Original subtitles

The C-130 Hercules is past the point of no return,

the point at which there's not enough fuel

to safely turn back, no matter

what the weather is on the ice.

It's loud back here,

the moan of four massive props relentless.

I'm dressed like all of us

who've been approved to make this journey

in the same regulation gear

as required by the National Science Foundation

for all flights and means of conveyance

on the ice: thick goose down parka

known by one and all as Big Red,

heavy waterproof overalls,

inflatable buddy boots,

gloves, long underwear, cap.

I am talking layers.

♪ I took a walk through this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ Felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪

♪ Found something good in this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ I felt the rain getting colder ♪

♪ La, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la, la

♪

The runway is frozen sea ice, 10 feet thick.

The airport shuttle, Ivan the Terra Bus,

a "Road Warrior" -looking behemoth

that takes us slowly towards our destination.

We're driving Ivan. 40 feet long. 67,000 pounds.

23 years old.

Made out of some good Canadian steel.

Sometimes the heat actually works.

This year it does.

It is no short hop to Antarctica,

and no easy thing to see it the way it should be seen:

the last un-[...]-up place on Earth.

Here we are. Try to get plenty of rest and enjoy the Antarctic.

McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. base on the continent.

The hub, supply and support center

for everything we do here in Antarctica.

The pursuit of pure science.

It ain't pretty. It looks like a mining camp.

But look closely and you notice things,

like the total absence of litter.

Not a single cigarette butt.

It's one of the most carefully-regulated

communities on the planet,

and it is a community... A tightly-knit,

highly-organized, very odd subculture

of just under 1,000 people in summer

and 150 in winter all working towards the same thing

in this most remote, barren,

yet stunningly beautiful continent.

Work is seasonal in McMurdo, and it's the type of place

that demands a very special kind of individual.

Everyone is interdependent

and comes to realize that very quickly.

The scientists, known in local parlance

as "beakers," depend absolutely

on a support community of specialists

like the "carps," or carpenters,

heavy equipment operators,

the fuelies, riggers, pilots,

wasties, cooks.

Like I said, it takes a special breed of hard-ass

to not just make it down here, but like it.

You got to be tough.

Right now I love being in McMurdo,

because it's like being at a spa for scientists.

Doug MacAyeal is one of the world's preeminent glaciologists

who's been coming to Antarctica since the '70s.

The Coffee House,

one of three watering holes on station.

It's not much to look at,

but offers a welcome respite from the cold.

One thing about this continent that's special

is the vertical hierarchy.

Everybody respects up and down equally.

The janitor really does have a sense

that their action is right at the frontline.

That doesn't happen as much elsewhere in the world

of science... tangibly seeing a contribution.

What brought you here? It's cold down here.

It's part of some kind of personal honor.

People who come as a scientist might think of their science

as driving them more than thinking of coming to a place

that is definitely different

than anywhere else in the world.

Despite its seemingly endless whiteness,

what you see is a desert technically...

The highest and driest on the planet.

A frozen desert holding 61%

of the entire world's fresh water.

It looks like nothing lives.

You won't see a single plant, a single leaf,

and certainly not a puppy.

Even the sun this time of year never sets.

It moves in lazy circles around the sky.

But shit is indeed moving.

Beneath your feet. All around you.

Just very slowly.

An ice shelf is a kind of glacier that flows off the land

but begins to float in the ocean.

- It's freshwater. - It's freshwater ice,

and the ice itself varies from the snow,

like today, and down at the bottom,

ice that might have fallen as snow 35,000 years ago.

It's the part of the Antarctic ice sheet we call the Buttress

because it fringes the entire continent.

It might take 50,000 years for the ice at South Pole

to get into the raw sea and bust off as an iceberg.

- Yeah. - But it would take only 20,000

years or even 10,000 years

if the ice shelf wasn't there.

This is the biggest pile of free ice in the solar system.

McMurdo is at the tip of Ross Island,

surrounded by miles of frozen sea.

