The whipping wind wasn’t letting up in the Allan Hills. With each thirty-mile-per-hour blast of polar air that lashed her face, Lauren Lipuma couldn’t help but think that there was no escaping the brutality—out there, and all over Antarctica.

She was there to visit a field team studying some of the oldest glacier ice in the world for insights into our climate. Lipuma caught a ride that morning on a Twin Otter turboprop plane from McMurdo Station, the U.S.’s primary research station in Antarctica and the continent’s largest. An hour later, 135 miles east of McMurdo, there she stood, just trying to survive. Any fallen snow had long since blown away; it was here that scientists had discovered many of the biggest meteorites found on the continent. The ice beneath her feet glowed glacier-blue, as if illuminated from within. This was also the slipperiest place she’d ever been, without question. Even with crampons. Who knew science could be so cinematic, even swashbuckling?

Until the end of April, Lipuma was the editor of The Antarctic Sun, the biggest and longest-running paper on the globe’s least-populated continent. When we first speak, over Zoom in January, she is seated in a conference room that looks like every other conference room. Except this one’s nestled in a peninsula jutting from an island at the edge of Antarctica, on McMurdo, which comprises 146 buildings and around a thousand summer residents—and is by far the largest settlement on the continent.

Though she occasionally works with a freelance network of scientists and others living on the ice, Lipuma writes the bulk of the stories herself. She works on two or three each month, mostly covering the same beat, per the Sun’s mandate: the scientific research being conducted there. She has covered one study on the unprejudiced sexual behavior of Adélie penguins, and another on their tendency to become stone-stealing kleptomaniacs while building nests. She took a helicopter to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the largest mostly ice-free region on the continent. Bone-dry thanks to extremely low humidity, rocked by hurricane-force winds that can reach 200 miles per hour, and surrounded by high mountains blocking the inflow of the nearby East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the landscape looks downright Martian. She’d ventured to the area to report on frozen Lake Fryxell and the researchers who dive in specialized scuba suits to observe the microbial mats— basically sheets of microorganisms that live on submerged surfaces, like a lakebed— with the aim to understand what life might have looked like millions of years ago.

The klepto-prone, polyamorous Adélie penguin.

Extreme remoteness presents unique challenges to newsgathering. There are the banal obstacles, like often painfully slow Internet speeds. Then there are the uncommon dangers. Untimely deaths are rare these days, but frostbite has been known to claim a few fingers or toes. The shimmering white snow often looks beautiful, like thick layers of vanilla frosting liberally applied to a very large cake. But the light reflected off it—including ultraviolet rays thanks to the ozone layer above Antarctica (usually about the thickness of a dime, and recent studies show that the infamous hole is smaller than it used to be)—can cause temporary blindness, severe sunburns, or worse.

When we speak, Lipuma is working on a piece about a recent visit to the NASA-funded Long Duration Balloon Facility, six miles from McMurdo, where she observed an international team of researchers launch a helium-filled polyethylene balloon—as thin as plastic wrap and laden with an six-thousand-pound payload—into the stratosphere. The payload was SPIDER, a collection of telescopes embarking on a sixteen-day tour twenty miles above the planet to detect cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest observable light in the universe. Lipuma learned, among other things, that Antarctica is an ideal launch site because researchers can easily recover the descending balloons and, more important, the instruments—which, beyond their cost, often contain the only sources of collected data.

Open Gallery

Polyethylene balloon is perhaps the only mode of transport Lipuma didn’t take to get there. She flew from Denver to Los Angeles, then to Sydney, and finally to Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island and a so-called gateway to Antarctica—a 9,670-mile trip in total. From there, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster cargo plane took her—along with scientists, support staff, science equipment, luggage, fruits and vegetables, and mailed packages, all crammed together in the back—2,400 miles south, to McMurdo.

McMurdo Station as seen from space.

