The writer measures out samples from fellow crew members as part of the 2012 scientific protocol at Concordia Station
Wednesday, Aug. 29
Living in Antarctica in what I call the Worst Winter in the World can be likened to living through the ice age — surrounded by ice, in extreme temperatures, reliant on available food and warmth for survival. Living in the darkness, with various sleep difficulties, I have observed and documented changes in my own and fellow crew members’ day-night cycles over the past eight months, and I have noticed a strange change in my perception in the passing of time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, important research was performed by a Frenchman, Michel Siffre, who in studying the effects of living underground in various caves for prolonged periods discovered the biology of time. This led to greater understanding of internal body clocks and cycles, now recognized as the scientific field of human chronobiology.
Mr. Siffre, an adventurer, explorer and speleologist, chose to spend two months in 1962 living in a cave deep inside a subterranean glacier. His purpose: to investigate how this isolation affected his mind, body and perceived passage of time.
He did not take a clock with him and had no daylight to distinguish day from night. He lived in perpetual darkness, in temperatures below freezing. When he emerged after 63 days, he discovered he had lost his sense of time, falling behind by 25 days in his estimation of the date.
Unknowingly, he had mostly remained awake for 24-hour periods before sleeping. But while his mind had lost track of time, his body had kept to its own rhythm. Mr. Siffre had discovered the human body’s internal clock.
In a later cave study, based in Texas and sponsored by NASA, Mr. Siffre discovered that in his six months underground, he had adjusted to a 48-hour cycle, rather than a 24-hour cycle. His experiences drove an interest in finding ways to extend people’s sleep-wake cycles.
At Concordia Station, we track our circadian rhythms on a regular basis by measuring levels of hormones like cortisol and melatonin in urine and saliva over 24-hour periods. Crew members have also noticed a distortion in our perception of the passage of time.
During my stay here, time slowed until we hit the period of darkness. Then time over winter took on a new meaning.
At certain times, seconds have become hours and days have become months or weeks, but over all, time has passed perceptively and deceptively quickly in the darkness. I am reminded of my favorite Salvador Dalí artworks, “The Persistence of Memory” and “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” (1954), with his now-familiar melting pocket watch.
Kathy DuongMishi, my Siberian husky puppy, in December 2011.
My own symbol of passing time has been the husky. Until a change in regulation in the 1990s, huskies had a crucial role on the ice, from taking Amundsen to the South Pole to transporting goods by sled. But now dogs have been replaced by machines and their presence has been outlawed because of a theoretical risk of transmitting infections to Antarctic fauna.
It is a tragedy; I consider dogs to have been a major factor in the well-being of isolated communities in the heroic days of exploration, keeping men occupied and balanced, with puppies running freely around camps, distracting, entertaining and providing company on such expeditions.
I left my Siberian husky puppy behind in England at the beginning of January, as I embarked on this expedition. Mishi was then 4 months old, and I miss her dearly. I have received photos of her taken over the past months, and created a timeline of her development, using her physical change and growth (alongside my beard length) as a macro measure of my time spent away from home.
On a micro scale, we have watches, clocks, alarms, mealtimes, station duties and even appointments to measure the passage of time while living here on the ice. (Our time zone is East Coast China, 12 hours ahead of New York City.)
For the first few weeks after winter began and the darkness arrived, we held our own timewise. As winter progressed, we began to tire. Our routines fizzled, our minds became disoriented. Any disturbance to our delicate cycles would cause us to plummet and spiral alone in the darkness, through Alice’s rabbit hole, missing meals and breaking our routines.
Measuring cognitive performance by means of various brain games, tasks and tests, we are able to chart the decline in mental well-being. Alongside difficulties and slowness in concentration, we have suffered short-term memory difficulties.
The question remains how we can prevent and reverse any such changes. Beside mealtimes, which provide biological markers throughout the day, I have found a daily shower and exercise to aid in sleep. And so I am performing brain tests before and after periods of intensive exercise to gauge their effectiveness in offsetting psycho-physiological deconditioning during our long period of confinement. I have also “prescribed” exercise as the station’s doctor, to tire out crew members who have found themselves battling insomnia, a feature of living through the Antarctic winter.
A crew member wears EEG equipment monitoring brain activity while playing brainteaser games.
Antarctica has a reputation for providing the worst quality of sleep on Planet Earth. One strand of my own research focuses on measuring this change in the quality and quantity of sleep during the winter. During my research, and from living here, I have found sleep patterns to have changed radically, with sleep quality falling faster at the beginning of winter than a spiraling stock on the Nasdaq.
I have found an afternoon nap here to be counteractive toward my own sleep patterns.
The sleep research we do on base is relatively invasive, but necessary. It requiring a crew member to sleep “wired up” for overnight monitoring. This can itself become a reason for poor sleep quality among crew members, and so some have chosen not to participate further.
The sleep we get is further eroded by what happens during it. Over the past century, Antarctica has haunted the imaginations of any who dare to dream about it. But along with the extravagant and vivid dreams we have had here on site, probably exacerbated in part by our 3,800-meter-equivalent altitude, have come nightmares.
I measure the crew members’ oxygen saturation during the night, sometimes finding dangerously low levels below 83 percent. A healthy person at normal altitude living in New York City might have rates between 95 and 100 percent.
As I see it, taking fewer breaths per minute allows less gas exchange in the lungs, and less oxygen picked up in the blood. That is known as hypoxemia. This may be accompanied by hypercarboxemia — an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the blood, because it is removed less quickly by the lowered respiratory rate and gas exchange.
A rise in carbon dioxide levels in the blood causes increased cerebral blood flow, and a change in blood pH, which makes the blood slightly more acidic. This can affect our sleep and dreams — for better, but mostly for worse. While there are processes at play to regulate these changes and keep the body in check, at this altitude they take time.
Living in isolation, exacerbated by sensory deprivation, I have often waked in recent months, feeling exhausted like I had already lived the day ahead, having spent the night on a nerve-racking, adrenaline-fueled rocking horse adventure in a desert or jungle, surviving one of Antarctica’s many conjured nightmares.
One colleague, appearing unwell, explained to me how he had suffered an awful night’s sleep soon after the last plane had left us in isolation. He had dreamed that he had discovered a winning lottery ticket in his possession that he had brought with him to Concordia. But now, locked into the Antarctic winter, he was unable to cash it in, leaving it to expire by the time of his anticipated return at the end of the year — an Antarctic conundrum. He had awakened in a hot, anxious sweat.
Besides our individual dreams, we have, incredibly, shared certain dreams. For example, some of us dreamed at different times that the station had collapsed on one side, leaving us to live a “slanted” life, on an incline, for the rest of the winter. We also commonly experience déjà vu — perhaps because every day looks and feels much the same.
And while the Antarctic winter plays out largely in black and white, our dreams are in color. I have even awakened surprised by having dreamed about daylight during our period of darkness or having seen trees again.
Along with the sleep studies, I am measuring the changes in sociability and mood in crew members over their year spent at Concordia. People at the South Pole Station have called this month “Angry August” in past years, because of the tiredness and increased irritability among crew members. Besides our sense of time, we are hoping that the return of sunlight and color will also bring back our senses, completing our full-circle journey.
Antarctica remains a place of dreams and nightmares. You never know what monsters sleep undisturbed, hidden in the unexplored corners of your mind, waiting to be waked. Here begins one of the earth’s most serious and extreme journeys of personal discovery — what I call a psychological marathon.
Alexander Kumar
a physician and researcher at Concordia Station, writes from Antarctica, where he conducts scientific experiments for the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program.
The New York Times, 6 de septiembre de 2012
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