One of the cool things about having a blog, as a newspaper reporter, is that it allows us to pass along more information to supplement the stuff we run in the paper – footnotes, as it were.

As usual, Wikipedia is a good place to start for information about Operation Deep Freeze, with lots of links to Antarctic topics, including early exploration by no less than our own Charles Wilkes and many others.

For a lot more about what it’s like to live and work in Antarctica, check out Big Dead Place. Also, Seth White has a cool collection of pictures with informative cutlines.

I already told you about the Antarctic Sun, the weekly paper published during summers at McMurdo. The South Pole has a more informal news outlet at South Pole Station, with a huge set of links to virtually anything else that’s happening related to Antarctica.

The National Science Foundation has an interesting site up about life and work at the South Pole.

The University of Wisconsin maintains a cool site about its part in the massive IceCube project under way at the South Pole. It hurts my puny unscientific brain to try to understand that stuff, but it’s amazing to think of drilling a 3,000-meter hole in the ice in one of the most remote places on earth.

There are far worse places to spend a week than Christchurch, New Zealand. Consider this my vacation recommendation, if you don’t mind spending 20+ hours in an airplane. Be sure to visit the International Antarctic Centre and see the great new facility for rescued New Zealand Little Blue penguins.

There’s much more about the tragic crash of Air New Zealand Flight TE 901, the worst disaster in New Zealand history.

And finally, for a good take on a different approach to McMurdo – by sea, aboard a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker – check out former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Judd Slivka’s journal from his 1999 trip aboard the Polar Star. (The aging ship was benched from further Antarctic duty earlier this year.)