Whats the hardest thing you’ve ever done? I wrote about a hard thing that I recently did. It wansnt the hardest thing I’ve ever done, by a lot. But there were a few moments in my head where I did think ‘why the hell do i do these hard things?’. I also asked myself, slogging up the steep hill what the hardest thing I’ve ever done is. It was a difficult mental exercise for me.
How do you define a hard thing? Physically is easy to measure, but is subjective based on the person doing the lifting. Mental toughness overlaps with the physical in ways that transcend explanation. Then theres the spiritual realm. I’m not qualified to speak on this. I’ve dabbled with the spritual, but it is, I think, the most neglected muscle in my person. I suppose part of the thing I’m doing here, by writing every day is a spiritual endeavor. But I haven’t begun to find the limits of my strength here - I have a lot more work to do.
I’ve traveled to Antarctica to go on ice core drilling expeditions twice now, and I think one of my travels qualifies as one of the hardest things. Though, not to spend too much time here, but other things compete on different levels. The death of my father, my divorce, the Norseman triathlon, flight school. Nothing I couldn’t handle of course, but this one really had hard things in all the aspects of a whole person I mentioned above. I reached my limit physically on more than one day, and mentally it was potentially the most challenging thing I’ve had to endure.
The Setup
I was meant to travel to Antarctica to be an extra hand on an ice core drilling expedition, at least, that’s what I thought. Because this is a pseudonymous blog, I am going to try to not dox the program that sent me, no guarantees. Like many projects in Antarctica, this project was a multi-year endeavor which had worn on the endurance of the science field team leads, so they needed some relief. Their solution to the relief was to ask other lead scientists that maybe had been to the field but otherwise weren’t connected to the ice core drilling to help out and split the leading of a field team.
For this particular year, they chose two older scientists that had been to Antarctica and other remote field work locations, which seemed like a great choice. I was new to the group of people, and didn’t recognize one of the people on the team. Because of their affiliation with my old field team lead, I made an assumption that that person, we’ll call him ‘Indy’, was the second in charge. I assumed Indy was a postdoc, but he was actually a very young grad student with no experience. That assumption left me so unprepared for the season that I never fully recovered my forward looking stance.
The lead up to the field season was fairly uneventful. It felt like the first field season I had gone to a few years before. Not much communication before leaving, save a few emails about what to pack, and some drama about physical qualification changes. Because I didn’t know I was technically the second in charge, this didnt really concern me. My experience in the previous season, since I was a ‘core handler’ was that I was just expected to show up with a good attitude and be ready to work.
During my first deployment, I also thought the lack of team preparation was strange. And I also thought the lack of safety discussions were downright risky. WIth my military and aviation background, talking about what can go wrong is what saves people from terrible deaths. I know thats a bit grim, but thats the reality. Its also why I struggle a bit in my daily life with intrusive thoughts.
Either way, my previous Antarctic experience set me up to fail here. I knew better, but I thought this was normal. If I had known what I was in for, I maybe would have made a much different effort to gather the troops before going down, and also would have made an effort to establish the relationship between the field teams and I that would be required for a successful season. You see, having a first person in charge and a second person in charge that disagree on the fundamentals makes the event so much harder for the entire team. Especially when the team sides with the second in charge, and even more so when the team is split in loyalties. This all sounds like the set up to a pirate mutiny. Its not, not exactly, but probably as close as you can come in academia.
I realized my place on the team only after reaching the continent and meeting Indy and discovering how inexperienced he was. I also had a discussion with the season’s first half leader ‘T’. I was the assistant team lead, he said, and I would likely be the functional team lead in the second half, since ‘J’ was weeeeeellllllll a bit quirky. A bit quirky, we would later find out, meant in the early stages of dementia. Really a tragedy of a brilliant mind, but not one we should have borne 200 miles from the nearest remote Antarctic station.
I had worked with T on previous projects. He was a strong personality, but a dad of daughters, so my experience of his vibe was one that made me feel good. I figured that even if the second half of the season would be a challenge, the team would be coasting on the vibes of the first half, and be able to survive the second.
The Letdown
My first clue that something wasn’t quite right happend when the team got separated. This separation was mostly intentional, since the whole field team cant be flown to the camp all at once.
The way these remote field camps get put in, is in pieces. First, a few very experienced individuals, usually paid by the Antarctic program, get sent in with life support equipment. This is tents, and fuel, and heaters. They land, jump out of the plane, and set up the minimum requirement to be able to survive after the planes leave. Then the science team comes in waves. These are usually drillers and a couple scientists and a lot of cargo, and then the final team on the next plane. If the weather is good, this whole series of flights happens over the course of about two days.
The initial camp put-in, as we call it, can be quite dangerous. The weather in Antarctica is difficult to predict, and is often quite variable. This particular camp put in set the stage for what was to come. After the put in team landed ( I was not on this team ), the weather degraded quickly and violently. They were able to set up a small camp, and there was one small, though scary, frost bite injury. The weather didn’t really get better for six weeks.
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