Conservationists in Australia's oldest Antarctic outpost have scraped away a hundred years of snow and ice to find items, from bullets to a bowl of peas, that reveal the harsh conditions battled by early explorer Douglas Mawson and his team.
Six restorers have painstakingly moved 30 cubic meters (39 cubic yards) of ice out of a hut that was the base for critical geological and scientific surveys of the region before World War I.
"You walk into the workshop now and the smells are very, very strong," Martin Passingham, leader of the two-month restoration effort, said by satellite telephone from the site, which is frequently lashed by blizzards. "The removal of the ice has let all of that smell come out of the floor and timbers. You get a feeling of how people moved around the building and how cramped it would have been with so many of them."
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