The USNS
Lawrence H. Gianella has arrived at McMurdo to supply us with a year's worth of fuel. To be honest it's quite impressive how fuel down here works. Everything down here runs off of two types of fuel:
JP-8 and MOGAS aka Motor Gasoline.
JP-8 is one of the standard jet fuels used to day by aircraft worldwide. JP-8, like in the US military, down here is used in anything that has a diesel engine which, for McMurdo, is about 85% of the vehicles. MOGAS is used in a few vehicles such as light pick up trucks or 4-stroke small engines and the such. JP-8 is also used as the fuel for all of aircraft down here. McMurdo Station has the ability to store millions of gallons of JP-8 and MOGAS as you can see here on the left hand side of the picture (look for the grey and silver fuel tanks along the road that goes through the pass):
All of that fuel comes in from a fuel tanker once a year. Hence, the purpose of the
Gianella being in town:
Amazingly, the tanker offload only takes 40 hours of continuous operation (40 hours to offload several million gallons of fuel!). The
Oden hangs around the entire time waiting to break ice as it needs to. More pics to come!
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