South Pole Station – USA Antarctic Territory

There is a US Post office at the South Pole. It’s located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. And today I received a postcard from there! Well, like the one from McMurdo Station it’s the one I sent there myself, asking to be sent to me postmarked. But I got more than that — they also added a Antarctica stamp, and their postmark is awesome! The travel time from NYC to the South Pole to St. Petersburg, Russia took just over 5 months.

The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is a United States scientific research station at the South Pole, the southernmost place on the Earth. It is at the only place on the land surface of the Earth where the sun is continuously up for six months and then continuously down for six months. (The only other such place is at the North Pole, on the sea ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.) During the summer the station population is typically around 150. Most personnel leave by the middle of February, leaving a few dozen (45 in 2015) “winter-overs”, mostly support staff plus a few scientists, who keep the station functional through the months of Antarctic night. Research at the station includes glaciology, geophysics, meteorology, upper atmosphere physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and biomedical studies.

Antarctica postcard

Antarctica stamp postmark

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