There are a lot of different types of ice down here.

Glaciology started about 50 years ago.

Our entire science is driven by the fact

that we're still trying to figure out

what Antarctica is doing in terms of sea level...

How the ice sheet is expanding or contracting,

how it's flowing,

whether it melts in some places,

how it busts off icebergs that float away on the ocean.

And we're trying to come up with some kind of a solid,

reliable statement

about what cities like San Francisco and New York

and Shanghai have to plan for.

Antarctica for all too obvious reasons remained free

of any sustained human contact

until the mid-20th century when the U.S. Navy

launched Operation Deep Freeze,

an enormous logistical enterprise that established

the first permanent base here at McMurdo in 1955.

Deep down in the ice caves were cut,

and here the supplies were packed away

in a natural fridge.

Frozen meat perfectly preserved, but where's that axe?

Let's have a bit of 15-year-old ham.

Since the National Science Foundation

took over from the Navy, things have gotten a lot less

Wild West around here.

It feels like dorm life at college.

Bathrooms are communal.

Everybody rotates housekeeping duties.

And everybody shuffles off at designated hours

to the galley,

where the cooks do the very best

they can, given the infrequent delivery

of what are called with longing tones around here

"freshies,"

or anything not frozen, canned, or prepared.

Little connectivity I have

with the outside world I owe entirely to you.

You've been helping me enormously.

Joanie works IT and has been coming here for nine seasons.

But it's coming, right? I mean, sooner or later,

they're gonna put a satellite up there

and everyone down here is gonna...

Maybe. I mean, we could be a long way away

from have cell service down here

and everybody having internet like that at home.

It's really the last place on Earth for cell service.

Christy is a heavy equipment operator

coming for 19 seasons.

I actually started off in two seasons in the galley,

and then I ended up getting trained on the equipment.

So, you learned an entirely new profession

so that you could stay here?

- Yeah. - And Jules,

another heavy equipment operator

who can most likely kick your ass, eat your lunch,

then kick your ass again,

has been coming for an astonishing 38 seasons.

So, what were you doing before?

See, my mom worked for the company

and she wanted me to come.

- Mm-hmm. - 'Cause I didn't want to come.

She was trying to get rid of you or what?

Yeah. She wanted to come.

When you first started coming, how many women were here?

What was the ratio?

My first two years were at South Pole.

There were probably 90 civilians.

I was the only female at South Pole,

and there were probably 12 total at McMurdo

and probably 1,100 men.

Was the Navy still running the place back then?

Yes, and I had a lot of respect

because the United States Navy

was the one that integrated this place,

and originally down here it was kind of this thing like,

"Shall we let women be here?"

Right.

And then we had an admiral come down and he's like,

"Dude, where's all the women?"

And, "Oh, we don't have facilities for them."

And he said, "Well, you goddamn better get facilities for them."

When I first came down here, the company was all about,

"Hey, this is special."

There's not very many civilians,

"you know, it's wild and free and it's a great place to be."

Just looking out the window, having seen what you see

on a regular basis

and experienced what you experience,

is that an alienating experience?

I really appreciate how simple life is

and how little you need to get by.

Like, you just pack a couple duffel bags and you come down.

But then I find when I go home,

sometimes I get caught up in the,

"I want. I need. I want. I need."

And that's the part that kind of bums me out.

And that's one of the things I like about it

is that there's no rat race.

There's no errands. It's a pretty egalitarian society here.

NSF sitting down at tables with us, and the janitors

and the fuelies are as important

as the people who run the station.

Nothing gets done without power,

and there's no power without fuel.

There's no fuel without roads,

There's no roads without heavy equipment.

So, it just kind of goes from there

and you kind of appreciate what everybody else's role is.

This is a place where things are more powerful

that don't involve money.

You make lifelong friendships.

The beauty of this place is astounding.

- There's no doubt. - It's such a unique experience.

There is something magical about being here.

A shared experience.

You know, a lot of people get really hooked

on this place in its principal,

I guess,

as to what it is.

