PORTLAND – Sen. Susan Collins returned to Maine in the dead of winter Thursday to thaw out after a trip to Antarctica, where she and other lawmakers received an update on the latest climate change research from scientists.

The temperature hit 50 degrees in Portland on the day Collins arrived after three days of travel from the coldest place on the planet.

It was a far cry from Antarctica, where she and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Sununu of New Hampshire had to be outfitted in long underwear, wind pants and other clothing topped with down-filled parka trimmed with coyote fur before venturing out.

On the trip, Collins met with several Maine researchers including George Denton, director of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute; UMaine professor Brenda Hall, who is studying the effects of climate change on elephant seal populations; and Bowdoin College’s Mark Battle, who’s studying carbon dioxide levels in ice core samples.

Those scientists and others called on the senators to boost funding for research as well as introduce legislation to curb greenhouse gases, she said.

While there, she said she saw a colony of Adelie penguins as well as a hut used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on his Antarctic expedition from 1914 to 1917. The hut still had provisions including curried rabbit and powdered egg, Collins said.

The trip is not the first taken by Collins and McCain to promote research on climate change and the increase in heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” accumulating in the atmosphere.

The two senators visited northern Norway nearly two years ago for a briefing by scientists involved in a multiyear assessment of the impact of climate change and increased ultraviolet radiation across the Arctic region.