Aurora Australis dances over an igloo illuminated by an LED, giving a blue tinge to the snow, during the austral winter in 2013.

Photographer: Ross Burgener / NOAA, OAR, ESRL, GMD

An emperor penguin, the largest of all penguins, stands proudly on the McMurdo Ice Shelf with Mount Erebus in the distance on January 23, 2017. Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth.

Photographer: Jack Green / National Science Foundation

The research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer heads toward McMurdo Station with the Transantarctic Mountains in the background on January 19, 2017.

Photographer: Mike Lucibella / National Science Foundation

A Commerson’s dolphin or “panda dolphin” follows the research vessel Laurence M. Gould as it travels down the Strait of Magellan on its way to Palmer Station across the Drake Passage on March 20, 2015.

Photographer: Cynthia Spence / National Science Foundation

Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill poses at the Bellingshausen Station on Antarctica’s King George Island on February 17, 2016.

Photographer: Igor Palkin / Russian Orthodox Church Press Service photo via AP

A section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with mountains poking through, viewed from a window of a NASA Operation IceBridge airplane on October 28, 2016, in flight over Antarctica. NASA’s Operation IceBridge has been studying how polar ice has evolved over the past eight years and was flying a set of 12-hour research flights over west Antarctica at the start of the melt season. Researchers have used the IceBridge data to observe that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be in a state of irreversible decline directly contributing to rising sea levels.

Photographer: Mario Tama / Getty

A chinstrap penguin stands on a rock on Robert Island, in the South Shetland Islands archipelago, Antarctica, on January 24, 2015.

Photographer: Natacha Pisarenko / AP

A penguin swims in front of an iceberg off the western Antarctic peninsula on March 4, 2016.

Photographer: Eitan Abramovich / AFP / Getty

The Milky Way shines above in the night sky near McMurdo Station on June 6, 2016. Below is the site of the NASA Near Earth Network satellite dish, known locally as the “golf ball,” which is one of three U.S. space communications networks collecting data from polar-orbiting satellites. In the distance on the right is a science project called SuperDARN (Super Dual Auroral Radar Network), which monitors the highest layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is one of several science projects that is maintained through the winter at McMurdo.

Photographer: Joshua Swanson / National Science Foundation