It's shower day!

It’s so difficult to describe what Antarctica is like. Rugged. Beautiful. Cold. Dry. White. Windy. Cold. Quiet.

But one thing I hadn’t appreciated is that it's not smelly. There’s no vegetation, very little life, and it's so cold and dry that some days it seems the only reason to have a nose is for the nosebleeds. Someone explained it to me once that because it's so dry and/or cold, our nasal passages don't work as well here. I'm not sure if that's the reason, or if it's that there's nothing to smell. 

Which is ok since we are encouraged to limit the number of showers we take so that we conserve water. McMurdo Station is located on Ross Island, formed by an active volcano in the Ross Sea, some 30-40 miles off the continent. Since we are surrounded by water (granted, the top 50 feet or so is frozen) the easiest way to get water for drinking, dishes and showers, is to pull it out of the Ross Sea, warm it up, desalinate it, and pump it through the plumbing. All that takes a lot of energy. Water is one of the most expensive resources here when you figure in all the energy used. We have wind turbines that provide maybe a half of our energy but we still burn a lot of fuel in generators. To reduce the amount of energy we need to generate, we conserve as much as we can. We have motion sensor light switches so lights aren’t left on, the housing office plans sleeping arrangements carefully so that we don’t heat any more buildings than we need to, and we conserve water.  

And so, when shower day rolls around, it’s a real treat to take a hot (though short) shower. But it’s not like anyone can tell I smell that bad anyway.