A worrying set of reports has emerged from the southern end of the world – drunken behaviour among the residents of the world’s coldest, loneliest continent have been on the rise. Such is the problem in Antarctica that the US National Science Foundation, which maintains the biggest permanent bases there, is considering making its facilities dry.
Cue cries of tragedy: no more sharing a warming nip of whisky inside your tent while a blizzard howls outside; no more watching the glorious Antarctic light bounce off the mountains with a beer, or a glass of wine, after a hard day’s trekking or researching on the ice.
Alcohol is available on many of the scientific bases clustered around various parts of the continent – even the South Pole has a small grocery store that sells beer and spirits – but visitors and residents usually know to be careful with it. Antarctica is breathtaking in its isolation and raw beauty, but it is also a place full of traps. Purposely losing your mental faculties on a continent whose environment is continually shifting around you is a potentially fatal idea.
I travelled to Antarctica for the Guardian almost two years ago, accompanying a group of scientists on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013. Our journey followed in the footsteps of the great explorer and scientist Douglas Mawson, and to say I was out of my comfort zone would be an understatement. Unlike many of my more active friends, I’m not an outdoorsy person. I don’t spend my weekends climbing mountains, hiking through muddy fields or generally trying to get cold or wet in the countryside. So I knew that Antarctica was going to be a full-on physical challenge. But the biggest and most surprising obstacles turned out to be mental.
Spend any time on Antarctica and you quickly realise this is no place for people. It is antithetical to the very idea of life. This continent is not just cold and windy but the extreme of those things. If you don’t dress appropriately, just a few minutes of exposure to the frigid, desiccated air can leave you numb and useless.
You have to stay on your toes, even when things look pleasant. On days when the wind isn’t blowing, it is too easy to forget that the pristine, endless white tundras all around you are not safe, peaceful or normal places. This inanimate environment can turn and envelop you in a moment. A blizzard can obscure the landscape, an ice field will hide weak points and crevasses, a sudden swirling wind can cut through your protective clothing and drain away your body heat.
If your vehicle runs out of fuel, or refuses to restart after it has been pulled out of a snow flurry, you’re in trouble. The nearest people might be several hundred miles away, perhaps thousands. Antarctica is not a place replete with second chances – you can’t simply ask for directions or wait for someone to wander past to get help. If you get lost, if no one else knows where you went, the chances of anyone finding you in the vast icy tundra are not high. And an ice sheet is an easy place in which to get lost – not only is everything white but one iceberg can also look deceptively like another when you’re distracted.
Mind maps get scrambled within seconds. You thought you knew which direction you were headed in half an hour ago? Get distracted by cold, hunger or tiredness, and you’re moving in the wrong direction, perhaps even back the way you came.
Distances can be difficult to judge and even time shifts in odd ways in the unchanging landscape. Driving back one day from Cape Denison, the site in Commonwealth Bay where Mawson had built his base, I remember seeing our ship on the horizon after several hours of trundling across the ice. It was a faint dot with nothing but the flat expanse of tundra between it and us. But, though we were moving quickly across the ice, the ship just never seemed to get any closer. Every time I looked, tired and cold, at the dot, it remained the same size. For hours.
All of this is exacerbated by the constant light. During the Antarctic summer, the sun never leaves the sky and it is light 24 hours a day. This can play havoc with your circadian rhythms. Without the usual cues of darkness and light, it is all too easy to stay up for hours without remembering that you need sleep. If there’s still light, it seems wrong to go to bed, particularly when there is so much to look at. At the start of our expedition, the ship’s doctor told us we had to be most careful about this aspect of the voyage. We had to stick to a routine, he insisted, and make sure we slept at appropriate times every day.
After spending more than a month at the continent, I can tell you that trying to do that is easier said than done. Instead, it’s all too easy to stay awake, without feeling tired, for 48 hours straight. That seemingly superhuman ability, though, is frowned upon by Antarctic veterans. Your mind will still race and the ubiquitous, unending light will seemingly burn away any limitations. You forget to eat, you forget to sleep, you feel invincible. But staying awake for so long will also dull your senses and slow your reactions. And this is a potentially deadly mental and physical state for a remote, hostile environment that quickly punishes mistakes.
But people do live on Antarctica, of course, and they do it for months on end. What I found kept me grounded, happy and safe on the continent were my companions on the expedition. I was never alone in my weeks on Antarctica and just being able to share the daily physical and mental challenges with friends on the ship lifted the weight of them. The stories and the down time helped us bond. Whenever we went outside or strayed far from the ship, we did so in the knowledge that if one of us got into trouble, another of us (probably someone we had shared dinner or a drink with the previous night) would come to help. You don’t need a beer or rum to help those bonds form, of course. But it does help a lot.
