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Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
At Antarctica's midwinter, a look back at the frozen continent's long history of dark behavior
As Midwinter Day approaches in Antarctica – the longest and darkest day of the year – those spending the winter on the frozen continent will follow a tradition dating back more than a century to the earliest days of Antarctic exploration: They will celebrate having made it through the growing darkness and into a time when they know the Sun is on its way back. The experience of spending a winter in Antarctica can be harrowing, even when living with modern conveniences such as hot running water and heated buildings. At the beginning of the current winter season, in March 2025, global news outlets reported that workers at the South African research station, SANAE IV, were 'rocked' when one worker allegedly threatened and assaulted other members of the station's nine-person winter crew. Psychologists intervened – remotely – and order was apparently restored. The desolate and isolated environment of Antarctica can be hard on its inhabitants. As a historian of Antarctica, the events at SANAE IV represent a continuation of perceptions – and realities – that Antarctic environments can trigger deeply disturbing behavior and even drive people to madness. The very earliest examples of Antarctic literature depict the continent affecting both mind and body. In 1797, for instance, more than two decades before the continent was first sighted by Europeans, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.' It tells a tale of a ship blown by storms into an endless maze of Antarctic ice, which they escape by following an albatross. For unexplained reasons, one man killed the albatross and faced a lifetime's torment for doing so. In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published the story of 'Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,' who journeyed into the Southern Ocean. Even before arriving in Antarctica, the tale involves mutiny, cannibalism and a ship crewed by dead men. As the story ends, Pym and two others drift southward, encountering an enormous, apparently endless cataract of mist that parts before their boat, revealing a large ghostly figure. H.P. Lovecraft's 1936 story 'At the Mountains of Madness' was almost certainly based on real stories of polar exploration. In it, the men of a fictitious Antarctic expedition encounter circumstances that 'made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.' One man even experiences an unnamed 'final horror' that causes a severe mental breakdown. The 1982 John Carpenter film 'The Thing' also involves these themes, when men trapped at an Antarctic research station are being hunted by an alien that perfectly impersonates the base members it has killed. Paranoia and anxiety abound, with team members frantically radioing for help, and men imprisoned, left outside or even killed for the sake of the others. Whether to gird themselves for what may come or just as a fun tradition, the winter-over crew at the United States' South Pole Station watches this film every year after the last flight leaves before winter sets in. These stories of Antarctic 'madness' have some basis in history. A long-told anecdote in modern Antarctic circles is of a man who stabbed, perhaps fatally, a colleague over a game of chess at Russia's Vostok station in 1959. More certain were reports in 2018, when Sergey Savitsky stabbed Oleg Beloguzov at the Russian Bellingshausen research station over multiple grievances, including the one most seized upon by the media: Beloguzov's tendency to reveal the endings of books that Savitsky was reading. A criminal charge against him was dropped. In 2017, staff at South Africa's sub-Antarctic Marion Island station reported that a team member smashed up a colleague's room with an ax over a romantic relationship. Concerns over mental health in Antarctica go much further back. In the so-called 'Heroic Age' of Antarctic exploration, from about 1897 to about 1922, expedition leaders prioritized the mental health of the men on their expeditions. They knew their crews would be trapped inside with the same small group for months on end, in darkness and extreme cold. American physician Frederick Cook, who accompanied the 1898-1899 Belgica expedition, the first group known to spend the winter within the Antarctic Circle, wrote in helpless terms of being 'doomed' to the 'mercy' of natural forces, and of his worries about the 'unknowable cold and its soul-depressing effects' in the winter darkness. In his 2021 book about that expedition, writer Julian Sancton called the ship the 'Madhouse at the End of the Earth.' Cook's fears became real. Most men complained of 'general enfeeblement of strength, of insufficient heart action, of a mental lethargy, and of a universal feeling of discomfort.' 