Imagine the charm of sifting through bills and junk mail in your mailbox and seeing the quirky script and colors of a handwritten Christmas card. Now imagine that you’re pulling it out of a mailbox at the farthest point on earth from human civilization. At the personal request of King Charles III, the Royal Mail — the UK equivalent of the USPS — has installed a traditional mailbox at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Rothera station, situated 1,155 miles south of the Falkland Islands. The shiny red mailbox was delivered by research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough, and arrived just in time for Christmas. Though letter-writing has become rare in the digital age, there’s one time of the year when it resurfaces — Christmas. That fact hasn’t been lost on the scientists who work at Rothera. “If you’re doing fieldwork for many months, the feeling of receiving a letter — an actual tangible, piece of paper with handwriting from friends and family — is such a lift,” said Kirsten Shaw, a station support assistant who runs the British Antarctic Territory Post Office. Mail is delivered to Antarctica by polar vessels like the Attenborough and distributed to various science bases and camps.
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| Kirsten Shaw and Aurelia Reichardt, station leader at Rothera, are pictured with the new mailbox |
