McMurdo Station

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The largest settlement in Antarctica, on the volcanic rock of Hut Point Peninsula at the southern tip of Ross Island - the furthest south a ship can reach - and operated by the United States Antarctic Program. Its summer population runs to something over a thousand people and falls to a couple of hundred over the winter, which makes the point the Journey turns on: Antarctica's human population is entirely a staffing roster. Nobody is from there. Its position matters because it is the logistics gateway to the polar plateau and to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and because the fast ice of McMurdo Sound alongside it is where the Weddell seal became one of the best-studied wild mammals on Earth. It sits within the Ross Dependency, claimed by New Zealand - a claim the Antarctic Treaty neither recognises nor denies.