Since the temperature in Antarctica is well below freezing, the urine freezes in the ice immediately and can't get washed off or evaporate.
In Antarctica, you can't pee wherever you'd like, due to environmental protection laws. We can only pee, or dump our pee, in designated areas, marked with a 'pee flag. ' The coordinates of the pee flags are logged in a database.
Antarctica is a leave no trace environment which means that you should leave the landscape exactly as you found it upon arrival. Just as litter should never be left behind, neither should human waste, and that includes urinating in the snow.
A slight bit of time with a search engine afforded this source, which states that the freezing point of urine is normally between -1.3 and -2.2°C.
Does urine freeze? It does freeze. It usually freezes between -1~-2 degrees Celsius.
During cold diuresis, blood vessels constrict, and blood flow is decreased to keep your internal and vital organs warmer. This causes your blood pressure to increase which causes your kidneys to filter out excess fluid and blood to decrease your blood volume, which causes a full bladder and makes you pee more.
Freezing urine samples has long been the traditional gold standard for preservation and storage. Typically, after collection, storage at -70°C is immediately performed in secondary collection facilities in order to prevent rapid nucleic acid degradation.
Oddly enough, there are very few smells in Antarctica. Ice and snow have no smell, and in the cold temperatures, everyday objects hold onto their aromatic chemicals. So that when you stumble into an aroma, it stands out like a black volcanic rock on a snowfield.
Dressing for Antarctica
Avoid sweating at all costs, especially in winter. If you sweat, your clothing will become full of moisture, which will freeze in the outer layers and melt with potentially harmful consequences when you warm up again.
The water is pumped into two holding tanks. Water saving appliances are installed wherever possible, but each person on station is asked to use as little water as possible. Expeditioners are limited to 3 minute showers.
(see below). In the event that someone might become pregnant whilst serving on a trip in the Antarctic or Arctic they will be evacuated as soon as is practically possible. Anyone who deliberately conceals pregnancy is putting themselves, the baby, and other base members potentially at significant risk.
Thanks to the low visibility and undeveloped infrastructure, flying over Antarctica is extremely difficult. Specifically, because of the strong magnetic fields that surround the polar regions, navigating there, no matter how well-equipped the airplane is in terms of instrumentation, can be particularly challenging.
“Summer residents at South Pole Station are restricted to two, two-minute showers per week.” That is… not a lot of shower! Let's break it down. Two showers, two minutes apiece, per week.
All urine, after the first flushed specimen, must be saved, stored, and kept cold. This means keeping it either on ice or in a refrigerator for the next 24 hours.
The only practical way to freeze urine in free fall would be to expel it from an airplane where the outside temperature is slightly below freezing and the liquid has plenty of time to cool off before hitting ground (yellow hail?)
Although the changes in pH are small, due to the added buffer, there are reproducible pH changes of about 0.05 to 0.1 pH units in the samples that were frozen on dry ice and analyzed immediately or stored thereafter in lN2.
Sperm in urinary sediment are usually derived from the first post-ejaculatory voiding [1], and in older men sperm are sometimes found in urinary sediment due to reduced contraction of the internal urethral sphincter [2].
Human poop is mostly water and the remains of food after digestion. It also contains some cells from the digestive tract, and these cells contain DNA. Sometimes poop contains microscopic amounts of blood. Blood cells also contain DNA.
Yes, urine will contain cells from the urinary tract. Cells can be used for DNA analysis thus determining the gender of the urinator.
"When urine leaves the body, oddly we get a drop in blood pressure, which then causes activation of the sympathetic nervous system to increase the heart rate and vascular tone, which then restores the drop in blood pressure.
Conclusion. Tear production in the context of micturition, defecation, eating, or drinking has been rarely described in the medical literature. This unusual phenomenon is likely caused by abnormal parasympathetic response mediated by the pontine micturition center and facial nerve nuclei in the pons.
In neurourology, post-micturition convulsion syndrome (PMCS), also known informally as pee shivers, is the experience of shivering during or after urination. The syndrome appears to be more frequently experienced by males.