CNN — When this year’s all-woman team arrived on Antarctica’s Goudier Island to run the world’s most remote post office, it was shovels they needed rather than stamps.
They’d traveled some 8,000 miles from the UK, by plane and boat, and Britain’s Royal Navy were already on hand to help them dig out their new home at the Port Lockroy scientific base, which was buried up to four meters deep under several tonnes of December snow.
It wasn’t just the frozen wastes that first struck postmaster Clare Ballantyne, who at 23 years old was the baby of the four-woman group. It was that “there’s penguins everywhere.”
More than a thousand Gentoo penguins live on this tiny island on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula, around the size of a soccer field. Since 1944, when the UK’s first permanent Antarctic base was established here, it’s also become a haven for explorers, scientists and – in recent years – tourists.
As well as the post office, there’s a museum and gift shop. In the 2022/23 season, nearly 16,000 visitors from more than 200 ships passed through, making this one of the busiest places in the “frozen continent.”
Each year, a team is selected to run and maintain the site from November to March, or summertime in the southern hemisphere. Around 4,000 people applied for this, the first post-Covid season, but just four made the cut: Ballantyne, base leader Lucy Bruzzone, wildlife monitor Mairi Hilton and shop manager Natalie Corbett.
The job also involves counting penguins: The scientific data they gather on the Gentoos’ breeding patterns is part of a decades-long study of the colony.