Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  When the midwinter celebration is over and there is nothing more to look forward to but long months of darkness and cold, life turns in on itself, and the station becomes even more of a pressure cooker. ‘It’s like a colony here,’ Larry says. ‘When it’s dark out all the time and you’re in one building you get the impression that you’re in some Stanley Kubrick movie heading out towards Jupiter 9. Nothing goes unnoticed. If you do something more than twice it’s a habit.’ NASA has spotted this phenomenon and there have been many attempts to do biological and psychological studies on wintering Polies, to see how a genuine Moon base might play out, or one on Mars.21

  One thing researchers have learned is that as the winter progresses you will start to lack T3, a hormone produced in the thyroid that winterers seem to divert from the brain to the muscles. There is also evidence that your core body temperature will drop by a degree or two, even if you don’t go outside. Perhaps it’s the lack of sunlight, or disrupted sleep patterns, or the cold. Perhaps it’s a psychological effect associated with being thrown together in a small group, and unable to leave. But the symptoms seem to be real.

  Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘winter-over syndrome’. Polies call it ‘going toast’. Everybody becomes at least slightly toasty in the depth of the winter. The first sign is that you stop paying attention to the way you look or the way you smell. People get a thousand-mile stare. While talking to you, they will trail off in mid-sentence, without noticing. And if you’re toast enough, you might not notice either. You might walk into a room repeatedly, each time forgetting why you have come. You might step out of the shower wondering if you are on your way in or out. You might sit in the galley quietly crying over your plate, then leave it untouched and wander out again.

  ‘We all know we go toast,’ says Jake Speed, ‘and it’s true you can’t remember one thing from the next, what day of the week. I think the people who struggle the most are the ones who try to hang on to those normal constructs that are part of our day-to-day society. Look around you—you’re not in Kansas any more. If you try to turn it into Kansas you will not survive. Just relax, go with the groove. You wanted this winter experience, and when that last plane took off you were happy. Well, this is what it really is. So just hang in there.’

  Jake knows better than most how to do a successful winter. He says that good winterers will have a positive approach; they’ll stem poison; they’ll have a sort of peaceful resonance. Bad winterers can’t handle themselves, and so can’t handle other people. They’ll either cocoon themselves in their rooms or come out and start stirring things up.

  Polies call the bad version of the syndrome ‘burnt toast’. ‘That’s when people get really bitchy, and want to pick fights,’ says Jake. ‘It gets to the point where you can be in the galley and someone could be on the other side of the room and just their presence is so unsettling that you can’t stand it. People begin to figure out—OK, he goes to dinner at 5:30 so I’ll go at 6:15. It’s not even necessarily conscious. It just begins to work its way out.

  ‘Mid-July to mid-August is mean month. It’s OK to go up to someone then and say, “I fucking hate you” for no reason, no instigation. Instead of saying “good morning” you just tell them right what you think. All inhibitions are gone, and all the filters are off. You don’t even know you’re doing it.’

  This is also when territorial troubles can start to play out, when it really starts to matter if someone is sitting in your chair. Last winter, Larry, Jake and a friend named Jed Miller made a joke out of the mad territoriality at the station. They put a tablecloth, made out of a bed sheet, on their favourite table in the galley. In July they started drawing on it, dividing it into imagined terrains with little mountains and landscapes. Larry’s was called ‘Larryland’. Jed’s was Jedanasia. Jake’s territory was the smallest. They called it the ‘United Front of Jake Insurgence’.

  ‘He was the rebel that we were constantly trying to quell,’ says Larry. ‘If you look at him, he’s like the rebel of the station; I mean, have you seen the state of his Carhartts?’ Jake was constantly moving his plate into Jed’s territory. Jed hated this. Napkins would fly. Food would fly. ‘We had a beautiful centrepiece as well, a lit-up Christmas tree about eight inches high, when we turned it on it would glow red. That was our thing. Our table was our world.’

