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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 how Stuff works dot Com and don't forget to check out the Brainstuff blog on the house stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain Stuff on
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