Antarctica is called the uninhabited continent, but this is not strictly true. Today, about 10,000 researchers and support staff work in the summer months, before dropping to about 1,000 hardy souls through the permanent darkness of the winter. Its winter population is little larger than the village where I grew up in the English countryside, but spread over a land mass 40% larger than Europe. For the scientists and support staff that stay, their bases are small oases of heat and light. When the sea freezes over, there is no possible exit until the thaw of the spring. You don’t pick your colleagues, but you better hope that you get along with them. 

There are currently 70 bases across the continent, providing places for the scientific research of 40 countries. Most of the bases are housed along the Antarctic peninsula, which we passed on our own journey south. One of our crew had worked in one of these. Alejandro had wintered in the Argetinian airport station, on the northern peninsula facing the Weddle sea. Perhaps with an eye on retention strategies for the staff, families were invited to stay here, and there was even a school, providing the option for scientists to stay for two years. (I would love to meet someone who had part of their formative years growing up in such a place). In the depths of winters temperatures dove to as low as -57 degrees celsius. I’m not sure what that means in the context of average temperature, but the winter cannot have been a good one. Alejandro was forced to over-extend his stay by one month while they waited for good weather. And this was after waiting 7 months for his well packed cargo of clothes and books to reach him. Yet he spoke fondly of his time, and described to me the conditions in May. Through this month, with the sun circling just along the horizon, it is like a permanent sunset, shades of orange and pink bursting across the sky. 

Some of the bases are far more inhospitable than this. Directly on the South Pole, 1,300km from the nearest ocean, the Amundsen-Scott station provides home for between 50 to 200 Americans. A year here is divided into two, the sun taking a full six months to rise and set, before six months of solid night. The extremity increases by the altitude, 3,000m above the sea level. The continent is essentially an ice dome, rising up with ancient ice towards the centre. If first journeys to the pole were not challenging enough to imagine, you were also going uphill, and into altitudes where you’d feel the lack of oxygen. Across the Antarctic plateau, there are just two more stations. The Russian station Vostok, famous – or infamous – for measuring the coldest temperature known on Earth. An unimaginable -89 degrees Celsius. The other is the joint French-Italian base of Concordia. It’s considered sufficiently remote and over-worldly that the European Space Agency uses it as a proxy for Space, conducting research on the impacts of the human body there. 

Of the more benignly located stations of the coast that we’d visit, most heavily praised was the one with its own fully stocked bar. No surprise given the 23 Irish on our boat. Only before we could warm our bodies from the inside out with beers and shots, we visited a more historic outpost, Wordie House. An old British station that now stands as a museum to Antarctic life from 70 years ago.  

The wooden building remains as it was when it was vacated. Tins of food, books, and board games still sit on the shelves. The kitchen remains well provisioned with coffee, peas, fish, and pork sausages. There was even a jar of marmite to remind me of home. It may well have still been edible. The climate here is incredible for preservation. Always refrigerated the air is free of the microbes that decompose food. The bookshelves were also a very British affair, including spy novels, history books, and as a sign of desperation for reading material through long periods of isolation, transcripts of House of Commons debates. I picked up a smaller book simply entitled ‘The British’. Written by an American it promised to give an educational perspective on the character of the people and must have sat there for tongue in cheek reasons. I enjoyed its opening observation. It stated that the British should not be considered as one people, but rather the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were all separate. While the others were fiercely proud and independent, the English seemed oddly complacent with their place in the world. Decades on, questions of cultural identity within the British Isles are as alive as ever.

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Wordie House was abandoned in 1954 in favour of more spacious and better equipped premises. They moved into Faraday station. Important research on the ozone layer took place here, and in fact, still does. In the 1970s a hypothesis was developed that gases called CFCs were depleting levels of ozone in the high atmosphere, resulting in an increase in UV radiation at the Earth’s surface, and consequences of increases in skin cancer rises and crop damage. In the same media circus tha would later play out with the cigarette industry and with fossil fuels, big business hotly contested these theories. Until, in 1985, British scientists published results of abnormally low levels of ozone above Antarctica, and evidence of how they’d been steadily dropping year on year.

The hole in the ozone layer had been identified, and it was rapidly growing. Findings were quickly collaborated by satellite observation from NASA and research aircraft flying over the content. The reaction to this was quite extraordinary when contrasted with the climate change debate of the last couple of decades. Just two years after the scientific findings were published, the Montreal Protocol was signed. It required the phasing out of CFCs and introduced a multilateral fund to aid developing countries in doing the same (a huge thorn when negotiating around fossil fuels, where the financial dependence is so much greater). It is the only global Treaty that has been ratified by every country on Earth. Improvements have not happened overnight, it took a number of years for these chemicals to be phased out sufficiently and stabilisation to occur. But we are currently seeing a slow recovery of the ozone layer above Antarctica. Levels finally stabilised in the late 90s, and the hope is that the ozone hole will eventually disappear in 50 or so years’ time. It’s necessary, without ozone the planet would not be much more than a sterile rock, with life only possible in the deepest oceans. 

The British piece of equipment that made these measurements, the Dobson spectrophotometer, is still in use on this spot today, only now by Ukrainian hands. Twenty years ago the station was transferred to Ukraine, with a name change to mark the occasion. While it’s now a Vernadsky, the Ukranians knew a good thing when they found it, and they kept a key feature – the bar. 

Vernadsky was well equipped, even if it did have the feel of student dorms. Most rooms were tightly packed with a bed, desk, and shelves filled with reference books. There was a gym, complete with punch bag, to exert away all those frustrations from a long stay. And of course, when exercise wasn’t sufficient to destress, there was a place to drink. It hadn’t been through any major refurbishments during its time in Ukranian hands, so it still felt incredibly English. It was a cosy place, complete with a pool table and darts board. There had just been one particular intervention, that the drink of choice was now homemade vodka. And thanks to the location, distilled with glacier water. We clinked glasses. “Budmo”, a Ukrainian toast. It translates as ‘let us be’ or ‘we shall live forever’. And here, frozen in time, things feel like they do.