hope at the ass-end of the world

some things make complete sense once you find out but it's not like you know them before you find out. if you can see what i mean there. maybe not? okay, here's the example. the south pole has 24 time zones. see? makes perfect sense, but it's not like you knew it already. or, let me say, it's not like *I* knew it already. so anyways, ol' antarctica has 24 times zones. who cares about what time it is in a place where it's completely dark half the year? you might think nobody cares, but you'd be wrong. so there!

a quick count of the dots on the map in this month's national geographic reveals that there are no less than 37 scientific stations scattered around the bottom of the world. many are concentrated on what we'd say is the "western" side, because it's to the left on the map. "west" and "east" are just relative terms but to keep things simple, on the western side there are more stations. the western side is closest to south america.


so the folks working at those 37 stations care what time it is. to coordinate their work with each other and with other scientists, they use UTC or coordinated universal time. you can tell by the acronym that it's not an acronym for the english because the english would be CUT. in french, it's temps universel coordonné, or TUC. the compromise is UTC. UTC is basically GMT (if you don't know what GMT is, you're really going to have to google it, because it's very basic) with some specific scientific adjustments to account for leap time, adjustments that we lay-folk shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over.

so, que hora es? turns out these hearty sciencefolk have three choices for the clocks at their stations. they can set their clocks by the zone of their departure point (tip-of-continent port from which they left for the pole). they can set their clocks by their home time zone. or, they can set their clocks by the slice of time zone they're in. the station at the pole doesn't have this third choice because at the pole all the zones converge, putting this station in every time at once... or, in no time at all.

there are stations owned by united states, france, chile, germany, poland, russia, italy, new zealand, austrailia, china, japan, india, norway, united kingdom, argentina, brazil, south korea, and uruguay. what an interesting mix. poland? really? i mean, where does a country like poland get the budget to support an antarctic station? and, south korea is also a country i would not think of as affluent enough to afford scientific exploration. argentina has three, which seems like a lot, but then i don't think argentina is all that far away from the south pole, is it?


the united states has planted the flag at the pole, calling the station "amundsen-scott" after the first men there (right?). most of the station names are immediately recognizable as to their country of origin:

dumont d'urville (france)
novolazarevskaya (russia)
neumayer (germany)
halley (u.k.)
arctowski (poland)
zhongshan (china)
san martin (argentina)

some have funny names. like, chile has one called bernardo o'higgins. wasn't that a character on the carol burnette show? china has one called great wall, and we all know that wall is great but it does not extend to the south pole. c'mon now. norway's station is called troll. heh. troll.

argentina has a station called esperanza, and in case you don't know, esperanza in english is "hope". that one really struck me. having hope in that godforsaken land, well, that's really something. esperanza is the birthplace of the first human born in antarctica (emilio marcos palma in 1978). wow. doesn't get much more hopeful than a newborn baby boy, does it now?