Letters from Seventy-Five South

3 February

The ship left this morning.

I want to record exactly what that was like while I still find it remarkable, because everyone tells me that by August I won't. Twenty-two of us stood on the ice edge and watched it become smaller, then watched the place where it had been, then walked back in a line without much conversation. Fourteen remain. Nobody else will arrive, and none of us will leave, until the ship returns in November. That is not a figure of speech. No aircraft can reach here in winter and no ship can break in. It is simply not possible, and there is something clarifying about a constraint that absolute.

Sarah, who has done three of these, says the first week is the strangest because you keep unconsciously behaving as though you could still change your mind.

19 March

The light is going. Not dramatically — it retreats by a few minutes a day, imperceptibly, and then you notice you have not seen your own shadow in a week.

I have been helping with the balloon launches, which happen at the same hour daily regardless of anything. You fill it in a shed, walk it out through a door designed to let a balloon through and as little wind as possible, and release it. It rises, transmits temperature, pressure and humidity as it goes, and bursts somewhere around thirty kilometres up. The data joins a record that has been kept at stations like this one, without a gap, for over sixty years.

I asked what the point was, given satellites, and got a sharper answer than I expected. Satellites measure radiation and infer everything else. This measures the air itself, and satellite instruments are calibrated against records like ours. It is an unfashionable science — repetitive, generating nothing publishable in most years — and it is precisely how the hole in the ozone layer was found. Someone noticed spring values far lower than they should have been, distrusted the instrument, checked it, then checked the previous decade's records, and published in 1985. Satellites had been recording the same thing for years, programmed to discard readings that extreme as errors.

The lesson everyone here draws from that story is: keep the long record, and be suspicious of automated systems that know what to expect.

28 April

Sun down. It will not rise again until the second week of August.

It is not black — there is a long twilight around what would be midday, a band of deep blue in the north, and the moon when there is one is extraordinary, because it circles without setting and the ice returns almost all of its light. But it is dark, and the dark is structural rather than nightly. You do not wait it out. You live in it.

Two practical things I did not anticipate. The first is that there are no smells here. None. The air is too cold and too dry to carry anything, and the continent is sterile. When somebody opens a coffee tin in the kitchen it travels through the whole module and everybody comments on it. The second is the sound. The wind against the outer skin is continuous and varies in pitch, and after a few weeks you stop hearing it entirely, until it drops — and then the silence wakes you at three in the morning, absolutely reliably, every time.

21 June

Midwinter.

This is the great fixed point of the Antarctic year, observed at every station on the continent, and it is taken seriously in a way I would have found sentimental in February and do not find sentimental now. We cooked for nine hours. There was a menu, printed. People wore things that had been packed months ago for this specific evening and kept hidden. There were gifts, all of them handmade, since nothing can be bought and everyone has had six months to make something — a chess set turned out of scrap aluminium in the workshop, a book of the year's worst photographs with captions.

And there was the broadcast. Once a year a radio programme is transmitted to the Antarctic stations, carrying messages recorded by families at home. Fourteen adults sat in a room with the lights off and listened to their relatives being awkward on the radio, and almost nobody could speak afterwards, and then somebody put music on and it was fine.

Tomorrow the light begins coming back, by two minutes, and we will all know that.

11 July

A harder entry to write.

There is a thing that happens to people here, well documented, unromantically named winter-over syndrome. Sleep fragments. Concentration deteriorates — measurably, on tests, not just subjectively. People report a flattening of mood that is not quite depression and not quite anything else. There is an involuntary stillness that goes by the name of the long stare, in which somebody sits in a doorway for eleven minutes looking at nothing and is unable afterwards to say what they were thinking about, because they were not thinking about anything.

Part appears to be hormonal: thyroid function alters under prolonged cold and darkness in a repeatable pattern. Part is simply what happens to social animals confined with the same thirteen faces past the point where anyone has a new story.

Space agencies study stations like this one for exactly this reason. An eight-month transit to another planet is, psychologically, this: a small crew, a sealed volume, no resupply, no evacuation, a delay on every message home. The engineering of long-duration spaceflight is largely solved. This is the part that is not.

We manage it with structure. Fixed mealtimes. Everybody has a job on the rota. Two evenings a week are non-negotiably social. It is deliberate, slightly artificial, and it works — which is itself the finding.

9 August

The sun came back.

We knew the hour. Everybody was outside in full kit twenty minutes early, and it appeared as a distorted orange sliver on the northern horizon, sat there for about forty minutes, and went again.

Grown adults, several of them very senior scientists, made completely undignified noises.

I had been told that the return of the sun is the emotional centre of the year and I had privately filed that under things people say. It is not. Something in me that had been running quietly on reduced power for a hundred days came back on, all at once, at the sight of an object I have seen every day of my life and never once looked at properly.

2 November

Ship sighted this morning, a smudge on the ice edge, twelve hours out.

I have been trying all week to work out what I will actually say when people ask what it was like, and I have settled on this: it was the first time in my adult life that I have been unable to leave a situation, and the discovery was that almost everything I usually treat as a decision — where I am, who I am with, what I do at four o'clock on a Tuesday — had been quietly costing me something to keep deciding.

I am extremely glad to be going home. I would come back tomorrow.