Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question,
Speaker 1: how is it possible to drive across Antarctica given that
Speaker 1: it's thousands of miles and there's not a single gas
Speaker 1: station along the way. Once upon a time, like about
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, getting to the South Pole in
Speaker 1: deepest Antarctica was hard, very very hard. An expedition in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven failed to reach the South Pole. It
Speaker 1: was finally reached in nineteen eleven, and it was an
Speaker 1: incredibly daunting project. Fast forward to two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: In the same way that Mount Everest was once unconquerable
Speaker 1: but is now nearly a tourist attraction and has cell
Speaker 1: phone coverage all the way to the top, Antarctica is
Speaker 1: now being traversed in Toyota pickup trucks. It's still a
Speaker 1: bit arduous, yes, but it would appear that anyone with
Speaker 1: enough money can make it to the South Pole as
Speaker 1: part of a vacation package. How do you do it?
Speaker 1: You ride in highly modified trucks and you carry the
Speaker 1: hundreds of gallons of fuel that you need in a
Speaker 1: trailer that you toe behind the truck. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and ten, a convoy of these Toyota trucks drove nearly
Speaker 1: three thousand miles to reach the South Pole and then
Speaker 1: come back. Now, it used to be that if you
Speaker 1: wanted to drive around the South Pole, you did it
Speaker 1: in highly customized, super expensive tracked vehicles that took years
Speaker 1: to develop. How are they able to do it in
Speaker 1: a normal pickup truck. The main modification that they've made
Speaker 1: is they've taken diesel engines in these trucks and they've
Speaker 1: converted them to run on jet fuel. The reason for
Speaker 1: the jet fuel is because jet fuel is formulated to
Speaker 1: work at low temperatures. Anyway, when jets are flying at
Speaker 1: thirty two feet it's minus forty degrees fahrenheit up there,
Speaker 1: so the fuel has to be able to flow at
Speaker 1: very low temperatures. So by modifying the trucks to run
Speaker 1: on jet fuel, they get rid of the problem with
Speaker 1: diesel fuel turning to jelly and cold temperatures. They make
Speaker 1: some other modifications as well. For example, they put thirty
Speaker 1: eight inch tires think about a tire that's over a
Speaker 1: yard in diameter and very wide on these trucks, and
Speaker 1: they run them at low pressure so that they don't
Speaker 1: sink into the snow and ice of Antarctica. They also
Speaker 1: put rails on the truck in case it falls into
Speaker 1: a crevasse, and they have amountable crane so that they
Speaker 1: can take the tanks of fuel. They bring the fuel
Speaker 1: in normal steel barrels. They have to be able to
Speaker 1: lift those off the trailer and move them into positions
Speaker 1: so that they can do refueling, so they have a
Speaker 1: portable crane that mounts on the front of the truck
Speaker 1: to help them do that. Obviously, they also beef up
Speaker 1: the heating system, do some work on the suspension, reduce
Speaker 1: the cooling capacity, things like that so that it can
Speaker 1: adapt to the extremely cold temperatures. And then when they stop,
Speaker 1: they just leave the engines running so that they don't
Speaker 1: have to start them at minus forty degrees. The company
Speaker 1: that did the modifications is called Arctic Trucks, and if
Speaker 1: you go to Arctic Trucks dot com you can see
Speaker 1: the kinds of modifications they're making in some of their
Speaker 1: future thinking in the Arctic and Antarctic Truck realm for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does that
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