Latest news with #survival
ABC News
7 hours ago
- ABC News
German backpacker Carolina Wilga discharged after five nights in Perth hospital
German backpacker Carolina Wilga has been discharged from Perth's Fiona Stanley Hospital after spending five nights recovering from her outback ordeal. Police said on Saturday she was exhausted, dehydrated, suffering from sunburn and had an injured foot. She also endured sub-zero temperatures and was "ravaged' by mosquito bites while missing, according to police. In a social media post from hospital on Monday night, Ms Wilga said she had lost 12 kilograms in that time. The backpacker was missing for 11 nights in WA's remote outback, north of the Wheatbelt town of Beacon more than 300 kilometres north-east of Perth. After an extensive air and land search, she was found on the edge of Karroun Hill Nature Reserve in WA's remote Wheatbelt region by a local farmer. The tourist was located barefoot 36 kilometres from her van, which she abandoned after it became bogged. After she was found on Friday evening, Ms Wilga was airlifted to Perth on a police plane, where she was taken to hospital via ambulance. Ms Wilga later released a statement saying she had hit her head after she lost control of her vehicle and it rolled down a slope in the reserve. In it, she expressed her gratitude for all involved in the search and her recovery. "Especially to the police investigators, searchers, the German Consulate, the medical staff and the wonderful nurses who took care of me with so much compassion," she said. "I am simply beyond grateful to have survived." The ABC confirmed Ms Wilga left hospital on Wednesday afternoon.
ABC News
14 hours ago
- General
- ABC News
Carolina Wilga search triggers uncomfortable questions
The discovery of missing German backpacker Carolina Wilga, who survived 11 nights alone in the West Australian outback, was met with joy and relief across the country. But her remarkable story of survival has triggered an uncomfortable question among families of others who have gone missing in remote WA: Do we care more about some missing people than others?
The Guardian
18 hours ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Boy in Minnesota survives fall that sent arrow through his brain: ‘It's a miracle'
A hospital in Minnesota was left in disbelief after a nine-year-old boy survived an accidental fall that sent an arrow through his brain and nearly out the back of his skull. Abby Deterding recently told the Minneapolis news station KARE 'it's a miracle' that the freak mishap did not kill her son, Gus. 'We're just thankful, so grateful,' she said. As his parents recount it, Gus was helping his father, Dave, pack up his truck for a hunting trip in March when he slipped on the icy driveway outside their home in Alexandria, about 130 miles north-west of Minneapolis. A youth bow and arrow were among the items Gus was carrying at the time he slipped. And he fell face-first on the arrow, which penetrated his head just to the right of his nose. Gus pulled the arrow out of his head by himself and immediately went to see his mother, who was vacuuming inside, KARE reported. He evidently was not bleeding much but was panicked. 'He kept saying, 'Mom, am I dying? Am I going to leave you? I don't want to leave you yet,'' Abby Deterding recalled her son saying. She said she told Gus he would be OK and they were just going to the hospital to get some stitches. A cautious emergency room doctor had Gus flown by helicopter to Children's Minnesota hospital in Minneapolis, where staffers observed him a few hours before releasing him home. But, after getting home, Gus began vomiting, and his parents brought him back to the hospital, which took head scans of the boy. The scans contained a startling revelation, as KARE noted: the arrow had pierced through the middle of Gus's brain and came within less than an inch of exiting his skull. 'It literally took my breath away, and I felt sick to my stomach,' Abby Deterding said to the outlet about what it felt like for her to see those scans. 'I couldn't believe it.' She said she remembered thinking: 'No, that far, what?'' Adding to the confusion was the fact that Gus seemed to be fine while in a hospital bed nearby. The medical director of the Children's Minnesota's pediatric intensive care unit, Dr Ken Maslonka, reportedly said to KARE that he had 'never seen anything like this' in his 28-year career. 'He looked too normal,' Maslonka said. Maslonka told the outlet that he had created a model meant to show the trajectory of the arrow that went into Gus's head. Had he seen his model without already knowing the outcome, Maslonka said he would have assumed the injury depicted was fatal. Gus, though, was showing no ill effects from the wound a few months after it had occurred, prompting Maslonka to attribute that to either 'fortune' or 'God controlling the direction of that arrow'. Abby and Dave Deterding said it was their opinion that Gus's survival was miraculous rather than lucky. 'We know,' Dave Deterding said, 'it didn't just happen.'