'When at all seriously afflicted,' Cook wrote, 'the men felt that they would surely die' and exhibited a 'spirit of abject hopelessness.' And in the words of Australian physicist Louis Bernacchi, a member of the 1898-1900 Southern Cross expedition, 'There is something particularly mystical and uncanny in the effect of the grey atmosphere of an Antarctic night, through whose uncertain medium the cold white landscape looms as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world.' A few years later, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which ran from 1911 to 1914, experienced several major tragedies, including two deaths during an exploring trip that left expedition leader Douglas Mawson starving and alone amid deeply crevassed terrain. The 100-mile walk to relative safety took him a month. A lesser-known set of events on that same expedition involved wireless-telegraph operator Sidney Jeffryes, who arrived in Antarctica in 1913 on a resupply ship. Cape Denison, the expedition's base, had some of the most severe environmental conditions anyone had encountered on the continent, including winds estimated at over 160 miles an hour. Jeffryes, the only man in the crew who could operate the radio telegraph, began exhibiting signs of paranoia. He transmitted messages back to Australia saying that he was the only sane man in the group and claiming the others were plotting to kill him. In Mawson's account of the expedition, he blamed the conditions, writing: '(T)here is no doubt that the continual and acute strain of sending and receiving messages under unprecedented conditions was such that he eventually had a 'nervous breakdown.'' Mawson hoped that the coming of spring and the possibility of outdoor exercise would help, but it did not. Shortly after his return to Australia in February 1914, Jeffryes was found wandering in the Australian bush and institutionalized. For many years, his role in Antarctic exploration was ignored, seeming a blot or embarrassment on the masculine ideal of Antarctic explorers. Unfortunately, the general widespread focus on Antarctica as a place that causes disturbing behavior makes it easy to gloss over larger and more systemic problems. In 2022, the United States Antarctic Program as well as the Australian Antarctic Division released reports that sexual assault and harassment are common at Antarctic bases and in more remote field camps. Scholars have generally not linked those events to the specifics of the cold, darkness and isolation, but rather to a continental culture of heroic masculinity. As humans look to live in other extreme environments, such as space, Antarctica represents not only a cooperative international scientific community but also a place where, cut off from society as a whole, human behavior changes. The celebrations of Midwinter Day honor survival in a place of wonder that is also a place of horror, where the greatest threat is not what is outside, but what is inside your mind. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Daniella McCahey, Texas Tech University Read more: Endurance captain Frank Worsley, Shackleton's gifted navigator, knew how to stay the course Women in Antarctica face assault and harassment – and a legacy of exclusion and mistreatment 200 years of exploring Antarctica – the world's coldest, most forbidding and most peaceful continent Daniella McCahey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Mint
30-05-2025
- Science
- Mint
What space, submarines and polar research teach about teamwork
If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18th after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay. At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December. Submariners on Britain's nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more. Spacecraft, polar-research stations and submarines are among a set of environments classed as isolated, confined and extreme (ICE). They put that two-day off-site retreat you're dreading into perspective. They also put very specific stresses on teams. Most obviously, there is no real escape from each other. If you storm out of an Antarctic research station, you will storm back in again fairly quickly. Privacy will always be limited: a British nuclear sub has a crew of 130 or so in a vessel whose length a sprinter would cover in under 20 seconds. Its absence is likely to be particularly obvious to women in male-dominated teams. Family members are a very long way away; any future missions to Mars would involve crews spending years away from home. These are plainly not typical team environments. You cannot tell a story that no one else knows about you, do a few trust falls—and then blast off. NASA, America's space agency, simulates the conditions of space at a facility in Houston called the Human Exploration Research Analogue (HERA), a 650-square-foot structure where crews can spend weeks at a time on mock missions. A paper by Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors reports on a 520-day simulation of a mission to Mars that was conducted in Moscow in 2011. Of a multinational crew comprising six male volunteers, one reported symptoms of depression almost all the way through. Only two crew members reported no sleep disturbances or psychological distress, which makes them the weirdest of the lot. Extreme though these situations are, they provide a magnified lens on more quotidian team problems. One example is tedium. Missions to ICE