This Bristol plumber has found a way to beat the credit crunch – by landing a dream job on the South Pole.

Mark Green, 47, will fly out to Antarctica next month after being given a 15-month contract with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

Mark will experience temperatures as low as -50C, use cross-country skis to commute and live in constant darkness during the "endless night" of an Antarctic winter.

But he can also expect to see icebergs, glaciers and the spectacular Southern Lights while maintaining heating and water supplies at the BAS Halley research station.

His closest neighbours at the station on the Bunt Ice Shelf, apart from 10 other scientists and support staff, will be a colony of Emperor penguins.

Father-of-one Mark will only be able to contact his family via email because of limited bandwidth, but said the job was the ''opportunity of a lifetime".

He said that despite the long separation, his wife Anna, 42, and son Jake, 18, were fully supportive of his daring decision.

Mark, of Langham Road, Knowle, said: "In my generation we never got the chance to travel and although I'm leaving my wife and son for a long time they are totally behind me.

''I heard about the chance to work in Antarctica on the radio and thought 'Wow, I have to give that a go otherwise I'll always regret it'.

''The furthest I have ever travelled in the past is to the Mediterranean on holidays to Spain, so I imagine this is going to be quite a culture shock. I can't wait."

The self-employed plumber of 31 years wanted a new challenge before he was too old and decided to apply after hearing about the BAS recruitment drive on the radio.

A total of 2,000 people applied for the 43 jobs advertised and Mark had to get through a series of gruelling interviews before being selected.

He has been taught survival techniques to deal with some of the harshest conditions on the planet, as well as training to cope with small spaces.

Some of the pipes on which he will be working on a daily basis run in tight shafts 65ft below the packed ice.

The Halley research station is 800 miles from the South Pole and is raised on stilts to cope with the two metres of snowfall in winter.

Mark will fly out to the base on November 10 via Cape Town, South Africa, and touch down on Antarctica in a ski-plane the following day – weather permitting.

He plans to fill his free time snow boarding and ice climbing in the crevasses surrounding the base, and will be taking his saxophone in the hope of forming a band.

Mark will be celebrating Christmas and New Year with his family before leaving because the holidays, falling in the middle of the six-month-long winter season, are low-key affairs.

BAS saw an unprecedented surge in applications for their tradesmen positions this year as a result of the credit crunch, global recession and job adverts in newspapers.

The 2,000 applicants for positions including chefs, carpenters and electricians was seven times more than the 193 people who applied for 42 jobs in 2008.

A staggering 451 people applied for the one position of groundworker and on average the number of applicants per post was five times higher than in 2008.

Almost 1,500 applications were submitted online and a spokeswoman for BAS said competition this year had been incredibly fierce.

She said: ''We were delighted with the response we had to our trades jobs this year.

''By having a higher number of people apply for each of the posts we were able to select the best people.

''They really are the cream of the crop."