Antarctic Research

In doing research for an episode of the podcast for season 2, I wandered onto a very exciting website.  It's the Australian Antarctic Division. 

They talk about the history and geology and wildlife and climate, but my most favorite part is that they have weekly updates about what the researchers are doing socially.  They say whose birthday it was an what special meals they had to celebrate.  They had descriptions of the Antarctic Film Festival, where each of the four research stations spread across the Antarctic had 48 hours to make a short film with particular criteria.  They talked about their darts competition. 

I think what made it especially neat was that the effort they put into organizing activities made ti really clear that the researchers were dying of boredom and loneliness, and the government is active in trying to keep them busy.  It's both wacky and eerie. 

I was watching videos and looking at pictures, trying to get a sense of one of the stations well enough to set part of a story there, and I was having some trouble getting a sense of it as a place rather than as a penguin documentary.  But then I saw the "Contact Us" button.  I narrowed my eyes at it a little bit, and then thought "Why not!" and I wrote them an e-mail asking about weird sensory information.  "What does the air smell like?" kind of thing.

The amazing part is that they wrote back.  And their answers were amazing.  They really went into how bad is smells (there is both a penguin colony and an elephant seal colony).  They described the colors of the hills and the clouds.  It was visceral and authentic and raw and perfect.

So thanks, Australian Antarctic Division!  And remember, if there's something you don't know for a story, there might be some very bored expert who would love to answer an e-mail for you.