In Antarctica, the sun sets once a year

and rises once a year.

Some twilight in late March,

then five months of darkness and extreme cold

and weather conditions lasting until September.

Six months of daylight...

The Antarctic summer season where we are now.

Constant sunlight reflecting off the ice,

and it can and does fry the brain.

♪

All right.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Romano,

and this is the Hot Cup of Joe Radio Show.

We're gonna spin some tunes here.

I have a special guest in here today.

Here to visit us at McMurdo Station,

Antarctica, Mr. Tony Bourdain.

♪

♪

There are no roads and few suitable runways

beyond McMurdo.

For short hops, the main mode of transportation is helicopter.

Ryan Skorecki gets a lot of flying time

shuttling scientists to and from remote field camps.

So, that's Mount Lister.

That's probably 60 or 70 miles away,

and that's over 14,000 feet high.

- Looks close. - Yeah.

Look at that massive snow bridge right there, huh?

There's some good building-sized blocks.

- How deep are those crevices? - They could swallow buildings.

It's very impressive.

So, that's what you don't want to hit with your snowmobile?

Right.

People climb around in those things?

They don't usually.

They'll have drills to practice extricating somebody.

There is a steep learning curve to flying down here.

Skillfully handling gale force winds,

reduced control at high altitudes,

and the unpredictability of extreme turbulence

around mountains and active volcanoes.

Slowly but surely climbing. And it's -20° outside.

- Erebus. - And that's Mount Terror.

This is Mount Erebus,

the southernmost active volcano on Earth.

Antarctica was a great mystery for most of human history.

Only a theory.

A great white space at the bottom of the world.

We're just passing 8,500. So, we'll go another 4,000.

You're gonna see the main crater in just a second.

The conditions endured by the first British

Antarctica explorers like Scott and Shackleton,

and Norwegian Amundsen,

and the lengths of time they endured them are,

well, horrifying to imagine.

They made their journeys in wooden ships,

man-hauling equipment across glaciers,

ice floes, mountains,

and frozen seas surviving on penguin meat

when rations ran out.

You might start to smell some sulfur.

Yeah. I smell that sulfur.

What's our altitude now?

13,200.

Cool.

About 22 miles from McMurdo

is Cape Royds, where a penguin colony

of about 2,000 breeding pairs live.

Marine ecologist Dr. David Ainley

has been studying this colony for 20 years.

So, you're tagging the young ones?

Right.

Do you follow them through their entire life?

I mean, essentially?

Yeah. This year we've got a bunch of individuals

that are 20 years old.

Why penguins? What brought you to penguins initially?

Well, this kind of penguin

just does everything with no secrets.

- Right. - If you, you know,

ask the right question and you're creative enough,

then they're gonna give you the answer

without a lot of guessing.

What really interests me is the relationship

of these penguins to the ocean.

Mm.

And how they fit into the food web.

During the '90s, small colonies like Cape Royds

were increasing much faster than the large colonies

where the competition for food was so intense.

In the last ten years,

colonies started increasing again.

We think it's because of fishery for Antarctic toothfish.

The toothfish and the penguins eat the same prey,

so now there's more fish available for adults

to capture and then feed to their chicks.

Oh, so there's less competition,

therefore more of the same prey available?

Yeah.

I haven't seen a lot of them going in the water,

but they're looking for some indicator

that there's fish down there?

They're afraid to cross this ice crack

because leopard seals might be in them.

They're very hesitant.

So then finally they make the plunge.

I mean, they're very agile. They don't look it.

At first blush they appear clumsy,

but watching them, they got a lot of moves.

Yeah. They're very, very agile.

Increasingly, people want to see penguins.

They're much-loved by, you know, children everywhere.

A lot of people would like to come to Antarctica as tourists

and look at penguins up close

in their natural environment

without impacting them in a negative way.

Is that a good thing?

The thing about Antarctica

is that most scientists just kind of like,

you know, keep their nose to the grindstone.

