Eight hundred and fifty miles from the South Pole, ten employees at McMurdo Station, the United Station’s main Antarctic station, decided to take a photograph with the rainbow flag to celebrate LGBT Pride, in a place it had never before been celebrated. Timing would be key so the group decided to take the photo on April 22—and not during Pride month in June—as by then there would be only two days remaining before the sun left the sky entirely, and the South Pole entered into four months of darkness, apart from moonlight.

Evan Townsend, who works as a “steward,” doing work in and around the galley came up with the original idea for the photo and his co-worker, Shawn Waldron, handled most of the planning. Townsend had wanted to take the flag picture on his own at the South Pole since it had never been done before. He was medically disqualified from taking the trip there, but he had the flag with him at McMurdo Station, and was moved by a sense of community among the other queer people there. “Why not take this photo and let people see that there’s queer representation—even at the end of the earth,” he says.

It’s a novel gesture and a fun way to celebrate Pride but it turns out there’s more to it than that.

McMurdo Station is dedicated to scientific research, focusing on a variety of disciplines including astrophysics, glaciology, geospace sciences, and earth sciences. The station operates year round but because a lot of the research is done away from the main station at sites only accessible by fixed-wing planes, helicopters, or tracked vehicles, most of the work is done during the summer, from October to the end of February. Aircrafts are unusable in the winter as most have a minimum operating temperature. Also, it’s difficult for scientists to take field samples during 24 hours of darkness, and search and rescue operations are much more difficult in the winter because of both the dark and cold. Read more via NewNowNext