Why south pole

But the freedom to skip a layer only lasts for the summer, when the temperatures linger at about 20 degrees below zero. In winter, all gear is necessary and they must be absolutely rigorous putting it on. Any exposed skin can be frostbitten in less than five minutes.

To get there, researchers follow an orange flag-line out in the frozen plains. The landscape is stark and unchanging. Besides the main station and nearby research facilities, there is nothing but open sky and snow that squeaks like Styrofoam underfoot.

The weather is fairly calm, but there is wind that is able to carry the snow — which behaves more like sand because of the extreme cold and dry — scattering dune formations across the empty expanse. Dune-like formations sculpted by the wind called Sastrugi cast shadows on the ice as sunset approaches. Another casual summer sight are the solar displays formed as ice crystals in the air reflect the sunlight, creating arcs, halos, and spots around the sun. The CfA researchers have only about three months to get to the Pole, make routine upgrades like yearly calibrations or swapping out broken or damaged pieces, complete major overhauls such as replacing entire telescopes, and leave.

Any longer, and they are trapped. Your standards for what a good work-life balance is change. The hustle only intensifies as mid-February approaches, but it also creates a sense of focus at the station since everyone is working under the same hard deadline. The work is exacting. The telescopes are a complicated mix of electronics, optics, control systems, motors, and detectors inside a large cylinder placed on a moveable mount inside the observatory. The detectors in the telescopes must be kept at about a quarter of a degree above absolute zero, and they require a vacuum chamber that uses a cryogenic system to keep them super-cooled.

With work that precise, things often go wrong. Other times they find a tool or material — even dental floss — that can be an effective substitute for whatever they need. The extremely dry environment at the South Pole limits contamination to the data collected by the telescopes, as water molecules absorb microwave energy.

In addition, the site provides unobstructed views of a particular patch of space, since the sky above the Pole never sets, it only rotates. Together, these factors make the South Pole the ideal place to look for the tiny signals from primordial gravitational waves that were generated during inflation, fractions of a second after the universe began.

Credit: Samuel Harrison, Hans Boenish. Harrison over-wintered in , spending almost a year on the ice. It was the first time the BICEP3 telescope was deployed, so he kept busy trying to get it to work as designed.

Samuel Harrison sees the light of the sun for the first time in seven months through the window of the Dark Sector Laboratory. If something were to happen, the crew is on their own; rescue is almost impossible because of the cold, the darkness, and the gale force that can come at any time.

Yet there have been only three winter evacuations since the station was established. In , a doctor who discovered she had breast cancer treated herself for almost six months, performing her own biopsy and administering her own chemotherapy until a rescue plane was cleared for takeoff. None of it is enough to keep people from the outdoors, which fills with stars and colors easy to get lost in after the sun goes down. Over that time, the sun gradually moves closer and closer to the horizon, skimming the edge and becoming distorted as the light bends through the atmosphere before it disappears.

Small streaks of purple sliver out from the opposite horizon and slowly take over the entire sky. Then come the auroras, which most often appear as swaying curtains of green light moving across the deep night sky. They can also be red, purple, or white. Climate Solutions We take companies on a climate journey. Climate Investments South Pole works with clients across the private and public sectors on structuring and managing pools of capital that deliver climate assets and impact.

We work with leading brands and public leaders all over the world Meet our clients. South Pole News Read the most recent developments taking place in the sustainability sphere! The motivation and expertise of our team in 19 offices across 6 continents drives our success and impact. They faced colder temperatures and harsher weather than Amundsen's team. They had fewer supplies.

Suffering from hunger, hypothermia , and frostbite , all members of Scott's South Pole expedition died fewer than 18 kilometers 11 miles from a resupply depot. American explorer Richard E. Byrd became the first person to fly over the South Pole, in , and the Amundsen—Scott South Pole Station was established thirty years later.

However, the next overland expedition to the South Pole was not made until , more than 40 years after Amundsen and Scott's deadly race. The expedition was led by legendary New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, who had become the first person to scale Mount Everest in Transportation to the South Pole Almost all scientists and support personnel, as well as supplies, are flown in to the South Pole. Hardy military aircraft usually fly from McMurdo Station, an American facility on the Antarctic coast and the most populated area on the continent.

The extreme and unpredictable weather around the pole can often delay flights. In , the U. It takes about 40 days for supplies to reach the pole from McMurdo, but the route is far more reliable and inexpensive than air flights.

The highway can also supply much heavier equipment such as that needed by the South Pole's astrophysics laboratories than aircraft. Resources and Territorial Claims The entire continent of Antarctica has no official political boundaries, although many nations and territories claim land there. No Time at the Poles Time is calculated using longitude. For instance, when the sun seems directly overhead, the local time is about noon. However, all lines of longitude meet at the poles, and the sun is only overhead twice a year at the equinoxes.

For this reason, scientists and explorers at the poles record time-related data using whatever time zone they want. The highway was created by filling in deep crevasses in the Antarctic ice sheet. The only vehicles on the highway are specialized tractors equipped with specialized towing sleds. After the last supply plane has left the facility not to return for six months , they watch two movies: The Thing about a parasitic alien being terrorizing an Antarctic research facility and The Shining about a caretaker isolated at a remote hotel in the winter.

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The findings were published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study, led by Kyle Clem of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, examined surface air temperatures at the world's southernmost weather observatory: the Amundsen-Scott station, located almost directly on top of the geographic South Pole. It's a lonely, snow-covered outpost in the middle of the Antarctic continent, in a place where winter temperatures can drop below minus degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers found that temperatures there have been rising by about a degree Fahrenheit each decade since the start of the s. That's about three times faster than the global average. Even more surprising, the trend represents a sudden reversal in conditions at the South Pole. For much of the 20th century — at least going back to the s, when the weather station was first established — the South Pole was cooling down. So why the switch?

According to the new study, shifting climate patterns in the tropics probably have played a big part. The researchers used a combination of observations and model simulations to investigate. They found that changing ocean temperatures in the tropical western Pacific have a big influence on warming at the South Pole. These ocean temperatures are regulated, in large part, by a natural climate cycle known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO.

The IPO causes western Pacific temperatures to swing back and forth between warm and cool phases every couple of decades or so. When the ocean is warmer, it interacts differently with the atmosphere.