I want to tell you about a sweater. It's in Antarctica and it's more than a century old.

It's thick gray-green wool and when you lean in you can smell it's smoky

gamey stinky and fishy but what really struck me about this sweater was the patches.

Someone has taken really big, clumsy stitches,

patched the sweater over and over, patches on top of each other.

The sweater belonged to someone who was stranded at

Hut in Antarctica for more than a year and they had no idea if anyone was coming

to get them or if anyone even knew they were there. The story of the sweater and

the hut where this person was stranded is one of just incredible resilience and survival at the bottom of the world. I'm Jemma Tarlack and I'm a senior editor and writer at Atlas Obscura.

Today we're going to Discovery Hut.

It's a simple structure that's a relic from the early 1900s, the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.

We'll learn about how it got here and how it became the last refuge for a lost party of explorers after this. The first question I have for you is how did you end up living in Antarctica for close to two years?

So when I was little, when I was way too young to be seeing an R-rated movie,

I was obsessed with Kurt Russell,

so my mom took me to be John Carpenter's The Thing.

Twelve men have just discovered something.

For 100,000 years, it was buried in the snow and ice.

I loved it, and my takeaway from it was,

what is this place of ice and snow and darkness?

I must go there. So I became obsessed with Antarctica. Eventually one thing led to another and I got a contract to work as a cook and

baker at McMurdo station which is the largest group of people in Antarctica on the continent and it's one of three permanent American bases.

You know flying into Antarctica for the first time is just, it is such a life-altering experience,

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