If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse

https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...

Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.

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brookst an hour ago | parent [-]

I am adopting “Furthest possible end of any logistics chain” as a more refined version of “middle of fucking nowhere”. Thank you.

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walrus01 an hour ago | parent [-]

It would probably be harder if they wanted to put it, for instance, on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, but for sure the literal south pole is pretty damn expensive on a $ per kg to get stuff sent to. And on an ongoing basis to sustain operations 24x7x365 (it's my understanding it runs almost entirely on diesel fuel and/or Jet-A for a big-ass set of generators).

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imglorp 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree: anywhere in the ocean is easier logistics than crawler trains over land: ship it there and chuck it overboard. They do that to install oil rigs all the time (but that's more like float it there and sink it). Eg: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/dockwise-vanguard-shipping

	▲	walrus01 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but now imagine the cost of putting large active electronics 4,000 meters down on the sea floor and keeping it running, and getting the data back off it... The cost of running the drill rig seen in the photos of the icecube detector would be a fraction of that.

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brookst 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

For sure, there are more difficult places, but I don’t think there is any conceivable place where the supply chain runs through the South Pole on its way. I hope not.