Big Dead Place :: Welcome to the Program

This guide is intended to assist you in your stay at McMurdo Station, the largest of the three American stations. It briefly covers Antarctic culture to provide an overview that may help you adjust to working here. Additionally, much of the information is relevant to South Pole Station, but consult your peers before assuming so.
Many of the early explorers who came to Antarctica died miserably of starvation while freezing to death. This unique frozen heritage is visible just across the bay from McMurdo Station at historic Discovery Hut, built by Robert Scott in 1902. In that noble wooden hut, several men once spent four months, clothes awash with gore from their endless seal slaughtering, their faces black from the soot of their barely flickering blubber stoves, their faces and fingers blistered and pocked from slogging a thousand miles with a ripped tent and a salvaged stove, their spongy gums still bleeding from the scurvy incurred on their futile sledding journey to lay depots of food for Ernest Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic expedition that would never arrive because Shackleton's boat was crushed in the ice, he and his men fleeing the continent for their lives, amputating limbs as necessary.

Cold desolate places (or for that matter hot desolate places) have always frightened me. When I think of Antarctica the above description is what comes to mind. I also think about falling through the ice and being unable to find my way back out. Needless to say, I won't be travelling there anytime soon-even if I were to win a free trip with all-you-can-eat blubber.