South Pole

While today's vernal equinox may not mean precisely 12 hours of daylight, it does mark one of the two days a year the sun rises from due east and sets at due west. At the equator, one can see the sun passing directly overhead. On the North Pole, the sun skims across the horizon, starting six months of daylight, while on South Pole, six months of darkness begin.

While today's vernal equinox may not mean precisely 12 hours of daylight, it does mark one of the two days a year the sun rises from due east and sets at due west. At the equator, one can see the sun passing directly overhead. On the North Pole, the sun skims across the horizon, starting six months of daylight, while on South Pole, six months of darkness begin.

Working late into the night at a research center at the South Pole, Renee-Nicole Douceur thought she was just tired when her vision suddenly became blurred. Sleep did nothing to improve her eyesight, and a doctor at the center at first thought she had torn a retina. But further diagnosis pointed to a stroke and the beginning of an ordeal where the closest hospital would be nine weeks and a 12-hour plane ride away. "I was very concerned for my health," Douceur said Friday. "I didn't know if I was a ticking time bomb.

Working late into the night at a research center at the South Pole, Renee-Nicole Douceur thought she was just tired when her vision suddenly became blurred. Sleep did nothing to improve her eyesight, and a doctor at the center at first thought she had torn a retina. But further diagnosis pointed to a stroke and the beginning of an ordeal where the closest hospital would be nine weeks and a 12-hour plane ride away. "I was very concerned for my health," Douceur said Friday. "I didn't know if I was a ticking time bomb.

How cold is it at the South Pole? It's so cold that icicles quickly form on your eyelashes, even beneath a pair of thick goggles. It's so cold that the packed snow squeaks as you plod across it. It's so cold that even though the sun never sets in summer, a temperature reading of minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit is considered balmy. All of these answers are courtesy of Sebastian Stewart of Ellicott City, who made the 13,200-mile trek to Antarctica in November. An engineer working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, he spent seven days performing annual maintenance of a scientific instrument.

Hauling 395-pound sleds, Peter Hillary, son of Mount Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary, reached the South Pole with two other ski trekkers yesterday after an 800-plus-mile Antarctic journey beset by blinding blizzards, illness and frostbite. Hillary and his father, who was also part of a trans-Antarctica expedition in the 1950s, are the first father and son to reach the bottom of the world."Now that I've got here, everything seems worth it," Peter Hillary said after his team reached the United States' Amundsen-Scott base.

Dehydrated food, layers of clothing and hot chocolate kept NASA scientist Peter Wasilewski warm and happy during his sixth trip to Antarctica.And then there was his five-member team, his trusty snowmobile and the flags -- 18 of them from Japanese and American elementary schools, including Swansfield Elementary and Glenelg Country School.The flags were his buddies, colorful markers to help others find him in the snow and reminders of the school children who accompanied him in spirit on his exploration.

After waiting five days for a rescue plane, a sick employee stationed at the South Pole will be flying out early today to get medical treatment. The Twin Otter rescue plane arrived at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at 5:13 p.m. yesterday. The name of the male employee of Raytheon Polar Services based in Centennial, Colo., has not been released. Unconfirmed reports indicate he is suffering from bladder problems that could require surgery. The rescue effort had been delayed for five days because of bad weather.

At least two Air Force planes were to leave the West Coast today on a risky mission to carry medicine -- and hope -- to a woman at the South Pole who has found a potentially cancerous lump in her breast.A medical evacuation is impossible in the bitter, 80-below-zero cold. The airmen will have to penetrate the storms and darkness of the Antarctic winter and drop the drugs and other medical gear by parachute."People were really motivated to do this because it's about saving a life," said Capt.

1911: Amundsen reaches South Pole 1911: Bingham finds Machu Picchu 1912: First L.L. Bean boot 1913: Income tax introduced

Scientists flying high above the South Pole have made the first high-altitude radar measurements of the snow and ice beneath the pole's Scott-Amundsen Research Station. A radar beam transmitted from a four-engine NASA jetliner flying at 39,000 feet penetrated nearly 3 kilometers of ice to the bedrock, then returned to the plane. The radar echoes were converted into a shadowy profile of the layered ice and the bedrock. The feat was part of the second season of Operation IceBridge.

Sam Cohen, in Rosedale, asks: "I hear a lot of people saying, on days when it is really cold, 'It's too cold to snow.' My answer is, 'Then how does it snow in the arctic?'" It's never too cold for snow in Maryland. But to have snow, you need ample moisture. And the colder it is, the less water vapor the air can hold. Even arctic air can produce snow if it cools to its dew point, or if there is warmer, wetter air above it. But at polar extremes -- say, 40-below -- snow is rare. The South Pole is a desert of blowing snow.

Declaring "This is not your father's moon," NASA scientists said Friday that last month's mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole. "The moon is alive," declared Anthony Colaprete, chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, or LCROSS. According to Colaprete and other researchers, the mission measured about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice after punching a hole about 100 feet across.

JERRI NIELSEN FITZGERALD, 57 South Pole doctor treated her own cancer Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer before a dramatic rescue from the South Pole, died Tuesday at her home in Southwick, Mass. Her cancer had been in remission until it returned in August 2005. She was the only doctor among 41 staff at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in winter 1999 when she discovered a lump in her breast. Because of the extreme weather conditions, the station is closed to the outside world for the winter.

How cold is it at the South Pole? It's so cold that icicles quickly form on your eyelashes, even beneath a pair of thick goggles. It's so cold that the packed snow squeaks as you plod across it. It's so cold that even though the sun never sets in summer, a temperature reading of minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit is considered balmy. All of these answers are courtesy of Sebastian Stewart of Ellicott City, who made the 13,200-mile trek to Antarctica in November. An engineer working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, he spent seven days performing annual maintenance of a scientific instrument.

As big and bright and beautiful as the moon has been these past few nights, it's still a challenge to think of the old rock as providing a way station for future manned space expeditions, which is how NASA envisions the ultimate use of a permanent lunar outpost it wants to set up on the sphere's south pole by 2024. That's a little like advising Magellan to tie up to an iceberg and catch his breath before attempting the voyage around Cape Horn. Of course, the accommodations NASA will build should be safer and more comfortable than a wooden sailing vessel and the moon's south pole is nearly always awash in sunlight, making it possible for many of the mechanical needs and creature comforts of its residents to come from solar-power collectors.

Almanac Nov. 29--1929 Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd radioed that he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.

"South Pole, South Pole, South Pole." The radio call from a remote field camp on the polar plateau crackles on the short wave band across Antarctica. Overheard on the flight deck of a cargo plane flying across the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in January, the radio call could be a distress signal from scientists marooned by blizzard winds. It could be a routine radio check, part of the daily discipline of fieldwork on the world's highest, coldest and most isolated continent. It's not. It's a call for Sally in the Galley; it's an order for takeout.

Almanac Nov. 29--1929 Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd radioed that he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.