Alexander Kumar, a physician and researcher at Concordia Station, writes from Antarctica, where he conducts scientific experiments for the European Space Agency?s human spaceflight program.
Monday, Aug. 20
On Jan. 17, 1912, Robert Falcon Scott?s team arrived at the South Pole defeated and exhausted, finding they had been beaten to it by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott wrote, ?The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected,? followed by, ?Great God, this is an awful place.?
While Amundsen or one of his sled dogs may have been the first to visit the South Pole, his team left behind only a legacy in exploration. But Scott?s team, with its British scientific leader and expedition doctor, Edward Wilson, also blazed a trail in Antarctic science ? a legacy that still burns bright today.
In fact, besides completing the Worst Journey in the World, Wilson had hauled a multitude of geological samples to what became his final resting place, never giving up to death. The final three members of the expedition team had died of starvation on their return from the South Pole, just 11 miles from the One Ton Camp supply depot and safety.
My friend Dr. Dale Mol? sent me a photo of a portrait of Wilson ? the first doctor to reach the South Pole ? that hangs in ?Club Med,? the infirmary of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, an American outpost. It remains an inspiration to all lone doctors who dare to overwinter there.
It is to me ? so much so that on March 29, to celebrate Scott?s centenary, the date of his last diary entry, I slept in a tent outside, where the temperature was minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit). The tent was basic, with open sides that allowed wind to come in. It was simply the worst night?s camping I had ever done, and a memory I will keep forever. Never again will I moan about camping in the British rain.
Scott?s team had dreamed of the South Pole ? ?the uttermost end of the world,? as Scott described it. Today, 100 years later, I sit in my spacious, comfortable biomedical laboratory conducting research for the European Space Agency with my own century?s dream: to send a manned mission to Mars, and see it return.
At Concordia, one of the world?s most remote and isolated manned outposts, our 13 crew members have been working hard, enduring these long months alone and forgoing our previous lives, rich with family and friends, also in the name of science. We have conducted a variety of experiments, including my human science research, attempting to carry the torch of science through the extreme cold and polar darkness.
Two crew members are continuing glaciology research, following the success of a Concordia project known as EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) that ran from 1996 to 2005. The project charted about 800,000 years of climate history, revealing humankind?s impact on the planet from the more than 3,000 meters (about 10,000 feet) of ice cores that were brought up for analysis. The remaining shards and pieces of broken cores brought up to the surface are kept inside a tunnel.
As a tourist in Antarctica, you could pour yourself a whiskey and have it fizz with 760,000-year-old ice if it weren?t such a scientific atrocity. More interesting to me has been finding samples correlating to the year A.D. 0, ?when Jesus walked the earth.
I spent many long hours outside helping our glaciologist, Sebastien Aubin of France, carefully excavate untouched ice far from the station and bag it for later analysis. It was almost fun working at midday in the winter darkness, sometimes under the moonlight and starry polar night sky; it is the closest you could come to sampling life on another planet. The ?great white silence,? as a British documentary film from the 1920s called it, was so still that you couldn?t even hear the old souls drifting across the plateau.
Buried deep underground, hidden in the ice not far away, is a series of ladders and tunnels that lead to a single box. You cannot touch the box or step near it. It blinks and flashes red lights silently. This box measures the minute and distant torsions in the earth?s crust, watching from afar as the world tries to blow itself up.
Before the onset of winter, I was extremely privileged not only to visit the site and box, but also to witness one of Antarctica?s most unique sights. My French guide, the resident seismologist and station leader, Erick Bondoux, turned off the lights. The ambient temperature was minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 Fahrenheit). I couldn?t even see my own breath. I set my camera up and took a photo. After some time, the most incredible sight appeared on my screen: an indigo hue produced by the filtration by the ancient ice of the sunlight from far, far above.
