First off, the temperature plunges to 100 degrees below zero. And there are five months of darkness.
But now that he's out, Phil Broughton says there's never a day in his life that he does not think about Antarctica.
In this animation from our partners with the BBC, Broughton, a onetime Silicon Valley worker, talks of the colors at night at the bottom of the globe — and the adventure of bursting from a steaming sauna to run, naked around the South Pole.
His job in Antartica was as a cryogenics technician and volunteer barman, he says.
But, oh, those benefits.