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It's an incredible place to be.

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It's desolate and yet it's compelling in a lot of ways.

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There's a sense that humans have never been in these areas much before.

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There's a strong sense that really humans

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don't have any place there.

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It's not a comfortable continent. But at the same time it's stark and beautiful

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and amazing. Way up at the top of the ice sheet

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about 13,000 to 14,000 feet, it's actually a very flat plain,

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but it's slightly higher than all the area around it.

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That's the area we started looking at. There's a

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lot of atmospheric science and climate science

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that's behind what produces the coldest termperatures in Antarctica.

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The home of all of that is this area along the ridge, the highest part

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of the ridge in East Antarctica, where

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if conditions are right, temperatures plummet to

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extremely low levels, past the previous record low temperatures

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recorded by the Russians at

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a base called Vostok. What we found was that the coldest

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temperatures are actually just off of the crest.

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The crest is an area where the air, as soon as it gets to a low temperature, starts to drain away

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What you need is a place where that air is actually caught and held

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for a while, so that it can cool down still more

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by radiating away into space, and those are

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the places where we're finding these very very low temperatures.

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You might say, let's go there, and maybe in summer that's

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a reasonable thing to try and do.... It's really cold.

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And so things like your ordinary thermometers, a mercury thermometer won't work

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and alchohol thermometer will have a lot of trouble.

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Were talking temperatures that are 50°C colder than anything that has ever been seen

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in Alaska, or in Siberia, or certainly in North Dakota or Montana

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