“Great God! This is an awful place…” -Capt. Robert F. Scott, 1912

Vast plains of nothing. Icy wastes expanding further than the imagination.

It’s the home of dramatic glacial pinnacles and fuzzy penguins waddling and diving. But for many, it’s simply home. Working nine hour days, six days a week in support of “science,” upward of 800 people crowd McMurdo Station between the months of September and February every year. The majority of those people will not see beyond the boundaries of that small “town.” Nor will they have any direct experience with the scientists or any hand in research or exploration (first-hand “science support,” as it is termed, is reserved for the lucky few). Most are washing dishes, cleaning toilets, repairing buildings, changing the oil in the heavy equipment.

For many (and indeed for me), Antarctica is a place of strange pipelines, heavy equipment, fried food, and wacky shenanigans in confined spaces. McMurdo exists as a strange summer camp cum gulag. It’s a summer camp in the way that close relationships form in an instant, then are forgotten or dissolve when the season comes to an end. It’s a summer camp in the cliquishness, in the pranks, in the gossip. Gulag because it’s a work camp; a mass of people living in close quarters working long hours crowded together on the tip of a peninsula at the edge of the emptiest place on earth. It’s also a monolithic bureaucracy with forms and spreadsheets and org-charts and Standard Operating Procedures for everything (there’s literally an SOP for kite flying).

There’s power in the place. It’s the desperation, the closeness, the vastness and humbling nature of the landscape. It’s a place that leaves its mark. The highest, driest, coldest, windiest, whatever. Got a boom box and a case of shitty New Zealand beer? I know of an empty fuel tank we can get drunk in.

Photos 4, 5 and 19 by Nicholas Johnson, www.bigdeadplace.com