The far south
From Punta Arenas, the Antarctic Peninsula is a short flight away. That accident of geography turned the southern tip of Chile first into a logistics base and then into a laboratory.
Why here
How close can you get to Antarctica?
Almost all Antarctic science begins as a transport problem, and Chile solved its own by being close. Expeditions stage here, assemble here, and bring their samples back here. The Chilean Antarctic Institute has spent decades turning that position into a research programme — down to a national science fair whose prize is a trip to the continent.
What people look for down there is no longer only ice. Organisms living at temperatures where almost nothing works carry enzymes that work anyway, and that interests medicine and industry alike: Antarctic bacteria are being studied against leukaemia and against digestive cancer, not as a metaphor but as funded lines of work.
It is also the best place to measure what the planet is doing, precisely because so few people live there. If a forever chemical shows up in Antarctica, it is already everywhere. The fjords, the kelp forests and the species of the deep south are the other half of the same laboratory.
The numbers, with their sources
separate Punta Arenas from Antarctica in a straight line — about the same as the distance to Puerto Montt, and a little over two hours by plane.
What we have on this
Scientists
If you work with any of this
Instruments, fieldwork, a programme that needs one of these conditions, or simply a story that is better told from here. That is the conversation we are interested in.
What we can do together →