  But that was also about the time when the galley broke out into what became known as the ‘light wars’. ‘One guy, Chuck, would come into the galley and flick on five or six extra lights at a time,’ says Larry. ‘Some people who miss the sun like having bright lights but to others it was like vampires having garlic thrown in their faces. There would be hollering and screaming. It almost turned into a fistfight.

  ‘Chuck enjoyed doing it every day, and finally one day he was outnumbered. The people who hated the extra lights would alternate at turning them back off. Chuck turned them on, someone went out of the galley all the way down to the end of the hallway, came back down the corridor, came in another entrance and turned the lights off again. And then they’d go round the whole thing again. Lights on. Walk down the hallway, back to another entrance, lights off again. There was yelling, fists, insults, sneers. Eventually everyone had to sit down and talk about it; station emails were sent; management got involved. We ended up with alternating days with the lights higher or lower. It’s almost embarrassing to think of it outside winter.’

  ‘Everyone’s allowed a couple of toasty psychotic episodes,’ says Jake. ‘As the first glimmers of light come over the horizon, the good ones start to make up. “I’m sorry I called you an asshole . . .” The bad ones just keep going.’

  The stories of the bad ones, the ones who couldn’t hack it, are legion and legendary. One year, the AST/RO guy tried to ski the 800 miles back to McMurdo in the dark with just a few chocolate bars in his pocket. He made it about ten miles before someone noticed he was missing and brought him gently back. There are other, perhaps apocryphal tales: the man whose friends shaved his head when he was drunk—and it took him three days to notice; the winterer who took a more novel approach to escaping to McMurdo by solemnly packing his bags, bidding everyone farewell and then trying to walk there on a treadmill.

  Polar madness isn’t limited to the South Pole. In the 1950s an Australian was locked away for most of the winter after he had threatened people with a knife. In the 1960s a Soviet scientist killed a colleague with an axe because he was cheating at chess. In 1996, the cook at McMurdo had to be isolated after he attacked someone with the claw end of a hammer. In 1983 the doctor at Argentina’s Almirante Brown Station on the Peninsula hated the winter so much that his bags were packed and ready for days before the relief ship steamed in. When the incoming crew broke the news that there was no replacement available so he would have to spend another winter there, the doctor promptly burned the place down.

  The various different programmes have tried many ways to guard against the crazies. The best way, most winterers say, is to look for people with mixed motivations. If your work is your life, and something breaks down while you’re there, you could go crazy. If you’re only there for the romance and adventure, and discover how little time you can spend in the Great Outdoors during the winter, you could go crazy. Paradoxically, it also seems to help if you’re not the sort of person who needs to resolve issues right here and now. One study of French winterers showed that the ones who performed best were neither extroverts nor assertive. Everyone goes a little toasty and you’re better off letting most of it slide.

  ‘You’ve got to be able to take everything,’ Jake says. ‘The toasty psychotic episodes, the gossip—this place is the biggest gossip mill of all time—and let it all just roll out. It doesn’t matter that you can’t tie your shoes any more; it doesn’t matter that so and so said something about you; it doesn’t matter that somebody tried to stick a spoon into someone else’s ear at dinner. You've got to let it roll off your back. If you allow these things to matter too much in the winter, you’ll become co
nsumed by them. And then I can’t help you.’

  The National Science Foundation puts every potential winterer through a psychological test known in Antarctic argot as Psych Eval. The results are never published, leaving some wags to suggest that the people who come out as unbalanced are the ones eventually chosen.

  The satirical website Big Dead Place has a more cynical take on the procedure: ‘Nearly every paper worth its salt written on the selection of winter-over personnel at isolated polar bases has come to this conclusion: psychological profiling is not an accurate method of determining who will or will not successfully integrate themselves into a polar community. Questionable introverts have flourished because of their tolerance of personal idiosyncrasies, and shoe-in extroverts have been shunned at bases for their relentless neediness.