ABC News
21 hours ago
- ABC News
Carolina Wilga search triggers uncomfortable questions for families of missing Indigenous men
The discovery of missing German backpacker Carolina Wilga, who survived 11 nights alone in the West Australian outback, was met with joy and relief across the country. Ms Wilga was found walking down an unsealed access road late last week by a local farmer, after an intensive police search and several days of widespread media coverage. From her hospital bed, Ms Wilga thanked authorities and the community who rallied together to find her, adding that she had only survived "thanks to this incredible outpouring of support". But this remarkable story of survival has also triggered an uncomfortable question among families of others who have gone missing in remote WA: do we care more about some missing people than others? In recent years, half a dozen young Aboriginal men have vanished in the north of the state in mysterious circumstances, in cases that have triggered a fraction of the public interest. And their families, still searching for answers, feel that a lack of attention on the cases of these missing men has made it harder to find them. Within the past three years, at least five young Aboriginal men have disappeared in regional WA, in a variety of circumstances. In October 2022, Clinton Lockyer and Wesley Lockyer disappeared just a week apart in the Pilbara region, after socialising with friends and relatives in the hours prior. Less than a month later, Wylie Oscar's vehicle was found on a remote bush track near Fitzroy Crossing, stocked with food and water. Zane Stevens was last seen near his bogged car on the coast near Broome in April 2024. And Brenton Shar vanished after a night-time walk in the coastal city of Geraldton in May 2024. The WA government has offered a $500,000 reward to help solve these long-term missing persons cases. But there have so far been no confirmed sightings of any of the men, nor remains found. Their families have been left in a type of torturous limbo that psychologists refer to as "ambiguous loss". And they feel strongly there has been less police and public attention because these missing men are Aboriginal. "It sounds cruel to say, but when an Aboriginal male goes missing, most of the public don't care," says private investigator Robyn Cottman, who is representing the families of the missing men. Clinton Lockyer's aunty, Annalee Lockyer, says the perceived indifference adds to their grief. "Of course we're all glad the backpacker is alive, but it did hurt to see all the coverage," she says. "You think, does anyone care about our boys the same way? It's not nice to feel like their lives don't even matter — it really hurts." The reasons that some missing persons cases trigger urgent searches while others fly under the radar are complex, but Ms Cottman believes racism is a factor. "I think there's racial profiling going on — it's easy to dismiss Indigenous males as 'gone walkabout' or 'gone bush', so there's no urgency trying to locate them," she says. "Then you've got a female German backpacker who's alone in the bush, all of a sudden it's critical that she's found as quickly as possible. "There just seem to be two different standards here." WA Police has rejected the suggestion that racism or neglect have affected the searches for the five missing Aboriginal men. "Missing persons, regardless of where they are reported missing, are treated as a priority for the WA Police Force," it told the ABC in a statement. "All investigations into missing persons are conducted using the same underpinning processes and procedures. Each report of a missing person is assessed and resourced appropriately based on a wide range of factors including the specific circumstances of each case and information known to officers at the time. "Not knowing what happened to a loved one is confronting and challenging for the families and friends of missing persons, and WA Police remains committed to finding answers for those families and communities." Ms Wilga's case prompted widespread media attention, with hundreds of online news articles published on her disappearance over the course of a couple of weeks. It is difficult to compare coverage of these missing persons cases, especially considering Ms Wilga's miraculous survival and the international interest given she was a German tourist visiting Australia. But while the families of Aboriginal men missing in WA have made public appeals for information about their loved ones, there have been significantly fewer headlines about these men in the years since they were last seen. Private investigator Robyn Cottman says she can understand why Ms Wilga's case attracted escalating attention. "It creates a more sensational story when it's an international person who is a female alone in the bush," she reflects. Ms Cottman also notes the public seems to engage less when there is a suspicion of drug use or criminality in the missing person's life, even if that suspicion is untrue or unrelated to their disappearance. Media coverage of Indigenous missing persons can also be complicated by cultural factors — in some cases, families request that the name and image of their loved one not be published. Ms Wilga is not the first foreign tourist to trigger a large-scale outback search and a media storm. WA Premier Roger Cook compared her disappearance to that of American man Robert Bogucki in 1999, who was found alive after six weeks in the Great Sandy Desert. The search for Mr Bogucki attracted worldwide media attention and cost Australian authorities up to $10,000 a day — and that was before his family spent $80,000 flying a specialist American unit to head into the vast