Cities in Antarctica

Is it possible to build a functioning metropolitan area above-ground in Antarctica? What kind of construction problems would a task like this face? Would geodesic domes be necessary for city life on Earth's most inhospitable continent (besides Australia, I mean).

Possible? Yes. Feasible and practical? Questionable. While there is solid ground in Antarctica (especially in the more mountainous/volcanic regions like around Erebus) you'd likely be holed up on the edges of the continent still connected to the sea.

That is unless you had a hell of a logistics train supply anything and everything a South Pole City would need.

Either way though design wise you could leave the city open air, it is still Earth after all. About the only reason to make a sealed dome type place is to make an artificial paradise in the most inhospitable place on Earth.

The biggest and perhaps only problem in dealing with construction is where you do it. If you are on the ice sheets and not entirely on the continent itself you may find yourself at the mercy of if/when the ice sheet breaks up owing to age or warming or otherwise seasonal variation. (The Ross Ice Shelf is known to break up considerably in the summer months.) If you build on the more solid ground sections of Antarctica you'd have to deal with more variable (and to a degree harsher) weather patterns. The great ice fields in the center of the continent are deserts and very stable climate wise. (Stable as in chronically cold and what little precipitation falls there doesn't ever melt.)

edited 10th Apr '14 9:25:19 PM by MajorTom

Think of this as an end of the world scenario. All other continents are completely uninhabitable, and the remaining human population has to be evacuated to Antarctica ASAP. How much of the land could be used if you wanted to avoid building on the ice shelfs, and if you had to build on the ice shelfs (this project must accommodate at least 2 billion humans, ideally 3 billion), which locations would be the most stable, the ones with thicker or thinner ice?

Less than ten percent of Antartica is not ice shelf or continental glacier. Most of which is near the sea.

The continental glaciers in the center of Antarctica. It's a desert but the ice is relatively stable in human lifetime terms.

So cities built towards the center could probably last at least a hundred to a few hundred years?

Depending on their supply situation they'd last as little as a year to up to a century. The structures would be there until the continental glacier breaks up and melts in a few thousand to few million years Ice Age and global warming and tectonic movement cycles depending.

When you're on continental glacier your resources are going to be incredibly scarce unless you plan on drilling through the kilometer-plus thick ice to hit the continental bedrock. (Only the furthest north parts of Antarctica have anything resembling soil.)

edited 10th Apr '14 9:44:51 PM by MajorTom

Again, end of the world scenario. Liberties can be taken with food and resources, considering this is literally a "desperation in the face of extinction" arrangement. And also in the future, so that helps too.

Aeroponics and hydroponics can probably compensate for the lack of soil as far as plants go. As a practical matter you're probably going vegan or pescetarian (fish) unless you want to start farming penguins.

Both full spectrum lighting and black out-blinds (or something similar) are going to be a necessity as the swing between perpetual daylight and perpetual night play havoc with people's heads (and give them nasty cases of seasonal affective disorder).

As a practical consequence, I think a series of linked domes might be more practical because it would allow people to travel from building to building, even during a storm and in the middle of winter. Also if you're thinking long term (centuries) you'll have to have a way for travel between cities, even during winter when flight is impractical, or have every city be self sufficient for six months of the year.

I assume that power is nuclear fusion (or at least fission?).

Underground would make more sense. Maybe geothermal taps for energy?

edited 11th Apr '14 4:19:35 AM by fulltimeD

Oh boy, this was one of my hobbies as a kid. I invented an entire alternate history in which Antarctica got settled by millions of people. We then turned it into a war game.

The main challenges for self-sustaining communities are dealing with the cold, and developing a resource to trade.

I decided to use active volcanic regions as sources of geothermal energy. There are three active volcanoes down there, all three of which are near a coast, so there's your three main population centers. The best one is Deception Island, located in a chain of islands between Antarctica and South America. It has an excellent natural harbor, geothermal heating, and access to the "Antarctic Convergence" where the world's best fishing occurs. A hundred thousand people could live there. And it's solid rock, so no probs with above ground settlement.

Nearby are undersea deposits of natural gas, on the penninsula itself are various mineral resources that could be mined, and the coast has enough fiord-like harbors to support fishing villages. The ocean in that region is ice-free for much of the year.

Another source of power is wind. Up on the ice sheet it blows pretty consistently. I figured the ice sheet would be a good place to put greenhouses. You can actually live under-ground (technically "Under-ice") if you dont mind re-digging the caverns every year (the ice sheet moves a couple inches every year).

@Knight of Lsama: Yeah, nuclear reactors are the main power source in this scenario, probably fission.

And I did consider underground cities, fulltime D, but decided that it was probably gonna be a lot less cool. Mostly because I have this picture in my head of a night-time satellite photograph of Antarctica lit up like America's eastern border that I kinda wanna hold on to, even if a written medium wouldn't quite get the picture across to anyone reading it. My original idea was to have them build outposts/towns like Mc Murdo on the surface for the lower class to manage, and the middle class and upper class all live underground in artificial environments like the Geofront, but again, it lacks the same oomph as literal cities being built above ground in a place like Antarctica.

Geothermal would be your best option for power. There are several regions in Antarctica where it is both plentiful and (relatively) accessible, and it requires no external resources (unlike fission plants, which require Uranium that may be hard to get if you need to stay out of Australia).

In any case, the main problem for power will be heat loss to wind. As such, exposed surface construction is probably a bad idea (if you look at existing antarctic construction you'll see a lot of low, ground-hugging and partially underground structures, all designed to minimize wind exposure). If you can minimize that loss by building properly, the geothermal energy available in a place like Ross Island should be quite sufficient for the needs of even a large city.

Knowing nothing about the rest of your setting, it's really hard to judge whether what you're suggesting is feasible.

