To heck with all of that technical junk. I know the real question that you are asking. How did you live in the middle Antarctica? As long as the weather wasn't continuously nasty (which it didn't seem to be) it was a rather pleasant place to hang out for a few months during this time of the year.
First you needed a place to sleep and get out of the cold. We had small mountain tents for one person, larger Scott tents that would fit two people, and a couple of Weatherall tents, one for the main camp tent (where we all gathered to eat, drink, and be warm), and the other for a science equipment tent.
The mountain tents came in two varieties: Plain, and wired. I used one of the large batteries and a solar panel array to power my IBM ThinkPad laptop in my tent so I could work on these web pages, listen to music, and to power my Christmas tree lights. OK, so I didn't really have any Christmas tree lights. First off there were no trees, and second with the sun being up all of the time Christmas tree lights wouldn't have worked very well even if I had brought them.
The inside of a mountain tent was large enough for your sleeping bag covering one side and the middle of the floor, and all of your stuff covering most of the remaining side. They also had a vestibule entrance where you could dig a boot pit which made it easier to get into and out of the tent. If the snow was piled around the outside of the tent properly so that there were no wind leaks the temperature inside would get up into the 20's Celsius (70's Fahrenheit) when the sun was out. On those nights when you knew it was going to be cold you would fill a 1-liter Nalgene plastic bottle with hot water, take it to bed with you, and either put it down by your feet or hug it like a teddy bear. If you had at least two sets of things like socks and boot liners, and you left one set hanging in the tent during the day, they were quite dry and ready to wear the next time their turn came up. I also used the boot pit as a place to do things like wash my hair every few days with the evening's liter of warm water, which would still be almost hot in the morning. The advantage to doing this in the tent was that you could get around to drying your wet hair without it being frozen stiff before you could begin drying it.
2018-03-05