I Worked in Antarctica for 5 Months. Here’s What Most Surprised Me.

• Lucy Bruzzone is one among a number of ladies who spent the final 5 months working in Antarctica.
• The crew counted penguins for monitoring functions and staffed the world’s most distant put up workplace.
• Bruzzone was stunned how a lot of her work nonetheless required a laptop computer — identical to again at dwelling.

This as-told-to essay is predicated on a dialog with Lucy Bruzzone, one among 4 ladies chosen by the UK Antarctic Heritage Belief to stay and work in Port Lockroy, Antarctica, from November 2022 to March 2023. The group’s duties included operating the world’s most distant put up workplace and museum, counting gentoo penguins for monitoring functions, coordinating ship visits to the island, and educating guests in regards to the web site’s historical past. This has been edited for size and readability.

I’ve at all times been fascinated by ice and the polar areas and I would been exploring alternatives to go to Antarctica for a few years. I’ve a level in geography and I am a sustainability schooling crew director for the College of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Management, the place I assist enterprise and political leaders to grasp their position in making constructive change for individuals and planet. I beforehand ran the Hong Kong workplace for the environmental NGO Earthwatch, the place I supported discipline analysis tasks, together with species monitoring and cultural heritage preservation.

So, the context of my every day work is local weather change, and we’re seeing growing impacts yearly. I used to be eager to grasp these wilderness areas for myself earlier than no ice stays — and to convey again to my day-to-day work a life-changing expertise that would assist me clarify extra deeply the explanations we urgently have to take motion.

I had frolicked within the Arctic earlier than however not the Antarctic. I believed it is perhaps comparable. My principal ideas had been of snow, ice, chilly, remoteness, science, journey, and hardship.

By means of my work and research, I used to be conscious of how the continent it’s affected by local weather change, with the Peninsula, the place we stayed, seeing a 3.2°C (37.76°F) temperature improve within the second half of the twentieth century, greater than 3 times the worldwide common, and the strengths of the winds over the Southern Ocean growing by 15% since 1980. On the similar time, modifications in Antarctica have an effect on our lives at dwelling, destabilizing methods we rely on for meals, water, and safety. There are implications for sea-level rise, elevated excessive climate globally, and a lack of marine species.

We frequently speak about this but it surely’s not at all times simple to think about what this implies in follow, so I hoped to realize perception into this.

The size of Antarctica was far better than I imagined. All the pieces was massive, from the icebergs and mountains to the pressure of the winds and the climate. I witnessed some big avalanches, very robust winds, and common glacier calving, the place ice chunks break off of a glacier. We as people had been actually insignificant, but we’re closely influencing change right here. I used to be amazed at this disconnect.

It was additionally far wetter than I ever anticipated. We arrived to meters of snow and this continued all through December. We then had nearly fixed rain in January. General, solely one-fifth of our days there have been with out precipitation. 

The typical temperature whereas we had been there was 2°C (35.6°F). With wind chill, we skilled temperatures far beneath -10°C (14°F), however we additionally had days of 14°C (57.2°F), so it was extra like a moist British summer season. 

Expedition groups that had visited the peninsula for years reported a few of the worst circumstances they’d ever skilled. It was additionally fascinating to see how the penguins reacted to the climate. They got here ashore when unhealthy climate was imminent; whereas for a lot of, every day life continued all through the worst storms, others took shelter behind rocks and our buildings.

There was a way of neighborhood I hadn’t anticipated. We had a symbiotic relationship with the ships, which gave us recent water, meals, laundry, showers, climate forecasts, and transportation. We acquired to know and befriend the expedition groups and ship crew. In flip, we labored arduous to share the tales of our historic web site to assist visitors get essentially the most from their visits and encourage them to maintain caring for the continent after they return dwelling.

There have been really much more similarities than variations from life at dwelling. Work was extra bodily day-to-day, however I nonetheless spent a whole lot of time working at a laptop computer for somebody in Antarctica!

We had ships visiting us nearly daily so whereas we had been distant, we really hardly ever felt distant and positively not remoted. At dwelling, I used to be used to working with world groups on worldwide tasks, however not typically getting to fulfill them. At Port Lockroy, I labored with individuals from everywhere in the world and met them every day.