  ‘Psychological profiling can help weed out the claustrophobic, the hypochondriac, and the manic-depressant, but when July rolls around . . . one begins to wonder whether there is as much to fear at the winter base from the overt psychotic as there is from the covert neurotic, that is, the “normal” member of society. Though apparently both of these types have no trouble passing the Psych Eval, the psychotic at least provides the community with a few laughs and occasionally a little excitement to spruce up the daily grind.’22

  Other programmes such as the British one ignore the lure of psychological testing and rely on personal interviews, which seem to work at least as well. But it’s also striking how many of the people brought into the American programme already know someone down here—and the same applies to the French, British and Italian23 programmes, too. It’s not so much nepotism as the power of personal recommendation in weeding out the unstable and unsuitable. If space agencies really want to send a small number of humans out into a space colony, when choosing who to send they should probably begin by trusting their own instincts.

  Even in a good winter, there can be times when you regret the choice you’ve made. There are stories of people getting ‘Dear John’ or ‘Dear Joan’ divorce letters by email while they are incarcerated down here and can’t do a thing about it. In 2003, Robert Schwarz’s brother was sick and all he could do was send emails and make calls. ‘It’s a time when you want more than anything to be with your family.’ In one of Larry’s winters, he learned that his best friend had died. ‘One of my worst fears was realised,’ he says. ‘It challenges your idea of surrendering and giving in and not worrying. That’s the only time I’ve ever wished that I wasn’t here. You work past it, and you realise how tight the community is. But that’s when you also realise that nothing waits for you. You feel as if everything is on hold while you’re here, but life outside is passing you by.’

  The only remaining scientific block that I hadn’t yet visited was the Clean Air Sector, where researchers studied the atmosphere.24 But now I had the perfect opportunity. During the South Pole summer, every Friday was ‘slushies’ night. This consisted of a general invitation from the guys at the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO) to come over and drink cocktails that were cooled into slushies using a scoop of the cleanest snow on Earth. It was my chance both to find out about their science and to sample some of the legendary mixes.

  ARO was only about half a kilometre from the main station but it was enough of a hike that I tried to beg a skidoo ride. No chance. Skidoos were strictly banned to protect the cleanliness of the air. The only way to get there was on foot.

  The building was big, blue and blockish, set up on crisscrossing stilts over two floors, with snow-covered metal staircases running up the outside. The windows were large and oval, like elongated portholes looking over the frozen ocean. Most of them faced outwards, away from the station and the views were to die for: a glorious white emptiness of sculpted snow and shadows, delicately shaded in pastel colours by the softly slanting sunlight.

  ARO looked oddly isolated against a backdrop of bare white plateau that stretched in an arc more than a third of the way around the Pole. To keep the air here as clean as possible, this entire arc upwind of here had been designated strictly no-construction. The prevailing winds blew true; for more than 90 per cent of the time they arrived directly from that empty stretch of ice. This meant that the air sucked into the sensors on the roof of this building was the purest on Earth. It was the background into which all of our human, industrial, polluting wastes were elsewhere being poured.

  Squeezed in among all that astronomy, ARO was one of the few South Pole projects that had no interest in outer space. Instead, it was using the way the Pole stripped away outside influences to find out what we could learn about home. It was one of five global observatories run by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to measure longterm changes in the air. This was the extreme end-member of the group, the base level against which all the others could be judged. It has also been responsible for some of the longest continuous records in the world; scientists had been measuring the air here since 1957. Long records aren’t necessarily sexy. They don’t tend to throw up exciting new surprises or eureka moments. But they are good at showing up the sorts of slow but inexorable changes that really matter to our climate, the ones that we wouldn’t notice if we were only looking week to week or year to year.

