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Scott Base conservators - Source: ONE News -
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The New Zealand team at Antarctica's Scott Base is down to just 14 hardy souls preparing for winter on the frozen continent.
Among them are four conservators preserving hundreds of historical artefacts that will be put back in the Ross Island huts next summer.
"You're always thinking about what they used them for, where they came from, the stories around them," says Nicola Dunn, Antarctic Heritage Trust Conservator.
Dunn will spend the next six months working to restore objects, such as kettles, found mainly from Scott's Hut.
But then there are the more unusual, like a bike.
It belonged to Griffith Taylor, the chief geologist on Scott's second expedition, and would prove a spectacularly unsuccessful way of getting around in Antarctic conditions.
He vowed his first bike ride in Antarctica would be his last.
"We have quite a few of the parts of the bike and we'll try to put them together again," Dunn says.
There are 1,500 artefacts to conserve over the next much colder and darker six months at Scott Base.
It's Dunn's second winter at the ice but she is not daunted to go through the experience again.
"A lot of the time it's not completely black outside&if you get a moonlit night and the light's reflecting off the snow," she says.
With so much work ahead, and a deadline fast approaching to put the pieces of history back in place, they say the time in the dark will fly by.
