For the past two decades, the micronation of Westarctica has grown in prominence—and is now using its power for something other than Antarctic domination.

A story of an Antarctic data hack.

“Antarctica, the only continent without a Michelin star, has never been a destination for fine dining.”

A report from Antartica, where the ecosystem is changing so fast scientists have no idea what will come next.

How a solitary trek across Antarctica became a singular test of character.

”In West Antarctica, scientists have discovered the engine of catastrophe.”

A visit to the American base in Antarctica, an “open-air museum of prefabricated regret.”

A man's lifelong hold on an imaginary person.

"He could never really explain it, once he got past that age where it stopped being okay to have an imaginary friend. He always knew she wasn't an imaginary friend. But he desperately tried to explain it anyway, to all the school counselors and all sorts of in-network therapists as he got older. It was simple in some senses. She was supposed to be living on his street. She was supposed to be in his kindergarten class. But all the houses were full with other families. And every little spot on that circular alphabet rug in his classroom was taken by someone else. Leona never happened."

A trip to Antarctica.

A research assistant experiences hallucinations while working in Antarctica.

"You hear a strange sound. It’s loud and insistent and returns again and again. You listen to it for a while before you realize it’s the sound of your own breathing and the moist rhythm of your heart. At night it ceases when you are no longer paying attention and the white steals into your 2 ½ x 1½ meter space in the housing unit. The room is barely larger than a coffin. Inside it, you could just as well be dead. You haven’t told Dr. Lubin. It’s just your heart falling quiet, leaving the job of keeping you alive to the white that surrounds you, infinitely greater than your tiny red. Who are you to deny it? After a while your heart starts up again, and that’s when you become aware that it had stopped."

A story of endurance in the face of unimaginably brutal conditions.

The enigmatic life and death of Bruno Zehnder, who obsessively photographed penguins in the ice fields outside of a Russian base in Antarctica.