(Radio Iowa) – An exhibit that opened this month at the Sioux City Public Museum focuses on the South Pole. Museum curator Matt Anderson says “Walking in Antarctica” features the work of artist Helen Glazer who visited several research stations on the continent in 2015. “She took these different photographs of the different landscapes and whether it’s the glaciers or the different ways that the intense wind that is prevalent in Antarctica shapes rock…and then she’s made several sculptures that are either of the different glaciers that she saw or of something they call ventifacts or these rocks that are sculpted by wind and wind blown sand,” Anderson says. In addition to the photos and sculptures, Glazer’s recorded voice is part of the exhibit.

“Helen, the artist, recorded a log as she was doing her travels in Antarctica,” Anderson says, “and on each label there’s a QR code that you can scan and you can actually listen to her talking about where she was when she took that particular picture.” Anderson says the artist had access to protected areas of Antarctica that may only be entered if a person has a government permit or is guided by a skilled mountaineer. “Because in Antarctica, the wind can blow 200 miles an hour,” Anderson says. That wind makes the majority of the continent a polar desert. “It’s even drier than the Atacama Desert in Chile. They get virtually no precipitation because of the way the weather systems are in Antarctica,” Anderson says. While most of Antarctica is covered in ice, there are some valleys with exposed soil.

“It is surrounded by an ocean current that basically locks it off from the rest of the world,” Anderson says. “It gets very little precipitation. There’s so much ice because it’s been accumulating for, like, 34 million years, but they don’t get a lot of snow, oddly.”

Visitors at the Sioux City Museum will be able to navigate through what appear to be a walk over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers, into an ice cave and through a colony of nesting penguins. The exhibit will be at the museum until March 9th.