Russian scientists have grown real watermelons in the coldest place on our planet – at the Vostok Antarctic station. In 103 days, they managed to harvest eight watermelons!
The plant was grown in a specially created phytocomplex, which was developed at the Agrophysical Institute. The plants were planted in April, hand pollinated in May and, in July, the first watermelons were tasted.
“The results of the experiment are impressive - we managed to grow the southernmost watermelons in the harshest conditions of Antarctica, in taste and aroma no worse than domestic ones! The size of the fruits reached up to 13 cm in diameter and their weight – up to 1 kg. Naturally, all polar explorers were happy to remember the taste of summer. Even the observation of sprouting seeds, their growth and appearance of fruits and their increase brought positive emotions,” shares Andrei Teplyakov, leading geophysicist of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.
In the near future, the polar explorers expect a no less impressive harvest of cucumbers.
The experiment takes place within the framework of the 68th Russian Antarctic expedition together with scientists of the Agrophysical Research Institute and the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
‘Vostok’ is a year-round Russian station in Antarctica, which was founded in 1957. It is located almost in the very center of the continent, at a point that is dubbed “the cold pole of the planet”. In 1983, a record low temperature of -89.2°C was registered there. Even in summer, it rarely rises above -30°С.
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