Lipuma, thirty-nine, had been waiting a long time for this moment. She grew up in Silver Spring, a suburb of Washington, D.C.; earned a master’s in biomedical engineering; and has been a science reporter for years. (She served a term as president of the D.C. Science Writers Association.) Four years ago, at a science conference in Washington, Lipuma met Mike Lucibella, then the editor of the Sun. That left her fantasizing about how cool it would be to have his job. One day she saw the position posted on a job board and immediately reached out to Lucibella; she got the job and took the helm in March 2021. Due to Covid restrictions, for nineteen months, she was based in Centennial, Colorado, at the office of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), which funds and oversees the Sun. Before she finally went down, in October of last year, Lucibella gave her a word of caution: Batteries freeze. As the Sun’s sole full-time staffer, she’d also be its staff photographer, and frozen batteries made taking pictures and video very difficult.

Being a newcomer to the area with no other Sun colleagues on the ice, Lipuma worried she’d spend five lonely months in the bone-chilling cold, isolated amid thousands of miles of unforgiving terrain with nowhere to go. But she discovered that the community at McMurdo is unusually strong, which she found heartwarming. (Pun possibly intended.) For starters, there’s the McMurdo Coffee House, run by a team of volunteer baristas. There’s a nondenominational church, the Chapel of the Snows, which is used by the Catholics, the Protestants, the Mormons, the Buddhists, and Alcoholics Anonymous. There are athletic events, like the McMurdo Marathon and rugby matches against the staff of New Zealand–run Scott Base, about two miles from McMurdo—next door by Antarctic standards.

A U.S. Navy helicopter delivers supplies at research outpost Palmer Station, in 1969. The Navy no longer runs McMurdo, but airdrops remain the means by which U.S. outposts stay supplied.

In some ways, the community changes: Mactown Lanes, a two-lane bowling alley, closed in the 2009-10 season. In 2021, a sous chef at McMurdo launched the Hut Point Bird Club with seven founding members. But in other ways, the social life stays the same. There’s Icestock—think Woodstock but on New Year’s in Antarctica—a tradition that began in 1989 and, of course, includes a chili cook-off. Gallagher’s, a pub known for live music, wild parties, and a pervasive smell of cheap beer, has been going strong for several decades. At a recent show, the McMones, a Ramones tribute band, expanded its repertoire to include a few Rage Against the Machine songs. Lipuma and the other nineties kids in the audience loved it. “There was a legit mosh pit,” she says.

Lipuma has found that fast friendships form because of the shared sense of survival in such adverse conditions and then strengthen rapidly through communal board games and movie nights. She likens the overall vibe to that of a small rural town in the U.S.—just one with the occasional stray penguin waddling around, pooping wherever it goes.

Just as McMurdo used to run on nuclear energy (true story) and dinosaurs once roamed Antarctica’s long-gone leafy forests (also true), the Sun used to come out in print but doesn’t anymore. Articles go live after they’ve been approved. In 2007, the paper dropped the physical edition and has been digital ever since. (Lipuma says that sometimes people request PDF printouts, which she gladly provides.)

This dinosaur skeleton—of the Jurassic predator Cryolophosaurus Ellioti—was discovered in Antarctica in 1990.

This may be surprising, but the Sun is not Antarctica’s first newspaper. In fact, for such an inhospitable place with so few people, it has spawned a number of media outlets. The first ones arrived in the wake of Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition, starting in 1901, to explore the then largely untouched and unknown continent; they included the South Polar Times and the Adélie Mail and Cape Adare Times. Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, beginning in 1907, birthed the Antarctic Petrel, published aboard its namesake ship on its failed trip to reach the South Pole. An Australia-led expedition was catalogued in the five issues of The Adélie Blizzard, produced in 1913. The newspapers’ target audiences were the same—sailors in desperate need of entertainment—and so was their anything-goes content: a mix of poetry, adventure stories, descriptions of the landscapes and the wildlife, song lyrics, sketches, and more.

Ernest Shackleton’s S.S. Nimrod in the Antarctic pack ice, on its failed trip to reach the South Pole.

