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bespectacledbengal t1_iswpbdy wrote

Reply to comment by WeirdlyStrangeish in Next pandemic may come from melting glaciers, new data shows. Analysis of Arctic lake suggests viruses and bacteria locked in ice could reawaken and infect wildlife. by chemistrynerd1994

I went to Antarctica and it was terrific. We saw so many penguins.

The weird thing about it is there are no borders and nobody owns any of the land so you can just roll up to someone’s research camp and say hi and it’s on them if they want to come out and say hi back.

I didn’t come back with any viruses though.

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Eponymous-Username t1_iswqis6 wrote

How do you do this? Tourism, or special vocational qualifications?

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bespectacledbengal t1_iswqkms wrote

You just pay a tour company and they do everything. It’s not crazy expensive. You can get your passport stamped in Antarctica but it’s more for fun since there’s no government that runs everything there.

And if you’re in the military in, say, Chile, they actually hand out pretty hefty bonuses for people who put themselves on the roster there because not a lot of people want to do it, I guess.

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WeirdlyStrangeish t1_iswrf9p wrote

Well that's actually significantly cooler and real than my plan. Do you have to get like a ton of super cold weather gear? Are there hotels?

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bespectacledbengal t1_isws987 wrote

If you’re doing a small tour, not part of a large group, they’ll just get you space at one of the research stations (i.e. I bunked with the folks from Chile since that’s where I flew out from) — but if you take a boat instead of fly, you just sleep on the boat

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R_Prime t1_isz5chi wrote

Hmm, I thought the only tourism options these day were the scenic flights and the cruises that just go kinda near it.

I need to look into this more.

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bespectacledbengal t1_isz5r0u wrote

nah, you can take a plane that lands there

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R_Prime t1_iszab32 wrote

Holy potatoes, they ain’t cheap! Looks like they only go from South America though.

I live in an Antarctic gateway city so I had hoped I’d be able to go there from this side of the planet, but the only options other than the scenic flights are research expeditions, which I don’t have the qualifications for haha.

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