Thousands of miles from home and -75C cold: Life is tough in Antarctica even before death threats from scientists
But at South Africa's Sanae IV in Vesleskarvet scientists have faced an extra challenge - alleged death threats from a colleague.
'It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees,' said an email sent home by one of the station's staff. The alleged aggressor has now apologised to their victim, according to the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) who said they had'shown remorse'.
The department has now begun the hard task of restoring relationships in the nine-person team who must continue working together through the rest of Antarctica's harsh winter. Such tensions between colleagues add what are already extreme conditions.
Around 10,000 scientists and support staff work for 18 countries on stations around the continent, and tourists arrive in droves, but temperatures still rarely climb far above zero.
In winter, which is fast approaching, temperatures will plummet to between -10C and -30C, and can reach as low as -75C.
Antarctic expert and retired scientist Dr John Dudeney spent two consecutive winters in Antarctica early in his career, and told The Independent it takes resilience to live and work on the isolated continent.
'It's a very, very extreme experience, there's no doubt about that,' he said.
Over winter the number of staff working in Antarctica will dwindle to about 1,000 scientists and support workers, who, outnumbered by penguins 5,000 to one, must endure long stretches without any sunlight at all depending on where they are stationed. At the South Pole, there is complete darkness for several months over winter.
Dr Dudeney, whose career in Antarctic matters spanned nearly six decades, said the weather wasn't the biggest problem - even though there would be times when it would be difficult to go outside.
'There is this problem of sensory deprivation,' he said. 'Quite often, if you look out of a window all you'll see is snow driving past, and if the sun is shining or the moon is bright, then you'll just see a flat featureless snow plane.'
Preparing to start a posting - and to rejoin normal life - takes serious preparation, to ensure people are physically and mentally prepared for the particular hardships of life in Antarctica.
Teams undergo psychometric testing beforehand, and the South African DFFE said the alleged perpetrator has undergone a further psychological exam.
Dr Dudeney, who was a base commander at Farady base in 1968, said normal relations could be challenging in Antarctic teams, and he was always conscious of watching his own behaviour and having the good of the team in mind.
'The team forms or it doesn't, and it forms as a sometimes what we call a storming team, a really good team that works really well together. Sometimes it fragments and becomes more than one team that works against each other. The key is to try and make a team that works together,' he said.
Handling a difficult individual was also tricky, Dr Dudeney said.
'You don't have any sanctions at all really -if you have a difficult individual, you can sack them, but then what do you do? They've still got to be there, and they still need to pull their weight,' he said.
Antarctica is one of the most remote places to work, besides the International Space Station: the British stations are more than 8,700 miles from the UK.
The difficulties accessing Antarctica at particular times of year plus the sheer distance from most major cities mean workers stay for months at a time, and Dr Dudeney said sending in backup support in winter was still a difficult undertaking.
'You've got to know what the balance of risks is,' he said. 'If you're trying to extract somebody, for instance, in the middle of winter, then there has to be a careful assessment of the risk you're taking compared with the risk of taking no action.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Antarctic Ocean secrets hidden in layers of seafloor mud
Why would anyone brave hand-numbing cold, icy winds and rough seas - sometimes working through the night - to dig up mud from the Antarctic seabed?That is what an international team of particularly adventurous researchers did earlier this year in the remote Antarctic Peninsula, on a mission aiming to reveal centuries of scientific secrets about the Southern around the world will now share and analyse these precious mud samples to work out how human activity - including a century of industrial whaling - affected Antarctica and the rest of our research is part of a global effort to understand the relationship between the ocean and the climate. A history of ocean life Researchers used a special coring drill - a bit like a huge apple-corer - tethered to a research ship, to drill at depths of up to 500m. They collected more than 40 long cores, or tubes, of seafloor sediment from locations around the is one of the richest habitats for marine life in Antarctica, and a focal point for fishing, tourism and - before it was banned in the 1980s - industrial whale the sediment gives insight and clues to the past, "like a book of history", explained lead researcher Dr Elisenda Balleste from the University of Barcelona."What is living in the seas now, what was living in the seas in the past and evidence of our human impact" is recorded in layer upon layer of sediment over centuries, she preserving and dating those layers, and analysing what they contain, researchers can build a picture of the history of Antarctic marine life. Once on board