  And probably the most important record here was the one for carbon dioxide. This exists perfectly naturally in the atmosphere but we have also been adding to it ever since the Industrial Revolution, by burning first coal, then oil and natural gas. And the CO2 that comes out of your car’s exhaust pipe or a power station chimney eventually finds its way here. CO2 is a survivor. It doesn’t fall out of the air easily like soot or dust, but can stay up there for a hundred years or more, spreading to the farthest corners of the globe. The graph of ARO measurements placed prominently in the entrance hall showed that, over the past few decades, carbon dioxide had been rising upwards like a rearing cobra, waiting to strike.

  ARO was built to replace the old Clean Air Facility, and had been around for only seven years. But already it had all the warm homely touches that the new station currently lacked. There were artificial flowers everywhere. One of the windows held a vase with plastic sunflowers; a fake poinsettia tied with a tartan ribbon was precariously balanced over one of the desks; and a plastic spider plant appeared to be growing out of the bathroom sink. A lopsided sign outside the bathroom read ‘Ladies’ Powder Room’. (Apparently this came originally from Old Pole, the first South Pole station—not that ladies were allowed to visit there until the 1970s.) Another sign hanging from the ceiling of the tech shop suggested that this was the ‘Mental Ward’. Beside the small wooden table that functioned as a coffee station was a metal trolley crammed with bottles of whisky and gin, Grand Marnier and rum as well as more brightly coloured and dubious looking liqueurs. There was also a blender, though here the ice came ready slushed.

  Beside the bar were bottles of soap solution and large improvised bubble wires. Blowing bubbles? In Antarctica? One of the slushies team quickly offered to show me how. Outside, the temperature was now around -40°F, which turned out to be perfect. You had to blow quickly or the liquid froze on the wire. But when you succeeded in making giant bubbles, you watched in wonder as they frosted over and shattered in the air, leaving frozen fragments to fly around your head. The pieces looked like plastic but if you tried to catch one, it broke up into fine wafers in your glove.

  Back inside, my companion handed me some small sample bottles and bundled me on to the roof. Up aloft there was a stiff breeze, which made the cold almost unbearable—even for just a few minutes. But I drew my parka hood close, and followed my companion’s instructions for collecting the perfect South Pole souvenirs. I held out my genii sample bottles to the wind and captured, and sealed in, magical whiffs of the cleanest air on Earth.

  Downstairs, the party was now motoring. Someone had brought in a bucket full of snow and the room was full of Polies, with cocktails already in hand. I had decided not to be daring. Larry Rickard warned me days ago about the power,
and pain, of high-altitude slushies hangovers. But after a couple of gin and tonics it began to seem churlish not to join in. My favourite was the concoction mixed for me by an ex-marine (and also ex-bartender), which contained Kahlua, Baileys and vodka—and of course perfectly pristine snow. It tasted delicious, like chocolate milk. The pain the next day was everything that Larry had warned me about. But it was still worth it.

  Just as ARO was studying home rather than away, there was one other experiment at the Pole that was looking inwards, to the core of the Earth. I had heard about it, but hadn’t much hope of getting out there. It was called SPRESSO, which stood for ‘South Pole Remote Earth Science and Seismological Observatory’, and it was concerned with measuring earthquakes. Not nearby ones. There were no earthquakes at the South Pole. Instead, like ARO, this experiment was all about focusing on what was left when the messiness of the outside world had been left behind. And just as ARO had to be placed where the air was cleanest, SPRESSO needed to be in the quietest zone on Earth.

  In principle, the South Pole was already a good spot for this. Elsewhere in the world, cars, trains, rattling cables or something as slight as the rustling of leaves could be enough to swamp the most delicate seismic instruments. But even here there were problems. The quiet sector was initially sandwiched between the dark and clean sectors, but half a kilometre from the station was too close. The researchers could hear the distant rumbling of the snow cats so clearly that they knew when the heavy equipment operators went to lunch. So they had to move their instruments out of town. After three years of construction and drilling, SPRESSO’s delicate seismometers were now buried deep in the snow, some five miles away.