sure that doesn't happen.

Alright and just inside the observation deck right here is the large conference room. Which is used for any kind of large gatherings, sometimes all-hands meetings, actually just the other day, a few weeks ago actually, we had one of our staff members here who was a PhD candidate defend his doctoral thesis here in this room via teleconference to his university back in Maryland. And he became officially the first person to become a doctor at the south pole.

So that was pretty cool. Along this side we have a bunch of relics. This is a rock from Mount Howe, which is the southernmost exposed rock in the world.

Somebody chipped it off and brought it here. A bunch of relics from the early explorers like 1st edition of Roald Amundsen's book about his trip here to the South Pole that he signed. The Navy CBs, we've got a little American flag that was taken aboard the international space station and then given to us.

So a bunch of cool stuff in here. This whole place is like a museum, I'll show you more stuff as we go along. If instead of going left when we came through those doors, we went to the right, we would be coming over to the weight room, which is above the gym.

"Anybody in here? No? " So this is our weight room, exercise room, some people call it the gerbil gym cuz we have all the treadmills, and ellipticals, and bikes in here as well.

But you got your rowing machine, bike machine, some smith machines, some other exercise machines, squat rack, barbells, your standard gym fare. Basically everything I needed was in here. We got a screen in here and good speakers in case you wanna play music or watch something.

We've got some people who did the walk to Mordor, which is where you watch all three of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as you walk on the treadmill. I think they did it a few weeks ago, which is like 14 hours or something crazy like that. Anyway, walking out of the weight room.

And now, head down this way. Now back here is where offices of administration are, HR, the station manager, the area manager. Most of these offices are dormant during the winter because there is not that many staff here.

We don't have HR over the winter, we don't have an area manager here over the winter. But, what I wanted to show you back here is the communications center. So the communications center is the main hub of communication that's not data-based.

Of course we have satellite internet, and voice-over-IP that we can use, that's held somewhere else. But this is all radio, all radio-frequency communication, which is important for flights that land here. So anytime there is a flight taking off or landing here, this is the flight control center.

We also have the satellite Iridium phones in here that we can call anywhere in the world via satellite that's separate from our internet satellite. So yeah this is the hub right here, not as active during the winter because we don't have any flights during the winter. But during the summer it is very active.

Alright and like I said down this hallway is all the offices, boring, but there's more relics in this glass case here. Most of it's not that notable, however I think this is pretty cool. If you've ever heard of Admiral Byrd, he was the first person to fly over the South Pole, in 1929 I believe.

This is the sweater that he wore as he flew over the South Pole in his plane. Pretty cool. So if we go back out into the main hallway.

We have. . .

of course since I said we have the large conference room, we've gotta have the small conference room. Same thing as the large conference room just smaller. As you can see as we go down the hallway there's all these murals [collages] of this history of the station, a lot of things about the Antarctic Treaty, what we stand for, why we're here.

And just a little bit down from the small conference room is this little hallway here which leads to what we call Kinkgo's, which is basically the copy and print office of the whole place. So, oh somebody left the light on in here. So over here we have laminators, copiers, a microwave for some reason.

Anyway anything you could need for office supplies is in here, if you want paper clips, you want pushpins, you want anything like that. Over here is more the drafting station, architectural, utilities management place. Not very much interest to me, however, in here is our large format printer, which we've been able to print out some massive posters with, and is super useful for events and printing out banners and things like that.

Otherwise this place is pretty boring, to me at least. Alright and coming out of Kinkgo's, and then back to the main hallway. We are exiting B3 second level and going into B2 second level, and just to my right is the cargo deck, although during the winter we're not actually lifting much cargo from the outside up to this deck, and it's usually known as the smoking deck because it's one of the few places on station where you can actually smoke if you're a smoker.

Let's see if this will actually open for me. Here we go. So yeah we have a crane lift here that we can bring up cargo, that's just brought in from the plane right here.

You wanna smoke? You can see those red signs over there, says "Smoking area behind these signs. " If you wanna be a smoker down here you gotta be pretty dedicated, that's all I gotta say about that.

Alright and if we go right across from the cargo deck, this is the entrance to B2. B2 second-level is all science. This is where all the science offices are, all the scientists hang out in here.

Right now it's about 3 in the morning so I don't think there's going to be any scientists in here. So as you can see we have the meteorology corner back that way, you might see a little sign that says MET, all the meteorologists hang out back there. And the whole B2 pod is very open, very spacious, the roof's very high, up there is where we have long-term science storage, which is called the mezzanine, that 2nd floor up there, 2nd kind of half floor.

