There are the banal obstacles, like often painfully slow Internet speeds. Education Images // Getty ImagesĮxtreme remoteness presents unique challenges to newsgathering. The klepto-prone, polyamorous Adélie penguin. She’d ventured to the area to report on frozen Lake Fryxell and the researchers who dive in specialized scuba suits to observe the microbial mats- basically sheets of microorganisms that live on submerged surfaces, like a lakebed- with the aim to understand what life might have looked like millions of years ago. Bone-dry thanks to extremely low humidity, rocked by hurricane-force winds that can reach 200 miles per hour, and surrounded by high mountains blocking the inflow of the nearby East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the landscape looks downright Martian. She took a helicopter to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the largest mostly ice-free region on the continent. She has covered one study on the unprejudiced sexual behavior of Adélie penguins, and another on their tendency to become stone-stealing kleptomaniacs while building nests. She works on two or three each month, mostly covering the same beat, per the Sun’s mandate: the scientific research being conducted there. Though she occasionally works with a freelance network of scientists and others living on the ice, Lipuma writes the bulk of the stories herself. Except this one’s nestled in a peninsula jutting from an island at the edge of Antarctica, on McMurdo, which comprises 146 buildings and around a thousand summer residents-and is by far the largest settlement on the continent.
When we first speak, over Zoom in January, she is seated in a conference room that looks like every other conference room. Until the end of April, Lipuma was the editor of The Antarctic Sun, the biggest and longest-running paper on the globe’s least-populated continent.
ALH 84001, a meteorite discovered in Allan Hills in 1984, is believed to have formed on Mars 4.5 billion years ago-around the same time Earth was born-and landed here just 13,000 years ago.
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