As for the Sun, its roots go back nearly to McMurdo Station’s birth, in December 1955. The Navy built it as a logistics and science hub for studying Antarctica. The location, Winter Quarters Bay—Scott bestowed the name after his expedition spent its first winter there, in 1902—was ideal: several square miles of ice-free land and the southernmost navigable water in the world. McMurdo News first came out in 1957, during the so-called International Geophysical Year, which brought together scientists from across the globe, including the U.S. and its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. By the sixties, the News had morphed into the McMurdo Sometimez, so named because its volunteer Naval radiomen only “sometimez” got an edition out of the door, composed on a teletype and printed on a ditto machine by the hundreds. By the seventies, a platemaking machine, salvaged from the Washington Navy Yard and set up in a converted hut, was cranking out four hundred copies each day of the newly titled McMurdo Sometimes, which contained three pages of news and one page each of sports, features, and comics, and which squadron pilots distributed to other U.S. Antarctic stations as part of their regular supply runs. By 1980, the name had changed again, to the Antarctica Sun Times. Its slogan: “published for the frozen chosen.” In 1997, staffing shifted to civilian contractors as many aspects of the logistics for USAP were turned over to civilians, which remains the case. That’s also when the paper assumed its current name.

Members of Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, at the entrance to an ice grotto in 1911, with Terra Nova on the horizon.

Lipuma isn’t the first female editor—that’d be Ginny Figlar, who worked there until February 1999. The Sun didn’t hire a woman for any position until Figlar joined as a staff writer in October 1998. In fact, women weren’t allowed to go to Antarctica for decades, allegedly because of unfounded concerns about the impact of the harsh climate on their delicate health, among other reasons; well into the sixties, according to former Sun editor Peter Rejcek, the continent had a reputation as “the last bastion of male supremacy.” The first women reported to visit McMurdo weren’t even scientists but rather Pan Am flight attendants on a four-hour stay in 1957. The United Press described them in incredibly sexist terms: “…dark-haired Patricia Hepinstall, 25, former model for I. Magnin, San Francisco, and a native of 3752 Garnet St., Houston, Tex., and blonde Ruth Kelly, 28, former school teacher from Holyoke, Colo., who resembles Princess Grace.” Times are different now, of course. Still, even today, pregnancy is considered a “Not Physically Qualified” condition—a disqualifier, in plainer words—for deployment on the ice. If you become pregnant, you’re sent home—Antarctica doesn’t have adequate medical facilities to support a pregnancy.

If life on the ice sounds a bit like a frozen Wild West, that’s certainly not true of the Sun’s editorial process. According to Terri Edillon, a spokesperson for the National Science Foundation, the paper’s budget is hard to untangle from USAP’s annual budget, which in the 2022 fiscal year totaled $216.02 million. But that financial dependence means that every story Lipuma publishes needs approval—first by her U.S.-based supervisor, then by the comms team at the NSF, and finally by an expert in the appropriate scientific field, who checks for accuracy. This process might seem tedious, and it leads to questions about impartiality. But this is surely an improvement over the censorship board that oversaw the paper under the Navy’s stewardship, which, in 1971, for example, added a military advisor after a few too many Sun articles criticized the Vietnam War. For her part, Lipuma says she doesn’t feel her work is compromised because of where the Sun’s funding comes from. She adds that it wouldn’t be possible to travel to Antarctica and cover the science on the ground without USAP’s support.

The Antarctic Sun, like everything at McMurdo Station, relies on funding from the U.S. government.

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When I speak to Lipuma in April, a couple months after her return to Centennial, she has news: She’s stepping down as the Sun’s editor. Not because of the penguins but because of a job opportunity at the University of Colorado.

Reflecting on her tenure, she says she’s proud to have introduced more multimedia storytelling (video in particular) into the Sun’s repertoire. It helps bring narratives to life for the general public—who, along with people on the ice, are the paper’s target audience. Lipuma says she’ll miss the scenery: the snowy tundra, the ice cliffs higher and longer than some mountain ranges, the constant reminders that in Antarctica, nature reigns. Her replacement has not yet been announced.

Whoever takes over, Lipuma believes they will continue to run an operation that has a distinct place in an ever-more-competitive media landscape. Artificial intelligence isn’t a threat—if it weren’t for humans like those at McMurdo, computers wouldn’t even know Antarctica exists. She has one piece of advice for her successor, other than the frozen-batteries thing: The weather rules all, so have a plan but be ready to pivot.

Lauren Lipuma.

Freelance Writer

Ben Mack is a New Zealand-based travel writer.