Numlock Sunday: Allegra Rosenberg on how to talk to the end of the world
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote “How Antarctica’s history of isolation is ending — thanks to Starlink” for MIT Technology Review. Here's what I wrote about it:
The continent of Antarctica has been the subject of fascination for centuries, as its remoteness and challenging climate has made exploration difficult and direct communication with those explorers routinely impossible. In 1911, Douglas Mawson’s expedition was the first to bring an antenna along, but while he may have transmitted wireless signals, it’s not clear if anyone actually got them. When Americans added a sequence of bases to the Ross Ice Shelf in 1929, radiotelegraphy allowed some contact with humans to the north, which was followed by an AM radio broadcast, but even still communications were hard; for much of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, two amateur ham radio operators in New Jersey helped route messages from the polar bases to families in the U.S. The Iridium constellation of comms satellites allowed a thousand seasonal workers access to a collective 17 megabits per second at McMurdo, but all that’s changing with Starlink. Now, field researchers are paying $250 a month for 50 gigabytes, or $1,000 a month for a terabyte. Who says the Age of Exploration is over, when there’s still the prize of “first person to win a Fortnite battle royale from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station” remaining on the board?
This story was great, it was a history story, a tech story, and most importantly of all a people story, about the fascinating lives and challenges of the people who spend large parts of their lives on the poles. Technological leaps have changed life for these people, and a new shift is very literally on the horizon.
We spoke about the history of communicating with Antarctica, whether by radio, newspaper, or satellite, and how Starlink is changing everything.
Rosenberg can be found on Twitter and at AllegraRosenberg.com.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Allegra, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks so much for having me.
You wrote a really fascinating story that is both a technology story but also a history story about a topic that I know is very near and dear to your heart. What got you interested in Antarctica?
I've actually talked about this on some podcasts recently, but for me, everything starts with media and pop culture and goes from there; for me, my gateway drug to loving polar exploration was my favorite TV show of the past 10 years or so, called The Terror.
I love The Terror.
That got me hooked on that history, the specific 19th-century Victorian stuff, at first, and then once I ran out of books to read, I was really interested in what came next. That’s the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, Shackleton and Scott, and all these crazy guys down at the bottom of the world.
I’ve sort of fallen headfirst into that, which, in turn, has gotten me super interested in contemporary Antarctica. How do people live there now? How has it changed since the Heroic Age? And that was the inspiration for my story in MIT Technology Review.
The tech element of the story and the part that I found fascinating was just the history of communicating to Antarctica. Obviously, this is a very far-flung place; obviously, there are always challenges with communications to remote operations.
But Antarctica, for a number of reasons, has just posed just such a big challenge throughout the past century. Do you want to maybe walk us through a little bit of the history?
Yeah, sure. For the first expeditions that went down there, you go down there and there's no way to contact anyone. Either your ship drops you off and it takes letters home, and then it comes to get you again when the ice melts a year later — there’s a year gap — or your ship gets stuck down there with you and you just have to wait it out. There's no way that they can even bring letters back. For periods of between one to three years, there would be no communication with the outside world.
That was up until about 1912, 1913, when one of the later expeditions of the so-called Heroic Age brought a radio antenna receiver and a transmitter down to the Antarctic. That was Douglas Mawson. He was a meteorologist, a scientist, and he wanted to be able to transmit weather data back to Australia to see if the weather in Antarctica was predicting the weather in his home of Australia.
So there was this sort of scientific motivation, but there was also a press and publicity motivation, because that's how these expeditions paid for themselves: through press and through publicity. There’s always been, with Antarctic communications, this link between science and publicity.
And that still remains to this very day. It was basically after World War II that the United States, that even the Soviet Union, that other countries really started exploring the continent with institutional support, right?
Yeah. There was this thing called the International Geophysical Year, which was in 1957 to 1958. There's a great Donald Fagen song about it. That was when all of these official, permanent bases started getting set up by multiple countries around the world.
This came shortly before the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, which declared Antarctica the continent of science and prohibited military activity on the continent, prohibited the exploitation of resources, the commercialization of Antarctica, and made it so that all the territorial claims that had been made up to that point were not... People still stand by them, but they're technically not real.
Got it. It seems like there's a lot of permanent settlement, but mostly it's temporary, just in the Antarctic summer, which we are actually coming at the end of, right?
Yes. We are coming so close to the end of the Antarctic summer that this time in 1912, Scott was out there dying. March is that very precarious month where you're like, guys, it's too late.
The research can only be done in the summer down there, because it's so freaking cold. Once the summer is over, most of the personnel will fly home and the groups of “overwinterers” left in these bases on the continent to keep them going are isolated for eight months. There are no ins, there are no outs. You're just stuck there.
It seems like through history, the isolation of it has always been something romantic about it, but also a technological problem to be solved. One of my favorite people that you wrote about were these two brothers in New Jersey that for many years facilitated communications between Antarctica and the rest of the country.
