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The South Pole
The southern end of Earth's axis, high on the Antarctic ice sheet and home to a year-round research station
The geographic South Pole sits on top of a continent buried in ice. A visitor standing there is about 2,835 meters above sea level, yet nearly all of that height is frozen water: the ice sheet underfoot is roughly 2,700 meters thick. It is among the coldest places people live, with an average annual temperature near −49 °C, six months of daylight and six of darkness. The United States has kept a station at the Pole without interruption since 1956, and about 150 people work there at the height of the summer season. A ceremonial pole ringed by flags stands near a plain survey marker that has to be moved every year, because the ice beneath it never stops flowing.
The Pole lies on the Antarctic Plateau, about 1,350 kilometers from McMurdo Station on the coast. The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, an elevated building on stilts dedicated in 2008, was designed to be raised as drifting snow builds up around it. The ice sheet slides roughly 10 meters a year, so the geographic Pole marker is reset each January 1. Nearby, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a cubic kilometer of deep, clear ice as a particle detector, and telescopes study the faint afterglow of the Big Bang through the dry, thin air. The station's record low is −82.8 °C. Supplies arrive on ski-equipped aircraft and by an overland traverse from McMurdo, and in winter the station is cut off for months.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four companions reached the Pole first, on December 14, 1911, traveling with dog sleds. Robert Falcon Scott's British party arrived on January 17, 1912, found the Norwegian tent, and died on the return march. No one stood there again until October 1956, when a US Navy plane landed, and the first station was built that season for the International Geophysical Year. A New Zealand party led by Edmund Hillary arrived by farm tractor in 1958. Under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which sets territorial claims aside, the Pole belongs to no country, though several national claims converge on it. The US National Science Foundation runs the station, and each summer skiers and adventurers also make the journey.