Fact of the Day:

The Pole of Inaccessibility is the point on the Antarctic continent which is furthest from any coast. The Russian research station Vostok is not far away.The location is marked by a bust of Vladimir Lenin facing Moscow and is protected as a historical site. Inside the small station there, there is a golden visitor’s book for those who make it to…

One of the ‘White Mars’ experiments which the Ice Team are conducting, in conjunction with the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, is to investigate how isolation and other environmental factors affect brain function, sleep quality, and the autonomic nervous system. Today the Ice Team had a conference call with a symposium of European researchers who are interested in human physical and…

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is based in Cambridge, England, and for over 60 years has undertaken much of the UK’s scientific research in Antarctica. BAS employs over 400 staff, and supports three stations in the Antarctic, at Rothera, Halley (see image) and Signy, and two stations on South Georgia, at King Edward Point and Bird Island. The Antarctic operations and science programmes ar…

This photograph of the camp was taken by Brian Newham several hours ago. It’s going to be weeks yet until it starts getting light again.

The South Pole is at an altitude of 2,835m metres (9,301 ft) above sea level. The ice is estimated to be about 2,700 metres (9,000 ft) thick at the pole, which means that the actual land surface under the ice sheet is close to sea level. The nearest open sea is located about 800 miles away at Bay of Whales. Below: Dr Mike Stroud (left) and Sir Ranulph Fiennes (right) at the South Pole in 1993…

A day in the life of Spencer Smirl As the expedition objectives have been changed, so have our daily routines.  One of the biggest changes is we get a lot more sleep. Rich and I no longer have to get up and begin the start-up of frozen vehicles and we also have a huge surplus of personal time as well. It has almost been weeks now that we have been pinned down by severe weather. Temperatures w…

What is the Aurora Australis? The Aurora Australis (also known as the Southern Lights) is a natural light display in the sky created when charged particles from disturbances on the Sun interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere. By extension, the aurora over the Arctic is called the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. The Ice Team have not seen a great deal of the Aurora Australis so far, which is…

What is sastrugi? The word “sastrugi” is used to describe an eroded snow surface and it is caused by the wind. They can be as much as 1 metre high and the rough surface can make travel extremely difficult.

Congratulations to Sarah Crist on getting married to Jonathan Wiltshire today! Sarah was the project manager with Finning CAT, ensuring that we got all the resources we needed to prepare and modify the D6Ns. In this picture she is braving temperatures of around -50C with Ian Prickett inside the cold chamber at Millbrook Proving Ground. We miss you Sarah!

If you include its ice shelves and islands, Antarctica is around 58 times the size of the UK, or 1.4 times the size of the USA.