Japan is shipping home a half-century’s worth of garbage from Antarctica

Japanese researchers in Antarctica are getting serious about cleaning up the half-century's worth of garbage piled up at their base on the southernmost continent, an official said Thursday.

Building materials, cast-off snow vehicles, and fuel drums have collected at the research base since the first expedition was launched in 1956. By 1998, the garbage weighed about 500 tons (550 short tons), and research teams began chipping away at the pile to clear it.