And so the only advocacy for Antarctica

has to come from the public.

It's very valuable to have these tours

because then people have an ownership of,

you know, they've been there and they see it.

Mm-hmm. What keeps you coming back?

I mean, other than the work.

I wanted to come to Antarctica because I'd heard it was

a very severe place and, you know,

nature was the king, daunting.

Having that chance to be humbled

by something greater than you is, I think,

an important part of being here.

Not all of Antarctica is covered with ice.

60 miles out of town are the dry valleys...

The 1% of the continent devoid of snowfall.

Scott called it the Valley of Death,

and it feels like Mars.

In fact, they used to test out equipment

for Martian exploration here.

Desolate but beautiful.

The Canada Glacier, a wall of ice,

right there where it seems to have stopped short,

pulled back scraping up a beach on a frozen lake.

Here is one of the NSF's oldest

and more legendary field camps... Lake Hoare.

Everything comes in by helicopter.

The base here supports a small team of scientists and staff

working on a variety of long-term projects.

It is, however, most legendary for this woman.

- Hi. I'm Rae. - Rae Spain, the camp's manager

who's been coming to Lake Hoare for 19 seasons.

Said to be the best cook on the continent.

This in an environment where so-called freshies...

The rare fresh vegetable...

Is spoken of in hushed tones

of near-fetishistic appreciation.

Staying over at Lake Hoare is a rare privilege

enjoyed by few, like Dr. Michael Gooseff,

a hydroecologist, and Dr. Byron Adams, a biologist.

So, what are you looking at here?

Everything that lives here lives in the soil,

and we study the soil organisms.

Mostly the animals that live here

but also the microbes that those animals feed off of.

- Right. - This is just a marker

to tell us to stay on this trail.

Okay.

These soils are so sensitive that if we walk off the trail

or whatever, we can completely jack up

the soil organisms that live below there.

- Oh, like that guy? - Yeah, like that dude.

He's totally... oh, he's gonna get wiped out.

When scientists came and first started studying,

they thought that these soils were sterile.

But we dispelled that myth.

When the glaciers melt and the streams flow,

that's where you find life.

So, why does this area look like this? Where's the ice?

How come the ground is so soft and spongy?

The Polar Plateau where most of the ice accumulates starts

to spread out towards the edges of the continent,

but the Transantarctic Mountains form a barrier

so the ice sheet hits the mountains

and it can't get through.

The other thing is that there are these really gnarly winds

that come off of them, drop down on the plateau,

and then rush toward the edges

of the continent gushing through these valleys.

So, it's a fluky microclimate here?

We call it the Banana Belt of Antarctica.

It's warm. We're coastal.

Life at Lake Hoare, considering the limitations

and the difficulties, is freaking luxurious

by continental standards.

Out here, by the way, as everywhere on the continent,

every bit of waste is separated and collected.

One pees in a bottle and pours it in the barrel

where it is eventually collected and shipped back to America.

Life here most definitely has its advantages.

Rae and her staff seem always to be making something delicious.

Homemade bread, scones,

muffins appear throughout the day.

Tonight, it's barbecue pork tenderloin.

Oh, that looks good. Pork tenderloin? Damn.

Grilled mahi sticks and shrimp marinated in chili sauce.

Homemade sourdough bread.

A roasted beet salad.

Oh, my gosh. Look at the salad.

It's so purple and it has avocado in it.

What cannot be fresh is nonetheless delicious.

Edamame salad with cranberries and carrots.

Roasted vegetables.

One might find oneself enjoying a cocktail or two.

This is an amazing spread.

I know. Mmm.

What are you guys doing here? What are you looking for?

I'm collecting water samples in the streams

and also collecting samples of the algae.

We're looking at the sign of bacteria mass

which make this rainbow shag rug in the streams,

which is super-cool.

Uh-huh. Well, you know, the beginning of the 20th century

when scientists and explorers were national heroes,

there was a hunger for knowledge and discovery.

