The US National Science Foundation, which funds the US Antarctic program at McMurdo and elsewhere, announced the news on Twitter.

NSF-backed USAP scientists in Antarctica are over the moon! Starlink is testing a polar service that increases bandwidth and communications to support science at McMurdo Station, where a user terminal has recently been deployed.
– reported the department.

Since the base at McMurdo is the main center for climatology and geology, a fairly serious satellite link has been established here through a traditional provider. But competition for limited bandwidth is fierce. The addition of the Starlink terminal should at least partially alleviate these problems.

However, this is not quite a traditional scheme. As SpaceX stated, “In a remote location like Antarctica, this possibility is provided by the Starlink space laser network.”

Space lasers sound good, and since they provide high-speed communication between distant satellites, as long as you can keep the laser in the right direction. SpaceX is testing this on a limited basis, with the ultimate goal of allowing Starlink satellites to create a kind of cellular network that can connect places as far away as Antarctica and the mid-ocean to the Internet.