the ship, the cores were frozen and transported to Barcelona and Dr Balleste's laboratory. From there, carefully extracted pieces of this Antarctic mud will be sent out to several academic institutions around the world. Scientists will scan and date the sediment layers, work out what microbial life they contain, measure levels of pollution and calculate how much carbon is buried in the is part of a mission - the Convex Seascape Survey - which involves universities and research institutions around the globe working together to better understand how our ocean and climate are Allen, an oceanographer from the British Antarctic Survey who has studied Antarctica's past for more than 20 years, said that cores like these were particularly valuable."Before 1950 - before there was any kind of monitoring capacity in Antarctica - sediment cores and ice cores are the only way that we can get an insight into any of the climatic or physical properties that have changed over time," she said. The DNA fingerprint from whale hunting The newly collected samples being stored for DNA analysis have to be kept at temperatures low enough to stop all biological processes. Dr Balleste took them out of the industrial-sized freezer where they are being stored to show them to us, very briefly."They're kept at minus 80 degrees to stop them degrading," she explained. These small pieces of the seabed - frozen in time at temperatures that preserve genetic material - will be used for what is known as environmental DNA is an area of science which has developed rapidly in recent years. It gives researchers the ability to extract genetic information from water, soil and even air, like a fingerprint of life left behind in the environment. Dr Carlos Preckler, from King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, is leading this part of the research and will be trying to measure how almost a century of industrial whaling in Antarctica affected the ocean and our - when it is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide - warms up our planet like a blanket. So, as the world struggles to reduce those emissions, any processes that absorb and lock significant amounts of carbon might help to rein in global warming. "We know whales have a lot of carbon in their bodies, because they are huge animals," said Dr Preckler. What he and his colleagues want to know is how much of that carbon gets buried in the seafloor - and locked away from the atmosphere - when the animals die."We can measure whale DNA and the carbon in the sediment," explained Dr Preckler. "So we can measure what happened before industrial whaling removed most of the whales in the [Southern] ocean," he the researchers say, will provide a measure of how much whales - simply by existing, being huge and living out their natural lives - remove carbon from our atmosphere and help in the fight against climate change.
The Independent
12-08-2025
- The Independent
The future of cancer treatment is ‘personalized' mRNA vaccines. Experts fear RFK research cuts will jeopardize that
Scientists have discovered the ability to 'personalize' cancer treatments using cutting-edge genetic technology - but experts fear that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, recent funding cuts will have 'a profound chilling effect' on U.S. progress in this area of medicine. The new mRNA vaccines are specifically engineered to address the genetic differences of each patient with stomach cancer, according to Japanese researchers in a study published Tuesday, which makes them more effective than standard treatments. But, vaccine experts told The Independent that $500 million cuts to mRNA development at Emory University, Pfizer, and other institutions in flu, Covid and infectious disease vaccines could be devastating to progress in the U.S. 'Secretary Kennedy's decision to cancel $500 million in contracts and spread lies about the safety and protection offered by mRNA vaccines will have a profound chilling effect on innovative medical research,' Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told The Independent in an email. 'mRNA vaccines hold tremendous promise to not only protect us from some of the worst infections, but also from devastating diseases like cancer,' she added. 'Rather than look forward at the promise of life-saving cures, the secretary would prefer that we look backwards towards the dark ages when these diseases ravaged us.' mRNA vaccines work differently from traditional vaccines, which inject a weakened virus into the body to trigger an immune response. Instead, mRNA vaccines teach the body's cells to make small and harmless pieces of virus that trigger the same response. The only mRNA vaccines currently available are Covid vaccines, but cancer vaccines work by getting the body to attack the disease. The new vaccines, described in the Japanese study, harness this technology and advance it by targeting unique spots on tumors. Last week, Kennedy said he would wind down some mRNA vaccine development, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services was 'shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.' Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, has spread misinformation that mRNA Covid vaccines are deadly and that vaccines 'poisoned' American children, despite decades of public research and countless government assessments that have deemed them safe. HHS's mRNA cuts have not impacted cancer vaccine research, which is underway at the Texas-based Baylor College of Medicine and other medical institutions, Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and pediatrician at the school, said. Baylor had announced it was testing the effectiveness of personalized mRNA vaccines in 2023. But, funding cuts and denouncements of the tech can affect the field more broadly. 