Not a good climate for facts, though, we live in today.

- No. - We may interpret our facts

differently but we don't get to make up our own facts, right?

There are plenty of people out there who believe

"The Flintstones"

is pretty much an accurate portrayal of history.

Don't laugh, Mike, that...

Shut up. I know.

They're funding our science in large part.

You want that connection between the public and the scientist,

and that's something we don't do a great job of back home.

I get this criticism all the time, though,

that you scientists need to do a better job

of presenting your research.

I get that. But I'm a professor at a university.

I present knowledge and information.

It's in the classes.

They learn all this awesome stuff.

They're thoughtful. They enter the world.

They make the world better.

But they don't do it in a five-minute soundbite.

But we live in a terrible new reality where you better have

a five-minute soundbite, or they're coming for you.

Right, right. We got to learn how to teach

evolutionary biology 140 characters at a time.

Yeah. Pretty much.

See, you guys just need better press.

Yeah, yeah.

You went gathering data

that will potentially save the world from flesh-eating,

anal-seeking algae.

♪

You need a giant nematode to rampage through West Virginia

or some shit like that.

Then everybody will be extremely interested in what you're doing.

In a battle between a nematode and the algae, who's gonna win?

The algae.

- The nematodes eat algae. - For now.

I'm betting on algae.

In this time you've all chosen to come out here.

You've all been born in the wrong century.

Why do you put up with these people?

'Cause everybody here is such incredible people.

I can't help it. I can't find any place else like this.

34 years later, I'm still in love with the place.

By the way, this is an amazing meal.

Lucky for us, some freshies showed up today,

because it gets really challenging.

It's her superpower.

'Cause I've got, like, four drawers of spices.

Mm-hmm.

I think that can make a difference.

- Makes it different. - That meal was delicious.

Thank you. This is sort of the last place on Earth

where pure science seems to be celebrated

at every level of society,

where people are making great personal sacrifices

in pursuit of knowledge.

That sounds quaint where I come from.

But it's an entire continent of seekers...

- Yeah. - In a world that is

increasingly hostile

to basically everything you're all about.

It's quite wonderful.

Wouldn't that be great, though, huh?

If everyone played as nice as we do with other nations?

Working together to do science, collaborating?

- Yeah. - Dream on, buddy.

The meal is followed by a precarious trip

across the frozen lake to the beach.

Because what's Antarctica about if it ain't about a beach party?

♪

Gear 22. Mack Center. Go ahead.

Gear 22, at 8-2-niner.

Gear 22, Roger. Thank you.

Another C-130.

The big, gorgeous workhorse of the Antarctic

gets you to the ass-end of the planet,

where it's north every direction you go.

Bottom of the world.

So, I like to say this is the biggest airplane

you can do little airplane things with...

Sea, ski planes, or float planes...

And we're trying to do those same types of missions

with a C-130, which is unusual.

Everything they built the station actually came on one

of these C-130s.

They had to build it using trusses

and pieces that could fit in the confines of a LC-130.

It's a fun job. And to support the scientists is fantastic.

In just a few hours, we cross the Ross Ice Shelf,

fly up the Beardmore Glacier

into the heart of Antarctica... The Polar Plateau.

How many miles from McMurdo to the Pole?

Around?

735 miles.

And Scott had to walk that? What was going through his mind?

He loved to suffer.

The first explorers who got here

or came close raced

across the continent striving to be the first.

Amundsen made it before anyone in 1911,

beating Scott by only 34 days.

Amundsen wisely used huskies to pull his sleds across the ice.

Scott didn't, and his team never made it back alive.

The South Pole. What you might not know

or be prepared for is, the South Pole is high.

Like, 9,000 feet above sea level.

And it's cold. Real cold.

But you knew that.

You feel the altitude.

Today, the base at South Pole

has the feel of a space station... a warm,

comfortable bubble in the middle of, well, the great void.

It can be incredibly harsh out there with winds

reaching as high as 50 knots

and temperatures regularly dropping below -50° Fahrenheit.

