South Africa has a tight regime for scientists wanting to “overwinter” in Antarctica. The 13-month assignment to an isolated research base on the top of a cliff edge is, as the environment ministry drily puts it, “testing”. Average annual temperatures are -16C but drop much lower during the winter darkness.
All applicants are subjected to psychometric analysis “to ensure they are able to cope with the isolation, and can work and live with others in the confined space of the bases”, said the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. “Only candidates who do not have any negative outcomes from all the background evaluations will be considered.”
But can humans ever fully prepare for long-duration remote scientific experiments? The crisis currently facing the overwintering crew at the Sanae IV station, more than 2,700 miles from Cape Town, suggests not.
Early in their stay, claims of physical assault, sexual harassment and a death threat have been made among the team of nine. Apologies have been made and psychologists from the mainland are now in “constant” contact with the team to guide them through the fallout.
The allegations might never have been noticed by the wider world had South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper not published an email sent by a researcher at Sanae IV accusing a male colleague of “creating an environment of fear and intimidation”.
A select few know what life is like on South Africa’s Antarctic research stations, which can be accessed only during summer months by an ice-breaking supply ship.
Ken Rice, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, is one of them, having overwintered at a station in the early 1990s. He went through similar psychological testing, and even had his wisdom teeth removed as a preemptive measure since there would be no practical way to do it once on the permafrost.
Rice’s trip was to the station’s previous location, Sanae III, a much smaller space buried under 20 metres (65ft) of ice that built up over the years. He spent much of his time outside, twiddling with nearby antennas and equipment used to measure the ozone and ultraviolet light. Rice spent hours filming the aurora australis, or southern lights, dancing in the sky. “The cabin fever, certainly in my case, I don’t think that was an issue,” he said.
There were disagreements, of course, “but never, ever anything that was genuinely confrontational where you thought: ‘somebody’s going to lose it’. So yeah, there were aspects that were not ideal, but we kind of got through them.”
Sanae IV, a three-module research station built on metal stilts, was completed in 1997 and is much bigger. Rice visited when it was erected. “There are very big living quarters, and I think there’s a snooker room, but there’s a couple of lounges and plenty of accommodation space.” That was the one aspect people did not realise about the station, he said: that there is space to get away from your colleagues.
The dynamics of how to keep humans living and working effectively together has been a fascination for centuries, particularly during the ages of global exploration at sea.
Antarctica is the location of perhaps the most celebrated story of teamwork under intense loneliness and stress. Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition failed its mission to make the first land crossing of the continent. Yet personal accounts suggest the crew remained shockingly united, despite enduring hundreds of days of hardship, including having to shoot and eat their canine companions. All 28 men survived.
A century later, a new frontier is driving interest in the impact of isolation: space. With years-long Mars missions looking more likely, and long-duration trips already happening on the International Space Station, scientists are once again investigating.
Several so-called “analogue” missions are under way, in which people are willingly locked away on Earth to simulate what it would feel like to travel deep into space.
Last year, a crew stepped out of a 3D-printed habitat in Texas after a 378-day simulated Mars surface mission. To add realism, artificial time delays to mimic communication lags to Earth – up to 22 minutes each way – were implemented. Nasa has not released details of the group dynamics, although the commander, Kelly Haston, said the worst they experienced were “crabby days”. A separate eight-month Mars simulation in Hawaii ended with one participant saying: “Not once did anyone use a personal insult.”
The largest-ever analogue experiment, a 520-day mission in Moscow, also appeared to have been a success, with six men emerging from their artificial Mars500 habitat looking tired and thin but happy. Nevertheless, its crew was reportedly all-male because a previous experiment had ended in a scandal when a Canadian scientist accused a male colleague of forcibly kissing her.
Accounts from research stations in Antarctica have also been seen as vital case studies – the continent has even been called “White Mars” because of its desolation – as have those from isolated communities. A 1983 US psychology study asked rural Minnesotans how they dealt with being cut off and found that just being aware of the concept of “cabin fever” helped people endure loneliness.
South Africa’s environment ministry says the situation is now calm at the Sanae IV base, where recent developments have drawn comparisons with another incident at one of the country’s Antarctic outposts – an alleged axe attack on a researcher’s laptop by a colleague in 2017.
Niel Malan, an expedition physicist who overwintered at Sanae IV in 1999, said people inevitably took time to get used to isolation and tempers could flare. “But humans adapt, and most teams work through their initial frictions and learn to work together effectively.”
The work at Sanae IV, he said, was no different from work anywhere else. “Most of it is routine and boring,” he said. “Personally, I was a member of a very successful team. We worked through our frictions without violence, and we’re still brothers.”
Ultimately, interpersonal conflict may be a shared human problem, he said, whether people are on a cliff in Antarctica or in an office in central London.
“As far as I can see it’s a story of violence in the workplace,” he added. “The only things that make it noteworthy is that it happened in an isolated place, and that the email with the complaint was leaked to the media.”