desert to try to retrieve his body. But not every family has those resources, and not every missing person has a straightforward storyline. Retired Aboriginal police officer Lindsay Greatorex, who helped search for Mr Bogucki in 1999, says the local men who have gone missing deserve the same level of care and attention. "Are they getting lost, or has there been foul play? It remains a mystery with a lot of these disappearances because remains haven't been found," he told the ABC's Expanse: Nowhere Man podcast. One thing these cases do have in common is the legacy of hurt and confusion for those left behind. Each year around 35,000 people are reported missing in Australia, but only a fraction of those cases trigger a physical search. According to search and rescue expert Jim Whitehead, an average of around 10 searches begin every day around the country, with around 97 per cent of people found alive. In each case, a form called a Search Urgency Assessment is completed to determine the response required. It captures risk factors such as the person's age, mental state, access to equipment, and the weather and terrain they are facing. "Often you do have families that are upset and angry because they feel like not enough is being done to find their loved one," Dr Whitehead says. He says one of the biggest challenges for search-and-rescue operations is when the person's last known location is unclear, because it means they could be thousands of kilometres away, requiring an unrealistic search radius. "And if it's unclear if they've entered a vehicle … well, that means they might have travelled to a different part of the country," Dr Whitehead adds. Another factor that can make searches more challenging is when there's a delay in the person being reported missing, "perhaps because they have an itinerant lifestyle", Dr Whitehead says. Again, it is difficult to make direct comparisons between cases because of the lack of clarity around the timeline of initial reporting and behind-the-scenes steps taken by police. In the case of Carolina Wilga, it's not clear exactly when her friends first raised concerns with police. The first police press release came seven days after her last contact with friends in Fremantle, suggesting she was reported missing within a few days of dropping out of contact. In the cases of the Aboriginal men from northern Australia, it took between five and 10 days for the initial missing persons reports to be made. However, some family members claim they did make approaches to police earlier, but that these were not taken seriously by local officers. Dr Whitehead, who does not have specific knowledge of the West Australian cases, says delays in reporting a missing person are generally not due to a lack of care or concern. Often this can be linked to a deeply rooted distrust of police, or a reflection of the more transient lifestyle many locals live, or limited access to telecommunications in many remote areas. Dr Whitehead says another complicating factor is that Aboriginal people are more likely to go missing in remote parts of the country, where there are minimal police resources to undertake large-scale searches. "Sometimes people feel we should be doing more as police, and in some cases that's absolutely true," he says. "But … search and rescue takes up a small amount of police time compared with everything else they have to do, so it doesn't have a huge amount of resources." Recent research does point to an over-representation of Indigenous people among missing persons in Australia. Exclusive data provided to the ABC in 2019 showed Aboriginal people accounted for 17.5 per cent of unsolved missing persons cases in Western Australia, despite making up just 3 per cent of the state's population. Six years on, national figures on the rates of Indigenous missing persons cases remain patchy, with a recent Senate inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children recommending an urgent review to address this data gap by the end of 2025. That inquiry received dozens of submissions, including one from Darumbal and South Sea Islander academic Amy McQuire, Sisters Inside and the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, which summarised "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more likely to go missing, and less likely to be found". The final Senate inquiry report, published in August 2024, noted that systemic racism and discrimination, as well as disparities in media reporting, had historically hampered investigations into the whereabouts of First Nations people. As Indigenous missing persons advocate Martin Hodgson has pointed out, a legacy of distrust remains, despite improvements in practices and attitudes. "The reality is, there are people who've gone missing from remote parts of Australia and they've never even been reported to police, because of the deep distrust that remains," he told the ABC earlier this year. Dr Whitehead, who oversaw search-and-rescue operations for Queensland police for almost 20 years, acknowledges the issue. But he believes the situation has improved. "There's still a long way to go, but the increase in training on cultural sensitivity and the use of liaison officers has gone a long way," he says. "So I'm confident that most of the time, the search-and-rescue response is the same, no matter who you are." For Annalee Lockyer, and the families of the other Aboriginal men who are missing in Western Australia, there is still hope that the public can help find a resolution. "We've been trying to conduct our own searches for Clinton, but we don't have the resources," she says. "All of the support and interest to find the backpacker … I feel like our boys deserve that too."
