How can you drive across Antarctica?

Given that it's more than 2,000 miles across and without a gas station in sight, driving across Antarctica is a daunting task. Tune in as Marshall Brain explains how it works.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question,
how is it possible to drive across Antarctica given that
it's thousands of miles and there's not a single gas

(00:22):
station along the way. Once upon a time, like about
a hundred years ago, getting to the South Pole in
deepest Antarctica was hard, very very hard. An expedition in
nineteen oh seven failed to reach the South Pole. It
was finally reached in nineteen eleven, and it was an
incredibly daunting project. Fast forward to two thousand and ten.

(00:47):
In the same way that Mount Everest was once unconquerable
but is now nearly a tourist attraction and has cell
phone coverage all the way to the top, Antarctica is
now being traversed in Toyota pickup trucks. It's still a
bit arduous, yes, but it would appear that anyone with
enough money can make it to the South Pole as

(01:07):
part of a vacation package. How do you do it?
You ride in highly modified trucks and you carry the
hundreds of gallons of fuel that you need in a
trailer that you toe behind the truck. In two thousand
and ten, a convoy of these Toyota trucks drove nearly
three thousand miles to reach the South Pole and then

(01:29):
come back. Now, it used to be that if you
wanted to drive around the South Pole, you did it
in highly customized, super expensive tracked vehicles that took years
to develop. How are they able to do it in
a normal pickup truck. The main modification that they've made
is they've taken diesel engines in these trucks and they've

(01:50):
converted them to run on jet fuel. The reason for
the jet fuel is because jet fuel is formulated to
work at low temperatures. Anyway, when jets are flying at
thirty two feet it's minus forty degrees fahrenheit up there,
so the fuel has to be able to flow at
very low temperatures. So by modifying the trucks to run

(02:11):
on jet fuel, they get rid of the problem with
diesel fuel turning to jelly and cold temperatures. They make
some other modifications as well. For example, they put thirty
eight inch tires think about a tire that's over a
yard in diameter and very wide on these trucks, and
they run them at low pressure so that they don't

(02:31):
sink into the snow and ice of Antarctica. They also
put rails on the truck in case it falls into
a crevasse, and they have amountable crane so that they
can take the tanks of fuel. They bring the fuel
in normal steel barrels. They have to be able to
lift those off the trailer and move them into positions
so that they can do refueling, so they have a

(02:52):
portable crane that mounts on the front of the truck
to help them do that. Obviously, they also beef up
the heating system, do some work on the suspension, reduce
the cooling capacity, things like that so that it can
adapt to the extremely cold temperatures. And then when they stop,
they just leave the engines running so that they don't

(03:13):
have to start them at minus forty degrees. The company
that did the modifications is called Arctic Trucks, and if
you go to Arctic Trucks dot com you can see
the kinds of modifications they're making in some of their
future thinking in the Arctic and Antarctic Truck realm for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does that

(03:33):
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