But everything's very open and spacious in here, it's really nice. But come through here, and this little hutch area is where the scientists for the IceCube Laboratory, the IceCube Neutrino Detector, they hang out here. Right now we have Dr Martin Wolf and Dr Josh Veitch-Michaelis, who run that experiment right now over the winter.

This little section here is for the South Pole Telescope scientists, we have Dr Sasha Rahlin and Dr Matt Young over here. And then we have various other hutches where other scientists run other experiments like BICEP, MAPO, the SuperDARN array, the aurora cameras. .

Back there we have a workbench if anyone needs to do any soldering or welding. And that's pretty much the B2 pod, or B2 science. We go out these other double doors that connect B2 to the main hallway.

And I do wanna point out one thing, to those of you who might be paying close attention is that you might've seen the stairway way down the hallway by the weight room before I went in. That's one stairway. We have another stairway here kind of in the middle of the station.

And then we have one more way down at the other end. There are only 3 stairways inside the station that connect the 2 levels. So there's a lot of times where you have to kind of walk out of your way to get to a stairway, to go down, to walk back under exactly where you just were.

So it's a little bit tedious to get around sometimes but honestly the station's not that big so you shouldn't be complaining. But the stairways are important for another reason, and that is because they're kind of the community bulletin board. So there's columns for each day of the week, and you have different events that happen each day of the week, it could be a TV show, it could be board game night, and then special events are here on the end.

So any time you want to put on an event, you've gotta make a poster, you've gotta put it up in the stairways, and that's basically how everybody gets to know that you're doing something. Okay, so here's the doors I just came out of from B2. Directly across is the entrance to B1.

Now B1 is mainly a berthing pod, which is another way to say that's where we sleep, it's just an old navy term. By the way, there are a lot of navy terms around here like berthing, galley, and that's because the very first South Pole Station was a Navy base, and so a lot of those terms kind of stuck around. But besides the berthing, the first half of this pod, B1, is a lounge where we have a billiards table, we have a little coffee table / socializing area over there.

Over here in the corner of the B1 lounge we have chess, a bunch of magazines, a little sound system play music if we want to, and also our community fridge where it's kind of like take a beer, leave a beer that sort of thing. And then all our board games and card games are over in these big ol' closets over here. We have tons of everything, we have tons of games I've never even heard of.

Of course we got Rock'em Sock'ems. Bunch of cribbage. Cribbage has gotten super popular on station this winter, we play it just about every day, sometimes twice a day, but yeah, puzzles, got lots of activities stuffed in these closets.

Catan, obviously, Ticket to Ride, all the classics, some stuff I've never even heard of in here. So lots of stuff to do. Lots of people down for board games here too because everybody here is usually a little bit nerdy, so.

. And then we have the movie lounge, or one of our movie lounges on station. And as you can see we have a pretty good selection of DVDs and Blu-Rays, and then pretty comfortable seating for watching movies, TV shows together.

A lot of times people just organize a movie night for a particular movie, whether it's ladies' night and they're watching Magic Mike or somebody new came on station and brought a new TV show with them. Sometimes they'll just organize that. It's a really good time, good bonding, bring your popcorn in here, and yeah.

Another thing to note is that, like I said back through that door is the B1 berthing. I'm not going to show it to you because all the berthing kinda looks the same, and I'm going to show you where I am berthed over in A1, so I'm just going to leave that for now. But just underneath us, underneath this floor on the 1st level of B1 is the emergency power plant.

Now that's pretty important because we do have a main power plant, and we have 3 generators there, and we only need one of them to run the whole station, but in the event that all 3 of them somehow failed we have the emergency power plant in the first floor of B1 that would take over and run essential functions while we're working on getting out of here because if all 3 of our power plant generators failed that's bad news. Alright as we come out of the B1 lounge and further down this hallway. .

. we are now in the connector between A pod and B pod. If you look out this window, you might be able to see if my camera adjusts, the big white banner that faces towards the.

. . I guess you could call it the "front yard" of the station, and that's towards the ceremonial pole with all the flags and the mirror ball.

Then if you look out this side you can see the back yard, and way off in the distance you can see the RF domes, the satellite radomes that we use to get our internet access. And all the berms that have our long-term storage out there. Various other buildings.

But yeah this is the connector between the two pods, A pod and B pod. So I'm now leaving B pod, now going to A pod. And we have lots of memorabilia on the walls, we have big blow-up prints of the original New York Times articles when Amundsen reached the south pole on foot, when Scott's party was discovered dead in Antarctica, and then when Admiral Byrd flew the first flight over the South Pole in 1929.

