Four women have been selected to run the world’s most remote post office and count penguins. 🐧📮 One of them is scientist Lucy Bruzzone from London has been speaking to us about her excitement at managing the historic site of Port Lockroy in Antarctica, which is being reopened for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The team will travel 15,000km from the UK, and on arrival be faced with five months of sub-zero temperatures, almost constant daylight and no running water. “It is a tiny island, it’s about the size of a football pitch... we might even have sea ice up against the island,” Lucy tells us. They will be sharing their home with a colony of gentoo penguins, who have an intriguing past themselves - it is believed they only took up residence when the base was abandoned. The team will monitor these penguins and track the impact of tourism and climate change on breeding. The results will be fed into a 20-year data set monitored by the @britishantarcticsurvey. As the postage needs of penguins seem few and far between, the question remains, why is there a post office on a tiny island in Antarctica? “So the post office has quite a historical significance, it was set up when the UK first put up their base in this location in Antarctica, it was to keep in touch with the wider world... since then it’s been used to keep in touch with other bases on the Antarctic continent, with the Falklands... and today it’s very much used for visitors that come to the island to send messages home to their loved ones.” The post office will handle approximately 80,000 cards over the team’s stay, mainly from tourists, but it also still plays a key role in keeping various other bases in the Antarctic in contact with each other and importantly, their loved ones. Lucy says this appointment is a "dream come true" and she looks forward to using hand-written cards: "There isn't a huge amount of technological communications available, so a bit of snail mail will be a nice way to keep in touch." 🐌 Click the link in our bio to hear the full interview with Lucy. 📸 :Antarctic Heritage Trust/PAUK Antarctic Heritage Trust/PA #antarctica #postoffice