About 200 scientists

and staff work here during the summer season.

Some of the few freshies I've got left.

Oh, really? Chef Bryan Denham

is responsible for keeping them all fed and happy.

He's been coming here for about five seasons,

wintering over for three of those.

Again, one makes a lot with a little.

What do you think a likely common thread

is between all of the people

who choose to come to this place?

Everybody's got a spirit of adventure here.

It's really cool because you think,

"Oh, I've done some pretty cool things,"

and then you talk to someone else and you say,

"Oh, I've done nothing."

Dr. Stuart Jefferies

is an astronomer and solar specialist.

First year, it's for the adventure.

The second year, it's for the money.

The third year is 'cause you don't fit anywhere else.

You can't punch it anywhere else.

That's right.

Siri Grossman runs equipment and supply.

I really love it here.

I feel like I live on a space station.

I keep coming back.

It's damn good. Like after a hard day

of dragging blocks of ice, this is exactly what you need.

Mm-hmm. People that work outside,

I mean, they'll burn 5,000, 6,000 calories a day.

Generally speaking, people can work between one and four hours

at a time before they need to...

- Come in and get warmed up. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - We eat pretty good down here

considering where we are.

We got a five-week menu cycle.

- Right. - Every Friday for four weeks

is New York strips.

On the fifth week, we do filet mignon and crab legs.

We don't really do fancy food. We just basic food well.

You're doing filet mignon with crab legs.

Eh, that's every five weeks.

Right. How do you deal with vegetarians with no freshies?

We got lots of frozen and canned stuff.

It's like justice.

Yeah.

Who determines the playlist?

It's usually whoever's shift is going on at the time.

I think there was a complaint one day about the music.

Then they picked this really awful song the next day

and they played it over and over and over.

It was "Afternoon Delight." We just put it on loop.

We started listening to German talk radio, too.

- German talk radio? - Yeah.

So, what do you do here?

We look at the inside of the sun through seismic probing.

No one's looking for frozen Nazi cyborgs?

I think they get those in the top few layers.

They're around here somewhere. I'm sure of it.

Beneath the station is a subterranean world.

♪

2,000 feet of tunnels 30 feet down.

Carved into the walls,

impromptu shrines depicting personal messages,

remembrances left behind by long-gone workers.

A frozen, constantly moving

and shifting network of passageways...

The walls come in, the ceiling comes down, the floor comes up.

Requiring constant maintenance.

What's supporting this roof?

Compaction of the snow.

Scott Smith runs the crews

keeping these tunnels clear and pipes flowing.

We're in the process now of picking the chainsaw

depth off the walls

and the ceiling to make it into a more useable entry.

A lot of work.

Pretty amazing feat of engineering here.

The lowest recorded temperature

at the South Pole is -117°.

We're roughly -59° right now.

59°.

- That's Fahrenheit. - Wow. It only feels like -20°.

It's ish.

I can tell you it scorches

the lungs and creeps through your heavy outerwear.

200 feet below the ground we've melted a giant,

enormous lake down there, about 2 million gallons.

This takes about 20 inches of snow

to make an inch of water.

Pump that fresh water supply up to the station.

It gets treated at the power plant.

- Yeah. - The rest comes back down.

Recirculated as hot, which then melts more ice.

- Right. - There's a giant hole

in the ground that contains our sewage for future removable.

Water on top, sewer on the bottom.

What do they do down here?

Some pretty trippy shit, as it turns out.

This is the Bicep in the Dark Sector Lab

and the South Pole Telescope,

ten meters across, mapping thousands of degrees of sky.

Today, they're installing

the most advanced camera of its kind.

It's the third generation South Pole Telescope camera.

16,000 pixels.

It weighs about 2,500 pounds.

In a couple days, we're gonna pull it up into the telescope

and try and see if we can hit the sky with it.

Very cool. It's like a Bond villain stuff, you know.

Yeah, I know. That's right.