And now since we're solidly in A-pod, here is the computer lab, also a lot of our offices and cubicles are in here for facilities and maintenance personnel, for IT personnel. I think some of them are in here working right now so I'm not going to bother them. But basically behind me is where you can find the computer lab.

These computers are available 24/7 to use. We don't have internet 24/7, but you can always use them. This is the IT office right here.

And then various cubicles and offices back in there, boring, I'm not gonna take you back there. And then coming back out of there, you might notice along the walls we have these lockers, some of them are red some of them are green. These are basically for the firefighter team.

They store a lot of their tanks, their tools, their fire gear in these lockers for quick access in case there's a fire. Which is one of our main emergency concerns on station, is fire. You might think that's weird since it's so cold outside, but inside it's a nice warm temperature, definitely fire could take hold here.

Along this wall, and you might be noticing I've past a lot of these pictures and frames already. These are group photos of every single winter-over crew that's stayed at the South Pole since the base was first established in 1957. And so you can come along this, it's kind of like a memory lane, you can kinda come along this wall, and also this wall and see all the prior crews that were here.

Our station photo was just taken not too long ago and we are going to go right here. So of course I'm the Physician Assistant on station, I work with the station doc and the two of us are the sole medical support for all the staff and scientists on station. And our clinic is right here in A-pod.

Lemme take ya in. So if you come in here through the vestibule, in here is the lab with another door into the pharmacy. And this is actually my office.

This is the computer I sit at basically most days, waiting for a patient to come in, sometimes I'm managing inventory, sometimes I am taking stock of all the pills we have in the pharmacy which is right through this door, locked of course. This is all the over-the-counter pills that we can just give out to people when they need it, whether it's TUMS, maybe some lip balm, or sunscreen, something like that. And this is all.

. . it's a little bit of a mess right now, try to ignore it, we're in the middle of trying to transition and clean things up for the next crew that's coming in here.

But we have a lot of the standard medical equipment, I'll probably make a separate video on all the different labs, and all the different capabilities we have here in the medical clinic, but actually it's pretty comprehensive for how isolated we are. I was actually pretty impressed when I got here. Coming further into the clinic we have our main patient treatment area through here.

And there's our bed, our crash card over here, our defibrillator, ventilator. . .

our main ventilator we have several backup ventilators as well. Ultrasound. All our equipment drawers here.

IV pumps, etc. And then we have our tele-medicine station, where often we'll call over to McMurdo Station where they might have a physical therapist which we don't have here. And they can help us with a patient who might be having back pain or shoulder pain, and help us do some rehab for them via tele-medicine.

Over here we have the dentists' area. We rarely use this but we are trained in some very basic dental procedures, and all our dental equipment over here. We also have our portable xray machine right down here, and our xray cartridges, readers over here, our 24/7 Iridium phone line over here in case we need to call back to medical support at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

They are there for us 24/7 if we ever have a question or we need to consult anybody, they are awesome. And so that is the patient treatment area. And if you're wondering, we have the plastic up because of COVID.

We have not had a COVID patient here at the South Pole yet, we're hoping to keep it that way. But if we needed to take any isolation precautions because we have a COVID patient there, we could shut this, and basically seal off the airspace from outside here. We have not had to do that yet.

But again we can go through some more plastic over here to the inpatient area. Here we have the inpatient bed, Manny the Manikin sitting over there right now. I think this is probably the best view out a window at the station is from this room, and that's because we get to look straight out at the ceremonial south pole.

Basically right in line with it, makes for some great pictures, great timelapses. You can see all the way over to the Atmospheric Research Observatory, way out there, and then the Dark Sector buildings way out there which are kind of just silhouettes right now. But, love this room, it's cozy, it's comfortable, we have not had to have an inpatient this year, I hope that continues.

We've had a very healthy year so far. And we got a TV too in case you got to sit here. We got our Stryker stretcher right here, 'course, with our go-bag and our ACLS medications.

And then through here is the station doctor's office, Dr Lee, who's not in here right now because it's 3 in the morning. Another exam table here. And that's basically the entire clinic.

Uhhh. . .

yeah. So coming out of the clinic and heading further down A-Pod, first we have the community whiteboard where you can write whatever you want, some people write jokes or riddles, other people are like hey have you seen my gloves, have you seen my headlamp. Anytime you want to quickly write out a message to the community you use this whiteboard.

And then further down A-pod, basically this whole section, the 2nd floor of this section of A-pod is the Galley, which is the kitchen / cafeteria. That is the way to exit the cafeteria so I'm actually going to take you down this way. Remember what I said about there only being 3 staircases inside the elevated station, this is the 3rd one, the one that is furthest away from Destination Alpha or the main entrance to the station.

