Water water everywhere…
Do they ever melt snow or ice for water? Then, they wouldn't need to desalinate it. Any idea how the energy required to melt ice compares with the energy needed to desalinate it?
All McMurdo water is from the sound, not from the local snow/ice. The energy for desalination v. melting is left as an exercise to the reader, but I expect a quick internet search would provide some rough numbers.
Complicating collection from local ice/snow would be the following: McMurdo does get fairly muddy and snow/ice free in the late summer. The ice runway is being moved this weekend from right in front of town to Pegasus Field, an airport a few miles farther away where the 'permanent' ice shelf is located. In a month McMurdo will be a sea port with boats docked at the edge of town. So the snow/ice would have to be transported, which cannot be done as efficiently as water transport, unless the melting plant was located out of town.
Field camps melt snow. When I was out in the field, we had to take the snow mobile a few km away to a glacier, where we would shovel snow into garbage bags and cans, drive it back to the camp, and melt it. We could not melt the ice under us because it was sea ice and tasted salty. Even the snow on the ice tasted salty. So ice melted near McMurdo (near the sea) might need to be desalinated anyway.
South Pole? They melt it all. I'm going there tomorrow (weather permitting) and here is the relevant passage from the South Pole Station Guide:
Energy requirements for heating snow and the water storage capacity at the South Pole make water a precious resource here. We are limited to TWO showers per week and TWO minutes of running water per shower. The easiest way to do this is to turn the water off while youâre soaping/shampooing, then turn the water on again to rinse.
