Ice, Ice, Baby! All About Antarctica

13 THINGS

- BY Emily Goodman

• THE NORTH POLE gets all the attention this time of year, but what about the South Pole? The southernmost spot on earth and Antarctica, the continent it sits on, are surreal. At the South Pole, the sun rises just once a year—and doesn’t set until six months later. The landscape: snow and ice as far as the eye can see, and that ice extends down more than a mile. In some places, it’s almost 3 miles thick.

• FEW HAVE set foot in Antarctica. Its only inhabitants—between 1,000 and 5,000 people, depending on the season—live at one of 70 permanent research stations on the continent. Their food has to be flown or shipped in, since it can’t be grown in the ground. Between the scientists and their support staff, roughly 3,000 Americans are stationed in Antarctica annually. To minimize their environmental impact, most of the garbage they generate gets shipped back to the United States. ALL COUNTRIES conducting research in Antarctica have promised to adhere to the Antarctic Treaty, which designates the continent as a place to be used only for peaceful and scientific purposes. The flags of all 12 original signers of the 1959 treaty (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the U.K., the U.S. and the USSR) are flown around the South Pole.