Astrophysicists like Dan Marrone

will be looking through those telescopes at,

get this, Sagittarius A...

The freakin' black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

We think we know what black holes look like,

but no one's ever actually looked at one,

and if you can build a telescope the size of the entire Earth,

you can actually see with enough resolution

to watch things swirling around

and disappearing into the black hole.

We're basically taking every similar telescope

in the world to synthesize one telescope

that's 11,000 kilometers across.

Basically the size of the entire Earth.

- Really? - So that we can take a picture

of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Wow. South Pole particularly useful because?

There's no other site like this.

The atmosphere is extremely stable.

It's extremely clear. There's no water in it.

Water absorbs the microwaves we're looking at.

So, you can just map the sky day

and night for six months a year

without stopping, and it gives the best maps

we can make, short of going into space.

I grew up in the Kennedy era

where the Space Program was everything.

The first men on the moon, the space race,

the whole nation couldn't wait 'til we can get to Mars.

Nobody gives a [...] now.

I mean, have you seen that change?

Because, I felt it change.

Yeah. It's true that there is an increased skepticism

of objective reality these days,

but this science stands

on thousands of years of human accrued understanding.

Who's interested? Like, who's most likely to benefit?

There's no immediate answer to that question.

But you're asking basic questions

about the fundamental nature of matter, time, space.

Surely it was people asking those kinds of questions

that led directly to technologies

that we take for granted now.

That's right. I mean, there's no question.

We have to solve hard problems to do these things,

and when we solve them they have other applications.

I've always thought of this basic research...

Trying to understand the universe...

As one of the most hopeful things that humans do.

We just want to know.

What's at the other end of that?

Wouldn't you kind of like to know?

At a time when science is held in open contempt,

when painfully-acquired data

is actually being deleted from computers

if it conflicts with preconceived policies,

these guys are looking at some deep stuff.

Where do we come from?

How does it all work?

How far can we go?

What are we as sentient humans capable of?

And what...

What's on the other side?

♪

Chilly.

My face hurts.

It really is the ass-end of the world.

As the Antarctic summer season comes to an end,

the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker "Polar Star" cuts

through 70 miles of frozen sea to make a channel

for the resupply ship "Ocean Giant."

She delivers vital food and equipment to McMurdo

before the winter closes in.

Just over 500 containers coming down

and there'll be 500 going back.

Well, just like a giant human. Food comes in, shit goes out.

Yep. Yeah. The human waste does go out.

Yeah. Everything, right?

The retro, the waste, old equipment.

Dale Rivers, fleet ops foreman,

makes sure the supplies are moving on and off safely.

The whole town mobilizes, working alongside

hundreds of Navy fleet ops to unload and reload.

Oh, yeah. That'll do. Thank you.

- You're welcome. - Awesome.

Russell Freeman is the executive chef at McMurdo.

- It's our year supply of food. - Year supply?

- Yep. - How old is this?

Ideally you would want it from last year.

We do a lot with a little.

Yeah. Soon after this vessel leaves,

the population starts just going downhill.

- Right. - Yeah.

We're going to warm places. Green grass.

All the things you don't see down here.

- Children, puppies, and salads. - Exactly. Yeah.

And then we just scatter to the winds and regroup in August.

- Yeah. - Will ya?

At the end of the Antarctic summer season

there is, however, a vibrant party culture.

And where people work hard, they deserve to party hard.

Responsibly, of course.

You got it. You got it.

But they do go hardy.

And whether it's the fuelies or the wasties or the riggers

who throw the best parties... And there is much competition

in this department... One can, it turns out,

have a very good time at the end of the world.

Let's get another album queued up here.

I'm liking this song.

All right, this is the world's worst

and most technically-inept DJ signing off.

Thanks for listening.

Antarctica... never gets old.

There is a curiosity in everyone who comes here.

It's a continent of travelers...

Of seekers united in the continuation

of exploration, learning,

the search for greater understanding...

The pursuit of pure knowledge.

♪