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McMurdo Station, located at , sits on the southern tip of Ross Island in Antarctica , on the shore of McMurdo Sound , 2,200 miles (3,500 km) due south of New Zealand . It serves as the logistics hub for half the continent, and is currently operated by Raytheon Polar Services (a subsidiary of Raytheon ). All personnel and cargo going to or coming from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station first pass through McMurdo. __TOC__ HISTORY The station owes its designation to nearby McMurdo Sound, named for Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of the H.M.S. Terror , which first charted the area in 1841 under the command of British explorer James Clark Ross . British explorer Robert Falcon Scott first established a base close to this spot (at the location of the current New Zealand base) in 1902 and built Discovery Hut. Scott's Hut still stands adjacent to the harbour at Hut Point. The United States established their first station at McMurdo in 1956 , intitially called Naval Air Facility McMurdo. CONTEMPORARY FUNCTION Today, McMurdo Station is Antarctica's largest community and a functional, modern day science station, which includes a Harbour , 3 airfields (2 seasonal), a heliport and over 100 buildings, including the Albert P. Crary Science and Engineering Center and a bowling alley with an antique Brunswick manual pinset machine. The primary focus of the work done at McMurdo Station is Science , but most of the summer residents (approximately 1,000 in the summer and fewer than 200 in the winter) are there to provide support for operations, logistics, information technology, construction, and maintenance. McMurdo Station is about 5 km away from Scott Base , the New Zealand science station, and the entire island is located within New Zealand's Ross Dependency Antarctic claim. Facilities worthy of note at the station include:
Recently there has been a large amount of criticism leveled at the base regarding its disposal of untreated refuse, its treatment of non-United States nationals, and its construction projects: in particular the McMurdo-South Pole Highway {Link without Title} . Despite this, McMurdo (nicknamed "Mac-Town" by its residents) continues to operate as the hub for American activities on the Antarctic continent. EXTERNAL LINKS
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