At Vostok Station in Antarctica, July means miserably low temperatures and almost perpetual darkness. But this winter brought Russian scientists living on the station a special treat: watermelons grown there as part of ongoing agricultural experiments.
It worked: After planting the watermelon seeds in early April and pollinating them in late May, the first fruits grew by July.
The watermelons’ “taste and aroma are not worse than” domestic ones, said Andrey Teplyakov, a geophysicist at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, which runs Vostok Station, in a translated. Researchers harvested eight fruits that were up to 5.11 inches in diameter, the heaviest of which weighed about 2.2 pounds.
“Naturally, all polar explorers were happy to remember the taste of summer. Even the observation of seedlings, growth, appearance of fruits and their increase brought positive emotions,” Teplyakov said.
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