I spent a year in Antarctica. Here’s what I learned – and what surprised me

When Cyprien Verseux was told he’d have to undergo some training before he set out to Antarctica in 2019, he thought that sounded reasonable. There are some basics expected of everyone who’s sent to do scientific investigations at one of the research stations in the remote, icy continent: a medical assessment, some basic survival skills, a psychological profile. After a dramatic 1971 incident in which the sole medical doctor at a USSR station had to cut out his own appendix, some countries made appendectomies a requirement for their “winter-over” medical staff in Antarctica. Most others will ask that a dental X-ray is done and wisdom teeth are taken out if it looks like they could impact. That’s because, once you arrive at an Antarctica research station for the winter, you can’t be reached again for nine months. It’s just you, a skeleton staff (most people take the three-month summer option), and perpetual darkness.

That complete isolation from the rest of the world is the reason why everybody there needs basic survival skills. Generators can fail, food can spoil, people get locked out of their accommodation by accident, emergencies happen. Knowing how to cope — and to remain calm — in such situations is just common sense. Verseux knew all of that. He thought it was a good idea.

What he didn’t expect was what happened once the training kicked off. During a week in Italy, stationed at the side of a lake, Verseux and his team — a small group of scientists and the physician who would be traveling with them — were taken out into the middle of the lake in a boat by one of the trainers, who was from the Italian military. “We thought it was to learn how to drive the boat,” he says, “but then one of the trainers… grabbed the medical doctor of our crew and threw him in the water and said: ‘Oh, now you’re saving him.’”

A few days later in the training week, Verseux says, “we were told to go into a building, and they say: ‘OK, you’ll get in and then you’ll react.’ I say: ‘To what?’ ‘Well, react to what you see.’ And then we get inside, and we hear some screams coming from a room in the distance. And so we run, we look for the room where the scream was coming from. And then we see somebody on the ground, unconscious, with blood coming out of his arm and a…