Byron Adams does his research in one of the coolest places on earth. Literally.

“The landscapes there are stunning,” Adams said. “I take hundreds of pictures each time I go and none of them really capture, for me, the essence of how beautiful they are.”

This December, the Brigham Young University biology professor will pack his bags for the 16th time and head for Antarctica to try to solve the riddle of how organisms survived the last ice age.

“Biologists have been puzzled by this for decades,” Adams said.

To address the problem, his next journey will be “to the middle of nowhere,” 370 miles closer to the South Pole, after taking flights to Los Angeles, then Sydney, Australia, and then to Christchurch in New Zealand before gathering his gear and flying to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. He’ll be setting up a camp in the Transantarctic Mountains with his research team and living on site.

There are a few theories as to how the soil ecosystems were recolonized. One of those theories is that the organisms survived on tall mountains, but Adams’s research team has found that those sites are too toxic to living things. Another theory says that volcanoes melted the ice and kept things living, but it fails to explain a lot of the organisms, and that there aren’t volcanoes throughout the Transantarctic Mountains.

There’s also the possibility that the organisms lived in a state of suspended animation during the last ice age and have come back to life after being frozen for thousands of years, but it’s a tough theory to prove. Carbon dating isn’t reliable, as a young worm that eats 20,000-year-old carbon would be carbon dated as being 20,000 years old. But although the theory has yet to be proven or disproven, the oldest samples in the lab have been reanimated by scientists after being frozen.

“If they can survive in minus 80 for 30 years, maybe they can survive for 300 years or 3,000 years,” Adams said.

Through his team’s research, they’ve discovered how sensitive the ecosystem is to climate. The majority of their work is focused in Taylor Valley, which has three closed lake basins. His core project is studying how ecosystems respond to climate-driven changes.

The vast majority of the continent is covered in a thick ice sheet. Adams does his research there when it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, which means that in Antarctica the temperature stays between 18 and 32 degrees, with a constant high wind and no setting sun.

“It looks just like Utah Valley,” Adams said.

The weather is the greatest danger and the greatest factor prohibiting them from traveling to different locations to collect observations and perform experiments.

His gear stays in a warehouse in New Zealand between trips. While he wears layers of clothing while out in the field, he’ll often strip down to a fleece jacket when he’s carrying a 35-pound pack up and down hills.

The lack of trees, birds and bugs also makes for a surreal experience.

“When the wind stops blowing, it is total, total silent,” Adams said. “No birds, no bees, no insects, no cars. There is absolutely nothing.”

But beside the absence of sounds, there’s also a scent vacuum, which doesn’t become apparent until he leaves the icy continent.

“They open the door on the airplane and there’s this gush,” Adams said. “You smell soil and flowers. It kind of blows your mind because you haven’t had any of that for weeks and weeks. For me, I can smell soil, and it just totally floods your senses.”

The scientific draw is the lack of biodiversity.

“That extreme environment allows us to answer questions you can’t answer anywhere else,” Adams said.

But even life at McMurdo Station is unlike anywhere else in the world.

“Even the janitors down there have like a Ph.D in string theory,” he said.