The Independent
a day ago
- Health
- The Independent
I spent a year in Antarctica. Here's what I learned living through nine months of darkness and -112F temperatures
When Cyprien Verseux was told he'd have to undergo some training before he set out to Antarctica in 2019, he thought that sounded reasonable. There are some basics expected of everyone who's sent to do scientific investigations at one of the research stations in the remote, icy continent: a medical assessment, some basic survival skills, a psychological profile. After a dramatic 1971 incident in which the sole medical doctor at a USSR station had to cut out his own appendix, some countries made appendectomies a requirement for their 'winter-over' medical staff in Antarctica. Most others will ask that a dental X-ray is done and wisdom teeth are taken out if it looks like they could impact. That's because, once you arrive at an Antarctica research station for the winter, you can't be reached again for nine months. It's just you, a skeleton staff (most people take the three-month summer option), and perpetual darkness. That complete isolation from the rest of the world is the reason why everybody there needs basic survival skills. Generators can fail, food can spoil, people get locked out of their accommodation by accident, emergencies happen. Knowing how to cope — and to remain calm — in such situations is just common sense. Verseux knew all of that. He thought it was a good idea. What he didn't expect was what happened once the training kicked off. During a week in Italy, stationed at the side of a lake, Verseux and his team — a small group of scientists and the physician who would be traveling with them — were taken out into the middle of the lake in a boat by one of the trainers, who was from the Italian military. 'We thought it was to learn how to drive the boat,' he says, 'but then one of the trainers… grabbed the medical doctor of our crew and threw him in the water and said: 'Oh, now you're saving him.'' A few days later in the training week, Verseux says, 'we were told to go into a building, and they say: 'OK, you'll get in and then you'll react.' I say: 'To what?' 'Well, react to what you see.' And then we get inside, and we hear some screams coming from a room in the distance. And so we run, we look for the room where the scream was coming from. And then we see somebody on the ground, unconscious, with blood coming out of his arm and a chainsaw next to him.' Verseux shrugs, matter-of-factly. 'Of course, it was an actor, but a very realistic simulation.' Once the group had secured the scene and sent the person for rescue, 'we heard some other screaming, from somewhere else in the building.' The pattern continued for a number of hours: We spent half a day running from emergency to emergency.' The surprises kept on coming. Not long after that test, Verseux says, he and his team were tasked with running through a U-shaped tunnel whose walls were on fire, armed with only a blanket. And after that, he was told to scale a gymnasium, climb through a window, take a ladder up to the roof and then flick certain switches. That, he says, sounded 'simple enough' — until the room was filled with smoke so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. A lot of the exercises Verseux and his team took part in involved smoke, heat or fire, he says, because 'fire is one of the main risks in the station, and you have to prepare for that — both to be able to leave the base if there is a fire, but also to save the base if you can. Because of course, if the base burned, then you're outside, it can be -80C [-112F], and then you're in trouble.' 'Trouble' is, of course, somewhat of an understatement. These tests weren't just designed to test the crew's reactions and their ability to put theory they'd learned previously into practice, but they were also psychological tests overseen by experts who were choosing who might be best suited to lead the station. A station leader can come from any role and any profile — one year, it might be a Navy officer; another, it might be a communications specialist. Different countries have different methods for selecting their leaders, but on Verseux's joint French-Italian mission, the decision was made by overseers while the crew prepared to deploy to Antarctica, and the exact criteria for that decision-making wasn't made known to the crew. At just 27 years old and in the final weeks of his PhD, Verseux was an unlikely candidate. He was surprised as anyone else to find out that he had been selected as leader of the 13-person group just before they set out for the winter. What probably helped was his calm and measured demeanor. He methodically describes the dramatic battery of tests he went through; the experience, he says simply, was 'interesting'. Sometimes, he adds, it involved some logistical juggling, since he was rushing to finish his PhD in astrobiology at the same time. At one point, he turned up for two days' training at a military hospital, only to find a note in his hotel room that told him to make his way to the other side of the country for a week. So much for his plans to be in the lab at university. Verseux had originally only applied for the three-month summer stint, doing microbiology research related to his PhD, but he'd been selected for a year-long summer and winter-over doing glaciology instead. He had to convince his professors to allow him to defend his thesis remotely from Antarctica, by satellite connection. 