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Comment by kayge | Hacker News Reader

I live in Alaska and have visited Whittier multiple times. Every time we go, my wife and I comment about how great of a setting it would be for a zombie apocalypse movie.

"Oh it's only accessible by water or the main tunnel, it's easy to secure" "oops we forgot about securing the old train tunnel" "oh no they're in the apartment building, let's go hide out in the creepy old abandoned building down the street"

... clearly I'm not going to be writing the screenplay, but the location has a lot of potential!

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It would be a great place to hold out with a large group if you had a way to obtain and import supplies and you cleared the building first. You'd probably be able to spot anyone coming or going (living or undead), and it would be likely that very few zombies would be in the surrounding land.

Also, of course zombie fiction requires a major suspension of disbelief in this regard, but the damp/cold weather would cause the zombie bodies to freeze (at below zero) or decay faster (at above zero, though I suspect it is rarely if ever above zero)

The Whittier temperature averages [1] seem to indicate a 6-9 month period where highs are above freezing. That would make for some exciting daytime zombie interactions. By comparison, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica [2] does indeed appear to be below freezing on average the vast majority of the year.

To hide out from the zombie hordes behind an impenetrable wall of freezing air, you would just have to set up shop at some place like Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica [3]. Once the jet fuel (what they use for power) runs out though, it will get unpleasantly cold, fast.

[1] http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/whittier/alaska/united-...

[2] http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=46698

[3] http://www.foresthillweather.com/PHP/Metar2/AntarcticaAverag...

Antarctica doesn't need zombies, it already has Aliens and Predators doing battle down there. A continent can only take so much!

(Apologies to those who missed the first AvP movie.)

Given that zombies usually don't obey the laws of thermodynamics, if I lived in a place like Whittier I'd probably try to harness them to some kind of hamster wheel driving a generator.

I don't think there's enough evidence to claim that zombies don't obey the laws of thermodynamics specifically. Perhaps zombie-ism transforms something in their core into a nuclear reactor that slowly converts atoms into a near-endless supply of energy. It's apparent that they don't obey physical laws, but which ones specifically depends on your interpretation.

Contrary to popular belief, while temperatures do go down on average as you go further north, the really pronounced difference is how much it varies between its extremes. Realize that in the summer in these northern places, the sun is shining (or at least in twilight) past midnight, and comes back up very early in the morning, only a handful of hours later [1]. It actually gets quite warm [2].

[1] http://www.alaska.org/weather/daylight-hours/whittier/june

[2] http://weatherspark.com/averages/33093/6/Whittier-Alaska-Uni...

"he has recently been in talks with two reality television production companies and the producers of a Gerard Butler submarine movie."

http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...

Not quite the same, I guess.

http://www.adn.com/article/20141212/big-budget-thriller-be-f...

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