If you are using this for a class, blog, or film club, consider these angles: Are the people at McMurdo running discovery or from society? Human Extinction:

"I find it astonishing that human beings can actually live there." – Werner Herzog. And yet, somehow, they thrive.

It was a man. He wore a heavy, leather aviator’s suit, stiff and cracked with age. Goggles covered his eyes, and a scarf was wrapped tight around his face. He moved stiffly, like a wind-up toy winding down.

The machine let out a hiss of escaping pressure, a cloud of white steam erupting from a side valve. A hatch, circular and heavy, began to wheel open with the groan of rusted iron.

Perhaps the most famous scene in Encounters at the End of the World involves a single penguin. While observing a colony, Herzog notices one bird that stops, turns away from the ocean and the colony, and begins heading toward the interior of the continent—to certain death.

He holds true to this promise. While there is a famous sequence involving a penguin, it is not a happy one. In a scene that has become iconic, Herzog follows a solitary, disoriented Adele penguin. While its peers march toward the ocean to feed, this single penguin turns away from the water and marches directly toward the interior of the continent—toward certain death in the frozen mountains miles away.

Elias pulled his goggles down and squinted at the horizon. There was no horizon, really—just a bleached-out smear where the white ice met the white sky. This was the "whiteout," the phenomenon that erased depth perception, turning the world into a two-dimensional void.