This year we have had the coldest temperature recorded on site in two winters ? minus 80.5 degrees Celsius (about minus 113 degrees Fahrenheit), without considering wind chill ? and the lowest atmospheric pressure ever recorded on site, at 610 hectopascals. The latter left us all feeling severely hung over from the simultaneous hypoxia, as oxygen was stolen from our breath before it reached our lungs.
Imagine the feeling of being half-submerged, half-drowned, continually short of breath, struggling with a hammering headache and wanting to vomit from the associated nausea. Besides the lowest records, we had two unusual days in which the temperature swung wildly from minus 70 degrees Celsius to minus 29 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight.
Without the efforts of Igor Petenko, our resident Russian meteorologist, all of these changes and records would have remained unknown. We would not be able to measure the human impact on all of the earth?s surface. After all, who else is going to do it around here? We are the only people living for more than 1,000 kilometers in most directions.
One of the greatest and most challenging journeys we undertook was to climb one of Antarctica?s highest towers in the winter darkness and extreme cold. American Tower, about a kilometer from Concordia Station, stands about 40 meters (130 feet) tall, with 25 levels up to its summit. On many of the levels, there are scientific instruments that require regular maintenance. With open sides and fierce winds, you need to fix yourself with a harness to a central rope to reach them. For me, standing on the top of the bottom of the world was magical, with shooting stars and satellites as our only company.
Living out of the reach of pollution, on top of a high-altitude ice cube and in the winter darkness, we have one of the clearest night skies available anywhere on earth. Up here, we can look into the Milky Way while being dazzled by the aurora australis, the southern lights.
Astroconcordia, overseen by the station astronomer, Guillaume Bouchez of France, is the headquarters for Concordia?s astronomy research initiatives, including the search for distant exoplanets that are like our own and could potentially support life. Guillaume spends a great deal of time outside, monitoring and cleaning his equipment. I spent a few hours late one night scanning the surface of the moon with him.
Living alone at this extreme, we have to be completely self-sufficient. Our plumber and resident explorer, G?rard Gu?rin of France, is responsible for keeping our water supply running and safe to drink. That may seem like a simple process: Turning ice into water simply requires the addition of heat. But heating in the coldest environment on earth can be terribly inefficient, and in a world full of landfill, it would be truly tragic and unthinkable to edge Antarctica toward the same fate.
Here we recycle our wastewater, using a gray water treatment unit built and managed by a French company, Firmus; it is similar to the system on the International Space Station. We have also a black water treatment unit and a digester, which, using a microbiological process, reduces our organic waste.
And so our team can not only survive in the world?s most extreme environment, but thrive while carrying out important scientific research during the worst winter in the world. I hope the scientific work of international overwintering stations on Antarctica continues to serve as an example to the rest of the world.
This entry is dedicated to those who, in the past century, gave their lives while working on the ice for the purpose of science and discovery. In particular, I dedicate this to the blazing legacy of science left by Dr. Wilson, my hero. It may be unpopular to say, but I believe Scott?s team was the first to reach the South Pole for the ?right? reason ? science ? which should also be the reason that humans, one day, land on Mars.
The only profit made from Antarctica should be in science. We may live in a world where $50,000 will buy a summer tourist a fly-by-night ticket to be photographed at the South Pole. But I am sure in my heart that the only way I would ever arrive at the South Pole is on my own two feet, starved in body but not in mind, dragging a sled of science behind me, repaving the trusted, century-old trail that at the turn of the last century blazed so brightly.
I would do so out of respect for others, like Wilson, who came before me, hauling to his death this same true belief in science and appreciation for the wonderful but dwindling diversity of what in the future may be found only in a textbook or on a Web site: life on Earth.
In 2014, Dr. Alexander Kumar will join the Imperial TransAntarctic Centenary Expedition as the expedition?s doctor and chief scientist. He will be responsible for conducting a scientific protocol while completing the route originally planned but not undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton on his ill-fated Endurance expedition 100 years ago.
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