Parker Liautaud, a 19-year-old freshman at Yale University, spent Christmas Eve at the South Pole the day before yesterday.
Eighteen days earlier, he had set off from the coast 562 kilometers east of the South Pole, dragging an 82-kilogram sled through extreme temperatures as low as minus fifty or sixty degrees Celsius to complete the journey. On this trip, Liautaud set a world record for the youngest male to hike to the South Pole, breaking the previous record of 24 days held by a Norwegian.
He had planned to walk about 18 kilometers per day, but progress in the first seven days was significantly delayed due to strong winds. The lowest temperature, reaching minus 60 degrees Celsius, didn’t just feel unbearably cold to Liautaud—he said he vividly experienced a sense of “speed”: “Even boiling water would freeze into icicles the moment it was poured out. Inside my face mask, a single breath would instantly turn to ice. My eyelids felt glued together all the time.”
Many people don’t realize that the interior of the Antarctic continent is actually a plateau. The average altitude of the regions Liautaud passed through was around 2,620 meters. Not long into the journey, he developed mild altitude sickness, experiencing headaches, difficulty breathing, and a rash.
In an age obsessed with food, many are curious about what explorers eat in Antarctica, but Liautaud said he’s completely over that kind of special food. “It was only nuts and dehydrated high-calorie food. After eating that for nearly a month, I lost 20 pounds,” Liautaud said. He needed to consume around 6,000 calories per day, but in reality, he was basically hungry all the time.
Liautaud’s trip to the South Pole wasn’t just an attention-grabbing stunt. The expedition team organized by the Yale student not only provided logistical support but also served as a research group. They had three scientific research projects, including studying the deposition rate of tritium in Antarctic ice and the radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Just like the opening science scene in the movie *The Day After Tomorrow*, he drilled into the ice sheet on the polar plain, collected samples onto the sled, and later analyzed them to determine the formation and melting rates of Antarctic ice, using firsthand data to study the impact of global warming on the Antarctic ice sheet.