If you've ever wondered what it's like to do science on Earth's southernmost land mass, you can follow an Antarctic field trip at the In the Field blog (http://go.nature.com/4Bk1kn).
Student journalist Chaz Firestone of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is travelling across the “seventh continent” and interviewing researchers working there. Firestone takes readers from getting outfitted for the extreme cold weather to experiencing a 'boomerang' flight from New Zealand, and his final landing on the ice-strip at Pegasus Field.
“The Sun never sets here, but just spins around the sky, casting gorgeous shadows on the distant mountains,” he says of his surroundings. “The horizon appears to wrap 360 degrees around you, the way it might if you were on a small island ... And the landscape is so uniform and textureless for miles on end that it is difficult to estimate distances.”
At the South Pole, astronomers are searching for galaxy clusters and astrophysicists are trying to capture elusive evidence of neutrinos. And in the arid Dry Valleys, Firestone will interview geologists peeling clues about Mars from canyon walls.
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From the blogosphere. Nature 463, 268 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/7279268c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/7279268c