Four women have been selected to run the world's most remote post office in Antarctica. They have also been tasked to count the penguin population during their five-month stay. Clare Ballantyne, Mairi Hilton, Natalie Corbett and Lucy Bruzzone constitute this year's team responsible for managing the historic site of Port Lockroy, on Goudier Island.
The UK Antarctic Heritage Trust chose the team which will maintain the Port Lockroy base. The trust, which is based in Cambridge, advertises yearly for seasonal postmasters at the site. Candidates are required to have a good standard of physical fitness, environmental awareness and a knowledge of minimum impact living. It usually receives hundreds of applications for the Antarctica stint but this year they saw a record high of over 6,000 applications. The team is entrusted with maintaining the historic buildings and artefacts in Antarctica.
The four women have traded in their home comforts for five remarkable months spent in freezing temperatures, with no electricity, running water or flushing toilets and constant daylight.
Mairi Hilton, 30, is a conservation biologist from Scotland and will be in charge of monitoring the island's gentoo penguin colony. "This will be my first time in Antarctica and I'm very excited to set eyes on the white continent," she said. "I have no idea what to expect when we get there: how cold it will be, will we have to dig our way through the snow to the post office?"
There are about 1,500 penguins on the island.
Lucy Bruzzone, 40, from London, has previously spent three months as the chief scientist on an Arctic expedition. She will be the base's leader in charge of managing the team and coordinating all ship visits to the island. Ms Bruzzone described her new job as a "lifelong dream".
Clare Ballantyne, 23, from Lincolnshire, has just completed a master's in earth science at Oxford University. She is the newly appointed postmaster and will deal by hand with approximately 80,000 cards, which are mailed from the site to more than a 100 countries. "I'm most looking forward to stepping on to Goudier Island and taking in the cacophony and pungent smell of the penguins, the backdrop of the glaciers and Fief mountains, and being able to call it home for the next few months," she said.
Ms Corbett, a 31-year-old newlywed, will be in charge of running the gift shop at the site's museum. She calls the trip her "solo honeymoon". "Who wouldn't want to spend five months working on an island filled with penguins in one of the most remote places on the planet?" she said.
Vicky Inglis, 42 has previously stayed on the island, and will join the team for 10 weeks as a general assistant.
Port Lockroy was in use from 1944 till 1962. It was also the first permanent British base to be established on the Antarctic Peninsula. Since 2006, it has been functioning as a post office and museum.
Although the site is visited by approximately 18,000 tourists annually, in the Antarctic summer, it has not had visitors during the last two years of the pandemic. This year's team would be the first to inhabit the site since 2019
