It's an incredible place to be.
It's desolate and yet it's compelling in a lot of ways.
There's a sense that humans have never been in these areas much before.
There's a strong sense that really humans
don't have any place there.
It's not a comfortable continent. But at the same time it's stark and beautiful
and amazing. Way up at the top of the ice sheet
about 13,000 to 14,000 feet, it's actually a very flat plain,
but it's slightly higher than all the area around it.
That's the area we started looking at. There's a
lot of atmospheric science and climate science
that's behind what produces the coldest termperatures in Antarctica.
The home of all of that is this area along the ridge, the highest part
of the ridge in East Antarctica, where
if conditions are right, temperatures plummet to
extremely low levels, past the previous record low temperatures
recorded by the Russians at
a base called Vostok. What we found was that the coldest
temperatures are actually just off of the crest.
The crest is an area where the air, as soon as it gets to a low temperature, starts to drain away
What you need is a place where that air is actually caught and held
for a while, so that it can cool down still more
by radiating away into space, and those are
the places where we're finding these very very low temperatures.
You might say, let's go there, and maybe in summer that's
a reasonable thing to try and do.... It's really cold.
And so things like your ordinary thermometers, a mercury thermometer won't work
and alchohol thermometer will have a lot of trouble.
Were talking temperatures that are 50°C colder than anything that has ever been seen
in Alaska, or in Siberia, or certainly in North Dakota or Montana