'We had to stop the internet for the entire station so I would have enough bandwidth,' he says, 'and even then it was chaotic.' Somewhat unsurprisingly, the connection dropped while he was in the middle of his defense. A place that belongs to everyone and no one Although no country owns Antarctica, several nations have made territorial claims on parts of the continent. Those claims are held in check by the Antarctic Treaty System, signed in 1959 and now with 56 parties, which freezes all sovereignty disputes, bans military activity (except for military deemed necessary to help protect civilians undertaking research) and mineral mining, and reserves the region for peaceful scientific collaboration. Seven countries — Australia, New Zealand, France, Norway, the U.K., Argentina, and Chile — have formal claims, some of which overlap, particularly around the Antarctic Peninsula. (Notably, the U.K., Argentina, and Chile all claim the same swath of land.) These claims are not universally recognized, and under the treaty, no new claims can be made. Many other countries, including the United States, Russia, China, South Africa and India, maintain scientific bases on the continent without asserting ownership. The U.S. and Russia, while not claiming territory, reserve the right to do so. In practice, Antarctica operates as a rare example of international cooperation: a vast, frozen expanse governed not by national borders, but by a shared commitment to science, conservation, and diplomacy. At the remote Concordia station where Cyprien Verseux was stationed — a research facility shared between France's Polar Institute and Italy's PNRA, and one of only three based far into interior Antarctica — a maximum of 40 people usually come for the three-month summer period. Once they leave, the station has an even smaller skeleton crew of around 16 people. Verseux's crew, of course, was even smaller than that. Among the skeleton winter crew, most work individually, in two separate teams: the technical team (a plumber, a mechanic, an electrical engineer, a janitor, a cook) and the research team (a computer scientist, an astrophysicist, a glaciologist and so on.) Nine months of non-collaborative work in the pitch black in the middle of nowhere with just 12 other human beings would be a challenge for a lot of people. 'Many people hardly sleep' during the 24 hours of sunlight in the summer, he says, 'and so there's always a lot of things going on — until one day in the beginning of February. Then everybody goes away, except the people who stay for the winter-over, and from that moment, we know we'll be completely isolated because it gets colder and colder, and often it can be down to below -80 Celsius (-112 Fahrenheit). And [in that temperature] planes cannot fly, as all the soft parts will freeze and they would break when they try to land.' As the light fades day by day, there is 'a period when you have sunsets and sunrises that follow each other. And then [the sun] goes lower and lower, and then sometime in May, it goes below the horizon for last time, and then for three months you won't see it at all. Most of the time it's pitch black — except of course for the stars and the moon, which you see very, very well.' Did he never find that psychologically challenging, I ask? No, he says. As the sun began to gradually disappear from the sky and the summer team left — retracing their three-week-long journey by helicopter, then icebreaker, then plane from Tasmania in Australia, and eventually back to Europe — he simply bedded down. 'It felt like home.' Penguins and 'Polies' It was a different experience for Lauren Lipuma, an American communications specialist who summered at the much larger, U.S.-run McMurdo research base in 2021 as the sole editor of the only Antarctica-based newspaper, The Antarctic Sun. At the peak of the summer there, she says, there were just under 1,000 people at McMurdo, making it 'basically a small town'. Like Verseux — who saw a collection of striking photos of the Concordia base one day and decided 'I have to go there' — Lipuma had her interest piqued by chance. She met the man who previously held the editor's position at the Antarctic Sun at a social engagement a few years before being deployed, and was taken with the idea of visiting the continent after hearing him talk about his job. When he retired, he let her know, and she put in an application that was ultimately accepted. She set out to the base in her mid-30s, having completed training with the American team that focused on building survival skills and was decidedly less intense than the training program run by their French and Italian counterparts. Lipuma had probably the most enviable job at McMurdo, because she was tasked with accompanying scientists on their most interesting missions in order to write about them. 