Waste Water Treatment Plant

Much more so than South Pole, McMurdo is a town. There are dozens of buildings scattered in this little nook of volcanic rock on Ross Island, and those include the kinds of municipal services you'd have in any small town: the fire department, a power plant, and so on.


Last week I got to take a tour of the Waste Water Treatment Plant, which was really fun to see and learn about at long last (considering I've now spent a total of nearly 6 months in McMurdo between this season and passing through on my South Pole contracts).


We got to check out a video feed of the digestive bacteria that we all so generously donate to the plant along with the rest of our..."deposits" (ahem) into the system.

They carry on their work in the festive (for them) environment of the processing tanks...

...and the remaining, irradiated solid waste gets passed through what (to my still-limited understanding) is essentially a dehydrator...

...and then end up as relatively harmless chunks of soil-looking material that gets packaged up in tri-walls and shipped off-continent on the vessel each year. You can tell it was a fun, interesting tour by the way there are more than a half-dozen people in this picture staring raptly at what is essentially poop.