'Alaska Mega Machines' is heavier than six blue whales

Do you want to watch Alaska Mega Machines with me?

That sounds like my kind of show, Duncan answered.

This was a two-season show from Discovery that I found on Tubi (which is free), with 10 episodes total. I guess there were only so many mega machines they could feature.

I did learn of a few new career paths while watching Alaska Mega Machines. I could have grown up with aspirations of being the one who drives Glacier Wind or Stellar Wind – two tractor tugboats that guide cargo ships through the ice in Cook Inlet.

Glacier and Stellar Wind are in a constantly changing environment, with 30-foot-average-tidal ranges. The captain says they refer to themselves as the Cook Inlet cowboys. Yeehaw!

This intrepid beast has the brute strength to move more than 40,000 tons. Even more impressive, it has an armor plated hull that can cut through three feet of ice. The waters in the inlet are swifter than the mighty Mississippi due monstrous tides which are the largest on earth.

Not true. The Bay of Fundy in Canada has the highest tides in the world (according to NOAA); Anchorage does have the highest in the U.S., though.

Up north at Fairbanks International Airport, constant freezing rain causes problems on the runways during the wintertime. Frustrations forced staff to create a "mammoth machine" and the number one ice fighter.

Mechanic John Frison removed the spikes from a typical roller and replaced it with two separate rows of teeth to create The Yeti.

Fairbanks International is decked out with all of Alaska's mega machines to unfuck the bad weather. Enter Tyler AD De-Icer, which is 50 feet long – twice the length of standard de-icers (crowd oohs and aahs). The extender arms put out potassium acetate to melt any snow or ice, which is also used as a flavor additive for sauces and was previously used for mummification.

I like that we get a whole title card for Fort Wainwright but not any of the actual mega machines actually in the base. The second half of episode two is basically just army propaganda, where we follow Arctic Warriors going through a two-week trial of surviving in extreme weather.

Are they Alaska's mega machines? Whose to say.

You're trained to be in negative temperatures, -40, -50, where if we were ever in combat in a place like Alaska, we could do it. We learn how to make fires, how to build an Arctic survival shelter, a snow shelter. It's no joke.

The amount of amounting in this show is incessant. Here’s the format: [name of Alaska mega machine] weighs more than [number] [animal].

Real examples from the show: the tugboat Glacier Wind weighs the same as 18 wooly mammoths. A Chinook helicopter weighs 30,000 pounds – more than 20 moose.

I get it, comparisons are helpful. If you tell me something is a basketball court's length away, that makes sense to me. I think these comparisons are just creating such silly visuals in my head that I had to turn them into graphic form.

A half-million pound haul of Alaskan pollock is the weight of 33 African elephants. The marine travelift 600 C in Kodiak used to haul boats out for repairs can lift six blue whales.

And then they just start comparing what feels hard to compare. In Sitka, the Blue Lake Dam is capable of powering more than 13,000 microwaves at once. I wonder what kind of voltage we're talking about.

My favorite critique I saw of the series was an Amazon review where someone gave Alaska Mega Machines two stars. The review was short and simple: good.

(total watch time: 7 hours, 20 minutes)

New for AK IRL: Too Long, Didn't Watch (TLDW)

Starting this month, AK IRL's paying subscribers will get a monthly roundup of what I'm watching. I'm aiming for this to be sent out on the last Thursday of each month.

I love the idea of you [watching] the shows for me so I get to be relevant and understand the zeitgeist but don’t have to commit to watching everything.

For the first TLDW, we talked about Age of Attraction (yuck) and Australian Survivor: Australia V The World (give me 20 more seasons with Cirie and Parv).