'I got to go out with some researchers who study Adelie penguins,' she recalls. 'They spend pretty much their whole time down there at a small field camp near a penguin colony.' She went on a two-day trip to observe the research, which was a highlight of her summer. 'Penguins build nests out of stones. And so they are actually really wily and they steal stones from each other,' she says, with a laugh. 'They'll go to the other penguin nest and steal stones and kind of walk around and do that. And then the other penguin gets mad.' Another 'very fun' field trip she went on was to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the largest ice-free area of Antarctica. There, where rock valleys without snow are surrounded by mountains and frozen lakes, there is surprisingly abundant microbial life. Lipuma accompanied a group of scientists who were looking at microbes in one of those frozen lakes among the dry valleys — and in order to get to those microbes, these researchers had to learn how to scuba-dive onsite, in the most challenging conditions imaginable. 'You can imagine like how cold the water is,' she says. 'It's covered with ice, so they have to make a big hole, drill it, and then you go down there and the divers are basically in a drysuit that keeps them warm, and there's like all sorts of cables hooked up. And I don't know if you remember the old Scooby-Doo cartoons, but that is what it looks like: a big, metal, round helmet with a big glass plate.' Lipuma watched two young women take a little boat into the middle of the lake and then dive down, while other people on their team held thick cords attached to their suits. Deep under the surface, 'they're taking soil samples, water samples, leaving certain things down there to track chemical processes and chemical reactions,' she says. You have to be 'in really good physical shape' to even attempt something like that, she adds; even simply collecting the gasoline to fuel the boats requires a lot of strength to turn the cranes in the freezing air. Lipuma's days were all very different from one another. Sometimes she'd go on an outing; sometimes she'd take time to write up her findings on the base. She reported on the lighthearted parts of being in Antarctica — the nicknames the crew had for various things ('When we would get shipments of fresh fruits and vegetables down, we'd call those 'freshies'. The people who go to the South Pole are 'Polies''); the movie screenings and holiday plays they put on for each other, like a version of the Nutcracker themed to McMurdo or a tongue-in-cheek Olympics — and the more hard-hitting science. And she loved living with 24 hours of daylight: 'It's really great because you kind of always feel safe. At least at McMurdo, there are three or two or three bars on station, or just kind of social gathering spots, and so you can go and hang out with people, and even if you want to stay out till the middle of the night, you open the door and you can walk back to your dorm. You don't have to be like: Oh, I'm walking in the dark.' Verseux's days, by contrast, were almost all the same. He would get up early in the morning and immediately eat as much bread as he could stomach, along with five eggs and any extra trimmings available, because his body burned so many calories to stay warm. Then he'd get dressed for the two to three hours he'd spend outside taking measurements, in multiple layers of clothing, socks, gloves, balaclavas, hats and masks. 'You had a mirror next to the door where you could make sure that you have no skin exposed, because if it's close to -112F in temperature and you have even a square centimeter exposed, and then there's a bit of wind, your skin can freeze within seconds,' he says. Outside in the darkness, he would emerge under 'a crazy night sky, because the atmosphere is very thin and very dry. So you see the stars like nowhere else.' Alone, he would walk 700 meters from the station and take measurements in the snow and record observations on the weather. Then he would spend some time in an outpost shelter, maintaining instruments and eating chocolate and raisins to keep his energy up. He returned to the station for meals — everyone eats lunch and dinner together, in order to keep on a proper circadian rhythm in the absence of sunlight. In the afternoons, Verseux would dedicate time to do the admin tasks expected of the station leader: making sure problems were being addressed in the right places, writing up reports, organizing equipment. Then, during their free time and their one-day weekend, the French crew members would teach their language to the Italians and vice versa. Despite the fact that they were a group of very different people, they had to work hard to foster good feeling and a positive group dynamic. Because when you're unreachable by the rest of the world and living in a tiny research station surrounded by darkness and ice, making sure you can stand the people around you isn't just a good idea; it's a survival strategy. A strange kind of addiction Lauren Lipuma says she met a few people at McMurdo who had been coming back year after year, some of them for decades. 