Antarctica is not truly home to anyone, as far as we know, but between 1,000 and 10,000 hardy workers can be stationed there, depending on the season, while around 40,000 tourists come and go each year.
But those workers are not only scientists, environmentalists, nature researchers and explorers. After all, maintaining living quarters in a land where temperatures average minus 10 Celsius along the coast and minus 43 inland takes more than being an expert on how leopard seals hunt or knowing how to drill an ice core.
For carpenters, chefs, electricians, mechanics, plumbers and more, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is promising “the opportunity of a lifetime to work in the world’s coldest and windiest continent.”
“Successful applicants will work in some of the most remote, and beautiful places on Earth, building lifelong friendships and contributing to science that’s important for understanding our changing world,” according to BAS, which said the next round of recruits will start work any time from May to September.
Contracts run from six to 18 months, with the latest set of vacancies on the BAS website including openings for a health and safety advisor, boating officer, electrical maintenance technician, as well as roles for marine biologists and ocean scientists.
“Being a chef in Antarctica is a very different experience to anything I’ve ever done before,” said BAS catering manager Olivier Hubert, a former chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
“Meals are such an important part of life down south – they’re the anchors to the day so the pressure is on to create interesting and nutritious meals with limited supplies,” Hubert explained.
Bigger than Europe, Antarctica is covered in an ice sheet averaging around 2 kilometres thick, and, while what lies beneath remains mostly unknown, scientists at Durham University in 2023 published the results of an airplane-surveying method called radio-echo sounding that suggested a vast hidden network of valleys and hills literally frozen in time under a zone of ice around the size of Belgium.
Although it is usually listed as having been discovered around 1818-1820, Antarctica appears on several maps drawn several centuries earlier, including some said to depict it without ice.
