When I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.
FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the "field safety training program" and basically it refers to the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in McMurdo.
Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year and instructors).
I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too, including how to travel on sea ice, and some mountaineering.
We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke was "the F stops here."
I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so... around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the building fulla chicks...
Right. So when I first went (2010-11), everybody going to mcmurdo had to sleep out on sea ice one night (and it was called "happy camper" or "snow school"). They gradually scaled back the program; added lesser versions and made it so your group had to request it. Maybe meanings of "snow school" and "happy camper" diverged at some point.
You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for Antarctica articles.
(McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to anywhere else.)
That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base to be.
"If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New Zealand and McMurdo, Antarctica and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to McMurdo, Antarctica will be 1 hour."
"Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99 miles.
If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."
Scott Base is easy walking distance from McMurdo, not 99 miles (or 100 kilometers and 100 miles and 100 nautical miles - that site is quite confused!).
Both are actually in New Zealand depending on the purpose, due to the Ross Dependency[1]. For instance, most of those folks in McMurdo station have longer NZ visas than typical US tourists visiting NZ would get (3 months), because when they fly down to The Ice they're not technically leaving the country.
An interesting corner case is when something happens at one of the US stations in the Ross Dependency, which New Zealand wants to investigate. The Rodney Marks death[2] is a particularly well-known example.
McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].
I'm typing this in New Zealand at latitude 42 degrees south (so about half way from the equator to the pole). So no, not near NZ, a bit less than 1/8 of the circumstance of the Earth away, maybe 1/10, more than 2000 miles.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, a twenty-minutes-into-the-future ecothriller, is much recommended reading for anyone who'd like to know more about McMurdo, the South Pole Station, and about the history of Antarctica's exploration and its geography and ecology. As is usually the case, KSR has definitely done his homework. (Disclaimer: you might fall in love with Antarctica, or at least develop a serious crush, as a result of reading this novel.)