environments can be a curious combination of danger and monotony. Antarctic explorers report that it is preferable to follow someone on the ice than to lead, because at least there is something to look at. But there are ways to inject meaning into the mundane whatever the workplace. A paper by Madeleine Rauch of the University of Cambridge looks at the disconnect experienced by UN peacekeepers between the abstract ideals of their work and the humdrum reality of it. She finds that people cope better with boredom if they are able to reframe tedious tasks as steps towards the larger goal. Another magnified problem is conflict. Small things can lead to great friction among colleagues in every workplace. ('Wow, you want to see crew dynamics," reads one entry in a journal kept by an astronaut on the International Space Station, about an attempt to take a group photo. 'I thought we were going to lose a member of the crew during that one.") But defusing conflict is much more important if there is nowhere for an angry worker to cool off. Personality obviously matters here. Some of the traits that seem to predict successful team members in ICE environments include agreeableness, emotional stability and humour. Empathy also matters. In his book 'Supercommunicators", Charles Duhigg describes research conducted at NASA to test would-be astronauts for their instinctive capacity to match the emotions, energy levels and mood of an interviewer. Tactics can help mitigate conflict, too. Regular team debriefs are a constructive way to bring simmering issues to the surface, especially if crews have very limited contact with mission control. A paper on long-duration space exploration by Lauren Blackwell Landon of NASA and her co-authors suggests that debriefs can be effective hurtling away from Earth as well as on it. ICE environments plainly place very unusual demands on people. But they can teach some lessons about boredom, team composition, conflict resolution and more. And knowing that they exist might just make you feel happier about the daily commute. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Researcher "Threatened to Kill" Colleagues Trapped in Antarctic Base
Things seem to be going nightmarishly bad at an isolated scientific base in Antarctica, where a researcher has been accused of assaulting and threatening to murder colleagues. As England's The Times reports, an unnamed climate researcher at the South African National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE IV), a scientific base on Norway's Queen Maud Land region of the frozen continent, allegedly threatened the life of one of his colleagues, physically attacking one coworker and sexually assaulted another. In a pleading message shared with South Africa's Sunday Times, one of the man's coworkers begged their superiors for rescue. According to that letter, the researcher's behavior "has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing" after he "physically assaulted" and "threatened to kill" at least one of the unnamed team members with whom he'll be stranded on the base for at least ten more months. "His [behavior] has become increasingly egregious, and I am experiencing significant difficulty in feeling secure in his presence," the letter reads. "It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees." According to that same letter — the name of whose author, as with the subject, was withheld to protect their privacy — the alleged attacker has created "an environment of fear and intimidation." "I remain deeply concerned about my own safety," the author wrote, "constantly wondering if I might become the next victim." As moving as that plea is, it remains unclear when or even if a rescue mission will be deployed to SANAE IV, which is located on the top of a remote cliff and takes nearly two weeks to access. On average, the temperature stands at nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit at the base, and the winds surrounding it can shoot up to 135 miles per hour, the report notes — which makes getting there all but impossible. In a statement to the Times, South African environment minister Dion George said that he plans to speak to the SANAE IV team personally "to assess for [himself]" what's going on. According to George, a "verbal altercation between the team leader and this person" — the alleged attacker, seemingly — broke out, and that individual did eventually assault the team lead. "You can imagine what it's like, it is close quarters and people do get cabin fever," he said. "It can be very disorientating." The minister added that an initial investigation into the matter found that the person who did the assault did not have "dangerous intentions," whatever that means. Should they need help, however, George said that his counterparts in Norway and Germany have been contacted "in the event that we need to do an urgent intervention." Be that as it may, these accusations seem incredibly serious — and the minister in charge of the SANAE IV team's safety doesn't seem to be handling it with the proper gravity. More on research gone wrong: Scientist Who Gene-Hacked Human Babies Says Ethics Are "Holding Back" Scientific Progress