You can see more of these red lockers with the fire equipment in here. And then through here is the A1 second-floor berthing pod. I'm actually going to show you this what it looks like, because this is where I live and sleep.

So, going to have to be very very quiet, because these walls are very thin, and you just have to be conscientious of your neighbors. So here we go. Helpful signs here that tell you which berthing rooms are where.

And then down here, down this long hallway is where I live. Here I am at A1, second floor, room 22. My room is a bit of a mess right now because I'm packing up to leave, and I'm finally getting around to doing this filming tour.

But yeah they're very small, I think the whole room is about 8 feet by 10 feet. It's sparse but you gotta make out of it what you can. When I first got here I thought this room was tiny, now I think it's plenty, but I just wish I'd brought more room decorations.

And now coming out of the berthing hallway, I'm just going to quickly duck in the men's bathroom while I know nobody's in here. And that the other thing about living here is that you get your own tiny little bedroom, but you have to use a shared bathroom. Three sinks, mirrors, couple urinals in the guys obviously, couple stalls, one shower.

Some of the other bathrooms on station have 2 showers, it's just kinda variable. But yeah, shared everything. Alright coming out of the berthing pod in general, and then further down to the total opposite end of the station from where we started.

And we come to another vestibule, and this one leads out to the Vertical Tower which is the stairway to get down to the under-ice areas, like the Logistics Arch, the Fuel Arch, the Vehicle Maintenance Facility. And I'm going to show you tours of those later, but for now, lemme show you what the vertical tower is. .

. Although nobody actually calls it the Vertical Tower, we all just call it the Beer Can. So right now we have a bunch of trash laying out here that needs to be taken down.

This is the trash collection area, and then once it's full enough which it definitely is now, we cart it all into the elevator here and take it down to the logistics arch where we sort it, it gets compacted and then gets tracked out once the summer starts which is just about to happen. Alright coming back in from the Beer Can, if you take a right you'll go right into the main entrance of the Galley. We are almost there.

And, this is the galley. Out this window, if you look to your right when you come in, you can see the geographic south pole way out there. It's probably too small to see with this field of view on this GoPro but you get the idea it's right out that window.

Tons of seating, we have the galley set up for summer right now which means there can probably be held like 100 people in here, something crazy like that, at a time. Over winter we had very few tables, we had enought to seat 20 or 30 at a time, because there were only 39 on station. Right now it's actually very kind of cluttered in my mind but it's necessary for the summer population.

Coming further into the galley we have our leftovers fridge where all the amazing chefs we have here load up this fridge for us to eat whenever, middle of the night or on Sundays when they're taking a break. You never go hungry here. We're all pretty well fed.

Here is the grill, the food line. Usually lots of baked goods right here. Coffee, tea, all the other beverages, these get switched out periodically.

Right now we have Gatorade, orange juice, water. And our ice cream fridge. A lot of people get a kick out of the fact that we have an ice cream fridge here at the South Pole.

And they're like "Why don't you just store it outside? " But the problem is that outside is like -80F a lot of the times, and if you've ever tried to scoop out -80F ice cream, it's actually pretty hard, so. This is really to keep ice cream a little bit warmer than outside, but not too warm so it doesn't melt.

Over here we have the coffee bar, where we have a volunteer cafe staff that run it every Sunday morning, early afternoon, really awesome, they make all kinds of coffee. People donate the beans, donate the grounds, so we're not always drinking the mass-produced coffee over there at the other coffee station. Pretty nice to have that.

Also during winter we can have a lounge in this area, where it's all couches, coffee table, it's a comfortable space, now it's gotta be taken up by tables so that there's more room for people here during the summer. Here's the community bulletin board. If you got something that you want to actually stay up for a little bit as an announcement don't write it on the whiteboard I showed you before, put it up here and you get people to know about it.

As you come out of the galley, put your dirty dishes in here. During winter we all take turns doing dishes in the dishpit. That's the Hobart right there that we use to wash all the dishes with.

But during the summer there's a dedicated steward crew that takes care of all the dishes and a lot of that housekeeping, so that we don't actually take turns. I think it's actually good that we do that during the winter because it just kind of builds camaraderie, community, everybody on station during winter takes turns doing dishes from the station manager to the chefs to the scientists, everybody. So I think it's just kind of is a bonding experience to have that, even though it's kind of annoying sometimes to have that, but I think overall, it's a good thing.

Thanks for watching and keep an eye out for part 2 where I show you the rest of the station, including the beer can, the sauna, and many other places. After that I've got tons of interviews coming out for you guys and in case you've ever wanted to know what it's like walking outside at the South Pole, I've filmed the entire 20-minute walk in -80F weather from the station to the South Pole Telescope.