South Pole Station

I am having great fun exploring this amazing, $150 million facility where the 150 summer residents of South Pole all live (and most work). If you're curious about the station, I really recommend the virtual tour of the station provided by this video on YouTube. It does a way better job than I could through pictures of giving you a sense of what the station I'm currently calling home is like.

I did, on my first weekend here, enjoy both a casual visit to and a formal tour of the "beer can" (see the video for context) which stinks horribly of the human waste that is buried not too far away. We also walked outside via the tunnels (where vehicle maintenance and all kinds of other work goes on) and explored the -60F (it was warmer outside!) gasoline storage area, which was completely covered in intimidating frost. No worries about a gasoline explosion, at least!--at those temps, there can be no gasoline fumes, which is the part of fuel that actually burns. And my final picture here is of one of the typically inexplicably weird things you might find down here. I don't know how or why people put pigs heads down in the storage areas under the elevated stations, and I'm learning not to bother to ask about the crazy things like this that tend to happen here when people get bored due to the isolation.