Knowledge

How close to the South Pole do people live?

OK – so the large building in the photo below is where most of the people who live and work at the South pole live. If you zoom in and look a bit above the building in the photo – you can see a bunch of flags, arranged in an arc. That is the “ceremonial” south pole – placed with flags and a red and white stripey pole for people to stand next to and take pictures…but the ACTUAL south pole is a little bit off to the left of that – marked by one flag and a simple white sign board.

As you can see – there are substantial numbers of people living and working just maybe 100 meters from the actual South Pole.

EDIT: Removed the information about it being discouraged to go to the actual South Pole marker, thanks Austin Richards for the correction.

Related Posts

If an astronaut working on the International Space Station were somehow cut loose from his tether, would he fall back to Earth or orbit around it?

If an astronaut outside the ISS has his or her tether broken, they do not fall to the Earth. Before the tether was broken, the astronaut was in orbit at…

Escape velocity is supposed to be 24,000 mph, but our rockets never achieve this speed. How does that work?

Imagine you are sitting on a skateboard at the bottom of your drive and you need to get to the top. You could push off your garage door…

Can humans live on the side of a tidally-locked planet where neither day nor night exist?

Humans with their technology developed on Earth could live on a tidally locked planet where neither day nor night exists. We used to think that such planets become…

How did NASA make the shuttle safer after Columbia?

The problem was not just the piece of foam that struck the wing, it was a failure of imagination — NASA had seen foam fall before and decided…

Why do US Air Force fighters like the F-22 and F-15 place the engines right next to each other while Russian fighters like Su-27 always have a gap between the engines?

The United States has this thing where we learn from our mistakes. One of those mistakes was spacing twin engines as far apart as we did in the…

Is Mars too small to have a permanent atmosphere?

No, it is not. It used to have a thick atmosphere, perhaps thicker than Earth’s. It had that atmosphere for a couple of billion years and had oceans….