Like, what's made the rest of the world so uninhabitable that living in the single least hospitable continent on Earth seems like a good idea? Nuclear war? Plague? Zombies? Robot uprising?

And exactly what kind of technology do the people of the setting have? "The near future" doesn't really tell a lot - do they have robot builders? Advanced nano-materials, or outright nanobots? Nuclear fusion? Wireless power transmission? Hovercars?

And one last question: how much time did the people of your setting have to build this place? Constructing a long-term, self-sufficient city in Antarctica would be one of the most massive engineering projects ever undertaken by mankind. The sheer logistics of such a thing are mind-boggling. I won't go into the details right now, but suffice to say it would need to be built long before the downfall of civilization - decades, maybe even centuries in advance. Without a stable industrial, economic and technological base, this project couldn't even get started, let alone completed.

That's one reason for building on the ice shelf- ice itself makes a decent building material, provided they have enough construction equipment to handle the sudden influx of population.

BTW- I direct ya'lls attention to this thread. Truly, nothing is new at TV Tropes.

edited 11th Apr '14 7:18:15 AM by demarquis

Grey Goo, actually. A nanovirus designed specifically to assimilate organic biomass has pretty much covered the rest of the world in a thick layer of Meat Moss.

No to the hovercars and nuclear fusion, but they do have wireless power transmission, as well as nanomachines (son). Problem is, the stuff on the outside is a lot worse than anything they've managed to manufacture in the "really tiny machines" department.

Decades are a pretty safe bet. This was being built before the complete surrender of all other habitable landmass on Earth to the nanovirus, once world leaders began to understand this wasn't a fight they were going to win at this juncture.

And how many people are attempting to live there in your scenario?

Wait, why hasn't the Grey Goo consumed Antarctica as well? I would've thought the only escape in that scenario would be to leave Earth entirely.

edited 11th Apr '14 7:59:41 AM by Tungsten74

It only assimilates organic biomass. It's coded to target anything composed of at least 3 out of these 4: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. In other words, it's a bioweapon. As for "why Antarctica", like I said, it's Meat Moss. It may be a nanomachine swarm, but it still uses flesh as a medium. In other words, it's progress is hampered by the cold as well as the natural barrier of mountains that separates east and west Antarctica.

From the other wiki's colonization of Antarctica page.

So if you're setting your world in a post-global warming environment, you could feasibly have cities on the northern coast. Migrants from areas displaced by rising sea levels (like coastal cities and such) would be a strong option for colonists.

If this is what you're going for, something growing out of McMurdo Station would be your best bet. (During the summer, Mc Murdo is already the size of a small town; it has about 1200 residents).

edited 11th Apr '14 9:30:17 AM by somerandomdude

Oh cool! I set a story in this kinda place, years ago.

I eventually settled on solar and wind power with a bit of tidal, and figured that it grew out of a local mining operation. The cities were domed, and non-city settlements were continent-roving landships operating as a self-defense fleet, all largely inspired by Blue Gale Xabungle.

The one thing I could never work out was what to do with the penguins...

Penguins are really smart. I'm sure humans could train them to perform all sorts of vital tasks in a small Antactican community. They might even develop a symbiotic relationship.

Or use them as food.

The penguins become domestic household pets. The obvious answer.

Quoted from the previous thread:

"First, shelter. Take a bulldozer, and run it back and forth a couple dozen times over an ice sheet. The result will be a shallow trench, several meters across and as long as you like. Roof it over and cover with the ice debri you just excavated. Instant shelter. Each household picks a spot within the trench and digs down and out, burrowing a small space for themselves. Instant village.

For energy- Antarctica has some of the most powerful sustained winds in the world. Each village sets up a series of wind-turbines on the surface that generate electricity. They have the "midnight sun" phenomena down there so half the year, when the weather is clear, they can supplement with solar. As the society grows, this energy source probably wont scale up, so they may have to supplement with either natural gas (available off the coast) or coal (available in the mountains). Coal is dirty, so environmentally that is a problem, but you don't actually have to dig into the ice to get it, there's plenty of ice-free surface in Antarctica to dig into. There's one other alternative: geo-thermal. There are three known active volcanoes in Antarctica, which gave me the location of my three first outposts, and eventually the three biggest cities. The industrial capital was a place called "Deception Island", located in the South Shetland Island◊ chain.

Food- Fishing provides almost all protein at first, so villages have to be near the coast, and the coast has to be ice-free much of the year. Deception Island fits this bill perfectly. I had a plan to eventually cut off most of the harbor and stock it with eatable fish and marine mammals- the worlds largest fish farm. Again, environmentally unsound, but plausible.

Industry- At the beginning, when we are relying on wind-power alone, nearly every manufactured item will have to be imported. As the population grows, and we switch to geo-thermal, local manufacturing could develop. Survival gear and light industrial machinery are obvious choices, but I was content to allow local entreprenuers figure it out. Shipping is another obvious choice. Hydroponics research would give us our international competitive edge, and provide the basis for a research/institution of higher education.

Defence- Come on, it's Antarctica. Imagine Russia in winter, on double steroids. Originally I didn't plan on even having a military, but obviously my friend's challenge forced me to rethink that. We agreed to let my colony grow to multiple cities first, otherwise there is no way to defend itself. I felt that a light militia, using harrassment tactics, would make any long-term invasion entirely impractical. International Relations- It's a colony made almost entirely by refugees. They will obviously want to help people back home. Whatever weight we carry in the world will probably be spent promoting international relief programs. In fact, I came up with a whole scheme whereby we take them in, give them economic opportunities, educate their children, and then send them back to the home country and initiate a world-wide wave of democracy and economic development."

Helpful household pets though. Probably very trainable. Penguins have a lot of social intelligence for non human animals.