Imagine the charm of sifting through bills and junk mail in your mailbox and seeing the quirky script and colors of a handwritten Christmas card—now imagine you’re pulling it out from a box at one of the farthest point on Earth from any human civilization.
At the personal request of King Charles III, the Royal Mail has installed a traditional post box at the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera station, situated 1,155 miles south of the Falkland Islands.
Here, members of the BAS live and work for months on end in cold and isolation, and as winter comes to an end in the Southern Hemisphere, King Charles asked that a mailbox be brought to the station along with the usual supplies.
It was delivered by the UK’s polar research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough, and arrived in time for Christmas.
Though letter-writing has become rare in the digital age, there’s one time of the year where it hasn’t fallen out of fashion—Christmas—and that fact isn’t lost on those frigid scientists who work at Rothera, mostly on climate research.
“If you’re doing fieldwork for many months, the feeling of receiving a letter—an actual tangible, piece of paper with handwriting from friends and family—is such a lift,” said Kirsten Shaw, a station support assistant who runs the British Antarctic Territory Post Office.
“It’s a wonderful way to connect people that goes beyond what an email or text message can do.”
The box, featuring the King Charles III cypher, is one terminal node in a series of three jumps that see the mail get to and from this remote territory.
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With the other terminal in Oxford, mail is shunted back and forth with a polar vessel like the Attenborough, and with a BAS plane which lands in the Falkland island of Stanley.
Ms. Shaw then sees the mail distributed to various science bases and camps in British Antarctic territories.
It could be said that the Royal Mail ranks among the most romantic of all British institutions. Red mailboxes maintained—sometimes infrequently—by the Royal Mail can be found all over the former Commonwealth, and a letter posed therein will be taken anywhere in the Commonwealth.
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