Yeah. That is such a great story, and I love that story so much. I've always wanted to really focus on that.
There's a great piece in the Antarctic magazine, The Antarctic Sun, about them that actually interviews them. I think the younger of the two brothers just passed away fairly recently, but they were huge deals in this early government age of American Antarctic bases. It was a way to get around the restrictions on communication. They had these super powerful radio antennas in their backyard; they were able to hear Antarctica.
What's really interesting is that this could only happen with the American base, because America's one of the only countries where you can patch through ham radio into the phone network. The Navy guys would call it from Antarctica, they'd call the ham radio to the brothers in New Jersey, and then the brothers would link in that call to whatever phone number the men wanted to dial — their fiancé, their mother, whoever.
It's so interesting, and to me, it's a story about the power of the amateur. That's why I love that story, because it's like these guys, these rich New Jersey kids, they built this antenna. They're just playing around with it, and suddenly, they become hugely important figures in Antarctic history because they love radio so much, because they love communication. Not because they've been hired by the government or anything. It's this act of enthusiasm.
It was such a cool thing to read. I did want to move forward briefly, but I'm going to stop myself because I do have to ask: The magazine about Antarctica is called The Antarctic Sun?
The Antarctic Sun, yeah. This is the official Antarctic publication of the U.S. Antarctic Program. Unfortunately, it has not published for a while. I think their last editor left around this time last year, ending something like over 60 years of continuous publication, which is such a bummer. If you know anybody at the National Science Foundation, I would love to be the next editor of The Antarctic Sun. They can send me down there. I’ll do it for no money.
They don't have anybody writing articles about what's going on down there, which on the one hand is interesting because social media and Starlink has in some ways obviated the need for that official channel of communication. But on the other hand, there's such a rich history of polar publishing, and it seems such a shame for that to fall by the wayside because of essentially the negligence of the NSF to keep someone in this position.
It's a tough time for media everywhere, it seems.
Yeah, even in Antarctica.
Let's talk about Starlink. Satellites revolutionized the way that we communicate with Antarctica, first in the ‘90s with the Iridium satellites, is that right?
It was a little bit earlier than that. In the ‘80s, some of these decommissioned government satellites were repurposed to use for Antarctic purposes above a certain latitude. And then yes, the Iridium constellation came online in the ‘90s.
That was great because it was a safety and security thing. Always being able to access this network out in the field versus having to use VHF radio or what have you was a big upgrade.
What's Starlink going to do? It seems like it's actually added an order of magnitude to the amount of comms that can happen.
Yeah. Well, the biggest thing that it's done is just provide for more personal use. Of course, in Antarctica, the continent of science, people are down there to do science, and the bandwidth that did exist is mainly for the use of transmitting scientific data from the pole to McMurdo, from McMurdo back to the rest of the world. Personal use has been very limited. I know at McMurdo, before Starlink, there was no Wi-Fi. You had to reserve time at one of the few ethernet cables. There still wasn't cell service around the base. People still had pagers.
What Starlink does is it lets people text while they're in places in the base; it lets people use TikTok, post to social media, send photos back home, communicate more effortlessly and more seamlessly with their families, which I think is the main reason that people are excited about it. That has still been one of the big restrictions.
Yeah. It definitely just seems like it's also the end of one of the last places it was truly hard to communicate with.
Yeah. Of course, there are mixed feelings about it. I couldn't include it in my article because people didn't really want to speak on the record about it, but there has been a culture shift at the stations that have installed Starlink and upgraded comms. There is definitely a change in the way that people live their lives down there. It's much more like the rest of the world, for better and for worse.
Speak more on that, please.
Well, people can, if they want to, isolate themselves with their phones now, which they couldn't before. You sort of had to exist in the world of the station, and that was part of the appeal for some people, was that forcible logging off — touching grass, or touching ice, as it were.
It's interesting; my article got posted to Reddit, and in some of the comments people have really interesting stuff to say about how Starlink has changed the culture at McMurdo, at Palmer, and maybe soon will change it at the South Pole, which is still the last place without Starlink. What I find interesting is that this is coming at a time in which other aspects of the culture at McMurdo are changing, too. They got rid of the bars, and that was always a huge part of McMurdo culture. They got rid of the VHS tapes, which was this lingering, fond tradition, playing VHS tapes.
So in an effort to upgrade these bases, a lot of these traditions have been losing ground to new technologies, new ways of doing things. And, because Antarctica is somewhere people come back to year after year, and they really feel like they belong there, there is a lot of controversy over these changes, including, but not limited to, Starlink.
Fascinating. It's just such a cool tech story and a cool history story, and I really enjoyed reading it.
Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed.
Well hey, thanks so much for coming on. Where can folks find you, and where can they find your work?
You can check me out on Twitter, aka X, at Allegra Rosenberg, except the at sign is the A of my name, so it's @llegrarosenberg. And then my website, which is AllegraRosenberg.com, is where my latest clips are.
Awesome. Again, thanks for coming on.
Thank you, Walt.