A night view of McMurdo Station on Ross Island, as it experiences 24 hours of darkness in the middle of winter, on June 6, 2015. The lights from the largest research station in Antarctica illuminate Observation Hill just to the south of town. #

The South Pole Telescope is used to study the cosmic microwave background dark matter emitted shortly after the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago. It also participated with the Event Horizon Telescope as one of eight telescopes located around the world, providing the first-ever imaging of a black hole. This photo was taken on November 21, 2018. #

Jennifer Lamp, an Earth scientist, adjusts some of the acoustic monitoring equipment she set up in Beacon Valley on February 4, 2019. Her team and she have instrumented rocks to “listen” to cracks as they form over the winter, to study how rocks weather and erode in the hyper-arid conditions of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. #

A Sunday morning sunrise was enjoyed by personnel on board the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer as it moved into the Bellingshausen Sea. The cruise had been in the Amundsen Sea region participating in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. The Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research team set sail from Punta Arenas, Chile, on January 26, 2020, to conduct research in the Amundsen Sea off the coast of Thwaites Glacier. During their 60-day cruise on the NBP, the team collected sediment samples from the ocean floor beneath them, as well as water samples and ocean temperature measurements. The team also mapped the seafloor to better understand changes to the area over recent and geologic time. #

Sevil Deniz Yakan Dundar, with Turkey's ITU Faculty of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, is seen on the deck of the Betanzos, sailing under the colors of Chile, before leaving the ship in Antarctica on February 27, 2019. #

Hurricane-force winds of a midday summer-snow storm at Allan Hills field camp reduces visibility to a few yards on November 22, 2019. The scientist John Higgins and an ice-core drilling team spent more than two months during the 2019 austral summer extracting ancient cores of ice from this wind-scoured glacial area above the Mawson and McKay glaciers. #

A newborn Weddell seal pup bonds with its mother on October 30, 2018. Seal pups will stay with their mother for a little over a month, until they learn to swim and are weaned from their mother's milk. #

A wet fur seal sits in front of a cluster of rusting whale oil tanks, which mark the site of an old abandoned whaling station dating back to the early 1900s, in Deception Island, on March 13, 2020. #

A view of Palmer Station from the research vessel Laurence M. Gould as it pulls away, on February 29, 2020. Palmer Station is the farthest north of the three year-round U.S. Antarctic research stations and the only one located along the Antarctic Peninsula. #

An aerial view of divers Sahika Ercumen and Jonathan Sunnex, swimming during Ercumen's free-diving training among icebergs near Galindez Island in Antarctica on February 9, 2019. #