jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

This video shows what life is like when the military sets up a temporary camp in Antarctica - to meet submarines. Living on moving ice sheets with temperatures around -70° can be challenging. Picture the earth with Antarctica right at the bottom. Then picture people walking around there - hanging from the bottom of the earth. That always strikes me as a funny image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap7-Wci2-8k

KillroyII Loc: Middle Georgia

I will watch this later... my feet got cold from watching the 1st couple of minutes

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I wrapped a blanket around myself.

rlv567 Loc: Baguio City, Philippines

I follow a forum called All Things Philippine, which has good information for expats such as myself, and those who are thinking about moving here. One of the active members is a supervisor of some sort at (I believe) McMurdo Station. I think he works three months, then has one month off, so he goes from the extreme cold of McMurdo to the hot weather (except for Baguio) of the Philippines! That would be pretty tough to handle, but he's been doing it for several years.

Loren - in Beautiful Baguio City

edwdickinson Loc: Ardmore PA

If they're standing on the bottom won't they fall off?
Never mind, I watched the video and it is the arctic so they were standing on top of the world , all good.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

That's quite a change to handle.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Ooooh! I got that wrong! I could have sworn it was antarctica. It looked just like it!

HRBIEL Loc: Rapid City, SD

Surprises me that they don’t fall,off!

Canisdirus

I grew up with an active (at the time) Sub Commander (friend of my dad's).
Spent many a day with him...he did all of that...kind of a laid back guy with laser beam focus.
He ended up commander of the sub fleet out of Hawaii...until he finally mustered out.
They had him slotted for the Pentagon...he tried it...and went private instead.
The bureaucracy he told me...deafening...and dangerous.
He was right of course...

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Definitely.

KillroyII Loc: Middle Georgia

I finished watch it last night, very interesting. Afterwards, I watched several of her other video articles

I spent 3, of my 20 years in the Air Force, in a joint service outfit. A couple of the Navy guys wanted to set me up for a ride in a submarine... always a NO from me. I did say yes to a ride on a carrier but it never worked out... work schedule wise. They did tell me that no one (military) takes a “vacation” type ride... you are assigned duties while on board.

SAVH Loc: La Jolla, CA

Please note: This did NOT occur in the Antarctic. The Antarctic is a continent (land) and submarines do not surface up through land. They do, however, surface from under the ice in the Arctic where this video was shot. I know, a minor issue, but as a career submarine officer I thought I would add to the comments. And, yes, Arctic operations are very complex and very technical.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, someone pointed out that slip-of-the-fingers. Arctic/Antarctic - both too far and too cold for me to visit.

neillaubenthal

That would be the arctic…the other polar region. Antarctica is land and submarines don't go there (source, retired submariner). Although TBH I also saw the arctic from underneath during my deployment…spent about 2 months running around up there in the late 80s doing submarine things. We didn't get to surface since us ending up there was sort of an unplanned thing and we had not had all the special stuff done to the ship before you go up there and that pretty much prevents surfacing unless its an emergency. The strange part was that we didn't have the special chart allowance that you get when you're planning to go that far north…so when we got to the north end of our northernmost chart the CO asked me what we were going to do…I told him we would just put down a blank sheet of paper and adjust the latitude markings which get farther apart as you go north and not worry about it. He asked me what I would do about not knowing how deep the water was…my answer was that even if we had the proper charts they're all for under ice areas and mostly had no depth soundings on them anyway…and that since submarines at the time did not use Fathometers on patrol since they make noise we couldn't really tell how deep it was anyway. We did find a 20ish year old Nat Geo in the crews met with a map of the arctic in it and concluded that the average depth was some thousands of feet deep…8,000 comes to mind but it was a long time ago…and it was pretty flat from what little we really know about the seafloor topography up there. We operated on these made up charts for probably 3 weeks before finally getting enough back south to be on the regular charts…which still had few to no depth markings on them…there would be a single line of soundings going across the 4x6 foot chart and the rest of it was blank. Since it was either under ice or in the marginal ice zone…we knew that at some undetermined point in the past some submarine had transited along the line or else the soundings would have never made it to the chart.

While it is cold…the -70F you're talking about is more common at the South Pole than in the Arctic…and you're not up there in the middle of winter because it's dark and the helo's can't fly.

I actually went up to the ice pack in the mid 90s when I worked for the office in DC that buys heavyweight (submarine launched) torpedoes…spent about 3 weeks or so up there in the early spring. While it was cold…generally about -10F with warm days up to about 0F…the humidity was so low that unless you were riding on one of the snowmobiles or staying outside a long time it really wasn't as cold as one might think if the wind wasn't blowing. We had. thermal underwear and heavy pants/shirt/sweaters…but unless going out of camp for awhile generally the Nanook of the North pants, parka, and mittens weren't worn.

There's no fresh water available obviously…except for the ice…and despite it being sea (salt water) ice…any ice that is more than a few years old is essentially fresh as the salt particles gradually drift downward…the blue ice is fresh and the white is salt (or maybe the other way 'round…it's been going on 30 years and I don't remember exactly). To get water…folks at the camp took turns going out and mining ice which we put in big pots on top of our oil powered hut stoves to melt. Once you got out there with the snowmobile and box for the ice on a sled…off came the parka but we did leave regular is gloves on after taking the over mittens off so skin didn't freeze to the shovel/pick handles. One would actually work up a sweat out there and when you stopped mining you gradually added layers back as you cooled down before heading back to camp.

The one time it was really, really, really cold was when we were recovering the torpedoes that were launched. After their run, exercise units float up to the ice and you open up a hole in the ice to recover them. Divers jump in and pull them over to the hole so they float nose up in the hole. Over comes the helo…we were using Vietnam era Hueys for this…he drops down the lifting bridle and while hovering about 30 feet over the hole you ran over and hooked it up to the torpedo. I gotta tell ya…when it's even up around 0F and you've got a 100 or so mph wind blowing down on you…its cold.