'There are some people who joke that they can't go back to the real world anymore,' she says. 'They just don't know how to function around a non-Antarctica environment. I mean, people really, really love it.' Some of the most committed keep coming until they're in their seventies, at which point the possibility of ill health rules them out. There is clearly something addictive about the 'unplugged' nature of the continent, Lipuma says, and the way in which you can avoid the politics and the 'drama' of everywhere else. It's also 'the most beautiful scenery you can imagine,' she adds: she wasn't prepared to be so taken aback by the sight of the region. Nothing elsewhere on earth can compare. 'Even though it's quite monotonous, there is an intensity of living there which you kind of miss when you are back in a city,' says Verseux. 'You are living with people with whom you are going through very strong experiences and you have to solve problems together. And, you know, sometimes you are outside on the ice and it's very intense and you feel very alive.' It's easy to at least 'somewhat miss that intensity.' For Lipuma, however, the practical challenges of preparing to go outside each day in such unrelenting cold meant she didn't become one of the regulars. She still remembers the moment she stepped out of the small plane that brought her to McMurdo and her snot instantly froze inside her nose. It was weird and it was incredible, she says, and she'd be happy to work in an isolated region again — but she'd rather do it somewhere a little more hospitable, weather-wise. Verseux says he brought back 'an appreciation from simple things' after returning from his year in Antarctica: being outside without having to put on a thick suit; being able to call his friends and family; eating a variety of food. Three years before he set out to Antarctica, in 2016, he'd spent a year in isolation with just five other people on a remote expanse in Hawaii, as part of a NASA-funded Mars simulation. There, in a geodesic dome with a single tiny cot for privacy and powdered cheese and canned tuna for food, he began to write. 'I found writing very useful, especially when the environment doesn't change, when your memories tend to blend into each other,' he says. 'So I started writing a blog and then books, and I've kept up this habit.' Verseux's abiding memory of Antarctica is, like Lipuma's, the staggering beauty of the environment. 'It's like, the Milky Way seems painted and white and the moon is enough to light your path because it'll reflect in the snow, almost like it's glowing,' he says. 'And it looks like the snow and the stars are made of the same material — the same glowy, diamond white. It's really, really beautiful.' The beauty is otherworldly, he adds: stepping out of the prop plane that dropped him off at the station at the beginning of his year on the continent, it feels like you are 'stepping onto another planet'. And then, eventually, you return — to traffic, and news cycles, and fresh fruit. Verseux often thinks about the quiet, the clarity, and the discipline of that year. Having experienced the highs and the lows of two separate years in extreme isolation — after which he emerged into the Covid pandemic and its associated lockdowns — he says he'd happily go on a Mars mission, if given the chance. Research is ongoing throughout the multiple stations in Antarctica. A 10-year long effort to find air bubbles in ice that's been in place for two million years is the one that Lipuma says most fascinates her. If scientists are successful in finding them, it could tell us a huge amount about how the world's climate has changed over a record amount of time, and potentially how we can mitigate climate disasters in the future. Each year, a few thousand scientists continue to deploy to research stations clustered mostly around Antarctica's coasts. Of those, only around 1,000 in total remain through the unforgiving winter. And yet, many of them come back. The appeal of such a self-imposed hardship can be hard to grasp — until someone like Verseux describes the infinite silence, the Milky Way hanging bright above the glowing snow. Then it begins to make sense. After all, Antarctica is what's left when the niceties and complexities of the everyday fall away. Little wonder some people feel the pull to return to the only place left in the world untouched by politics and unreachable for most of the year, a place where every person has a purpose and every action has a consequence, a place where you can quietly live as the most extreme version of yourself.
