Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson

Celebrity News

NSF heated over scientists’ Tinder hookup in Antarctica

Fuddy-duddy bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation are fuming over the story of two scientists who hooked up at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica by using the dating app Tinder.

The NSF is worried funding might dry up if its serious scientific mission is trivialized by polar passion. But the intrepid explorer who located an arctic fox at the end of the world says the eroticism of their encounters was highly exaggerated.

“The Internet really overplayed the romanticism of all this — much to my amusement, as McMurdo is about as unromantic as it comes,” said the dashing scientist, who agreed to speak only if he remained anonymous.

He confirmed he tried the Tinder app on a lark, and was surprised to find a female researcher about a 45-minute helicopter ride away. Their first date in December ended with a hug.

“When we crossed paths for a day five or six weeks later, we both had a million season wrap-up tasks to do and, personally, I was much more interested in drinking to get over a less than enjoyable field season than I was anything else.”

Field operations in Antarctica ended with the onslaught of winter, and the two digital daters went their separate ways.

NSF investigators quickly launched an investigation to find who leaked the story and “had a lot of questions about bandwidth in the field.”

“This is all hilarious because the NSF got a free story that actually might humanize Antarctic research,” said another source. “But that is totally unacceptable because it didn’t go through the official outreach channels.”