'Therefore it's important that the federal government and the Department of Health and Human Services reverse their position on mRNA vaccines and throw their support behind this technology,' Hotez said. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Independent that mRNA research in the fight against cancer is 'critical.' 'It's tragic that we have wrapped this up into politics, which will only hurt our ability to move forward,' he said. HHS told The Independent said that recent $500m cuts to Covid, flu and infectious disease mRNA vaccines would not impact other medical research in the area. 'Technologies that were funded during the emergency phase but failed to meet current scientific standards will be phased out in favor of evidence-based, ethically grounded solutions – like whole-virus vaccines and novel platforms. Other uses of mRNA technology within the department are not impacted by this announcement,' Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said in an email. The new study, from Kindai University in Osaka, explains that the vaccine targets the unique biological signatures of each patient's tumor cells. 'NeoAgs, derived from individual genetic alterations in each cancer patient, serve as unique immunological targets on tumor cells and represent the key to personalized immunotherapy,' Kindai University's Professor Kazuhiro Kakimi said in a statement. The mRNA vaccine helps the body create more cancer-attacking white blood cells and resulted in tumors shrinking or disappearing. When used with an unnamed cancer drug, it had a heightened effect on tackling the tumor, the study found. The Japanese researchers said the vaccine was particularly effective on peritoneal metastasis, the condition when stomach cancer spreads to the lining of the abdomen. It is one of the most common forms of reoccurring cancer following surgery for stomach cancer. Stomach cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in the world. The U.S. is estimated to see 30,300 new cases of stomach cancer and 10,780 deaths this year, according to the American Cancer Society. It disproportionally affects men, with more than 2,000 more deaths than women.
The Independent
12-08-2025
- The Independent
Bird-dinosaur species found with extremely ‘robust' hands
Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Get our free Health Check email Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice A new bird-like dinosaur species has been discovered with unusually large and 'robust' clawed hands, shedding more light on early adaptations that led to the evolution of birds. The dinosaur, named Shri rapax, belongs to the dinosaur group called dromaeosauridae, which includes small to medium-sized feathered carnivores considered the closest relatives of birds among dinosaurs. Researchers found the new species based on a fossil dated between 75 and 72 million years ago, likely found in the 2000s in Mongolia. However, scientists are unsure of the exact location from which the specimen was unearthed, as it was illegally poached before 2010, and later retained in private collections in Japan and England before being acquired by the French company Eldonia. 'Based on the documentation associated with the specimen, we tentatively refer it to Ukhaa Tolgod, Mongolia,' they wrote. The specimen likely came from the Djadokhta Formation in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, known for its rich fossil record, particularly of dinosaurs, which dates back to about 75 to 71 million years ago, according to scientists. 'Here, we describe an exquisitely-preserved velociraptorine dromaeosaurid from the Upper Cretaceous Djadokhta Formation of Mongolia, and refer it to the new species Shri rapax,' researchers wrote. Shri rapax was found to have peculiar vertebral and pelvic features along with powerful hands. It had a 'very stout' thumb and claws which were 'proportionally larger' than in any other dromaeosaurid, according to the study. Holotype of Shri rapax sp. nov. ( Historical Biology (2025) ) The dinosaur also had cranial adaptations hinting it supported a powerful bite. 'The most unusual feature of Shri rapax is the exceptional robustness of the hand,' scientists wrote in the study published in the journal Historical Biology. Researchers suspect the dinosaur's peculiar hands were adaptations that enabled it to target larger prey like the plant-eating dinosaur group ceratopsians. 'We suggest that frequent interactions with the ceratopsians, combined with active anti-predatory behaviour by the latter, could have promoted the evolution of more robust forearms and stockier hands among some Djadokhtan velociraptorines,' scientists wrote in the study. 'If we assume that Shri rapax shared the predatory behaviour of its close relative Velociraptor mongoliensis, the more robust proportions of its hands imply that it was better adapted to target larger and more robust prey than those usually preyed on by Velociraptor,' they wrote. The findings suggest the new species was adapted to handling vertebrate prey larger than those preferred by the other bird-like dinosaurs that roamed the prehistoric Djadokhtan site. These large prey likely also included immature individuals of armoured dinosaurs, scientists say.
