Sitting for months now in the dark, deep freeze of the South Pole, Jamie Lloyd has been a happy guy since a cargo plane recently made a successful midwinter airdrop to America’s tiny outpost there.
Among the bundles from home parachuted to him was fresh milk to drink, fresh garlic to cook with, fiery red hair dye for his mohawk and a sultry red cocktail dress for him to sashay around in.
Lloyd, 23, a University of Chicago research assistant, is determined to not let life get too boring at the polar station, where he is one of a crew of 21 men and 7 women.
By the time the sun rises sufficiently in late October to allow a plane to land again at the station’s airstrip to extract them, they will have spent nine months at the pole. Almost all of that time will have been spent in three small buildings under a geodesic dome a few hundred feet from the actual South Pole.
The weather outside the little scientific enclave is truly frightful. In 24-hour darkness that lasts from February to October, high winds rake across the flat polar landscape, driving windchill temperatures down to minus-184 degrees Fahrenheit.
Inside the dome, in their snug, cramped quarters, the winter crew is beyond the reach of rescue should anything serious happen. No planes can land in the winter darkness, dooming anyone with a serious injury or illness, perhaps dooming all of them in the event of a calamitous fire.
The winters are so long, lonely and claustrophobic, NASA has assigned an anthropologist to study the polar winter crews. Much of what they do and endure, and who they are, resembles the kind of crew the space agency may soon put together for an extended, deep-space mission.
In such splendid isolation, most of their time is spent on formally assigned work tasks, whether for science or survival. Informally, however, at meal time and off time, they are a society in microcosm, forming social groups that define station life with friendships, feuds and even love affairs.
Ten of them are scientists, called “beakers” in Antarctic argot, pursuing mysteries, from the origins of the universe to the origins of the ozone hole and global warming.
The other 18 work at keeping the scientists and themselves alive. Called “trades” or “tradesmen,” these are mechanics, cooks and electricians, drones to the queen bee of science, keeping the station operational and everyone alive.
Lloyd recently talked about life at the station, via computer Internet from the South Pole, a couple of weeks after the June midwinter airdrop.
“It was an unbelievable experience,” he said of the airdrop, “hearing the pilot’s voice on the radio, watching lights appear on the horizon, seeing a plane come out of the darkness. It’s the first sign of civilization we have seen since early February.”
All 28 crew members bundled up and went outside to chase down 21 bundles that the C-141 jet cargo plane dropped to them during five quick, 1,000-foot passes over the station.
Too dark for a landing, the airdrop is a once-a-winter operation, the plane flying from Christchurch, New Zealand.
The airdrop replaces damaged and broken scientific gear and station machinery, but it also sends in mail, personal items and fresh food for the crew.
They worked as fast as they could, Lloyd said, to get the bundles, ranging from 300 to 800 pounds each, into the warmth of the dome “before the bananas froze.”
The precarious little self-contained colony at the bottom of the world often reduces life to its basic elements. A crack research physicist doing the work for which the station is maintained is less important in terms of survival than the workman whose only job is to cut and melt ice for the station’s water supply.
“The South Pole station is the most perfect analogue we have for working and traveling in space,” said Jeff Johnson, an East Carolina University anthropologist doing the NASA study.
The polar crews, Johnson said, also are a reasonable facsimile of a deep-space crew in terms of gender ratio and of melding together people of widely divergent educational and skill levels.
“You won’t just take astronauts and Ph.D.’s to the moon to build a spaceport,” he said. “You will need steel workers up there, too.”
NASA wants to be able to better predict from Johnson’s research what kinds of people from differing backgrounds are best suited to work well together for long periods at close quarters.
When a station chief falters
For the last four years Johnson has studied the four succeeding crews wintering at the South Pole station.
Earlier this year Johnson reviewed some of his research at a university colloquium with interested polar and social scientists. He covered data from his first two years of study, 1992, when 18 men and 4 women wintered over, and 1993, when 19 men and 9 women did so.
The crews of the polar station are tethered to the dome for its heat and sustenance much like astronauts are tethered to a spaceship’s oxygen supply.
That fact can cause authority problems for the station chief, the crew leader designated each year by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that funds and controls the station.
“How do you fire somebody at the South Pole? How would you fire somebody on a space ship on its way to Mars?” asked Johnson. “What would you do with somebody you have to live with and see every day for six more months after taking away their livelihood?”
Instead, he said, the station chief must lead largely by virtue of example and personal character.
One station chief in Johnson’s years of study was unable to do so. People in his crew lost respect for him, ignoring anything he said or ordered. Realizing he had no authority to fall back on, Johnson said the chief retreated to his quarters for most of the winter, spending time only with a girlfriend who was on the crew.
Three informal cliques formed, and their leaders took over the effective management of the station for the duration of the mission.
One of those cliques camped out in the station’s bar, taking the name “Carnivores” because of their all-male, hard-drinking, meat-and-potatoes attitude. A second, rallying in the medical building, became known as “Club Med.” The third group centered its life around the station library.
In the big picture, however, no damage was done to the winter’s mission, Johnson said. Life went on, scientific work went off without a hitch, and nothing more than egos were wounded from the experience.
The natural divide within the crew would seem to be between the “beakers” and “trades.” The scientists are grantees whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. The support staff are hired through a Colorado employment agency.
“When you live so close together and depend so much on each other, those distinctions don’t mean much,” said Dr. Hien Nguyen, who held Lloyd’s winter over job at the station in 1994. “You just become friends, equals.”
Nguyen, an astrophysicist, was at the pole with 20 men and 7 women. He was down there to operate SPIREX, the University of Chicago’s experimental infrared telescope.
SPIREX is an instrument of such complexity that no one person can adequately understand or run it. Lloyd this year runs it as Nguyen did last year, by collaboration, talking daily via the Internet with the telescope’s designers and astrophysicists back in Chicago.
The telescope sits in the “dark zone” a half-mile from the geodesic dome, in a structure housing several telescopes, safely away from the dome’s distorting artificial heat and light.
Manning SPIREX is a seven-day-a-week job, lasting up to 16 hours on some days, said Nguyen.
“I know to those who have not been down there life sounds awfully harsh,” he said. “Actually, I quite enjoyed my time there.
“For much of the time I had nothing else to preoccupy my thoughts except my work. Sometimes I worked 18 hours a day or more without interruption, which can be a wonderful opportunity for a scientist.”
Women and `normalcy’
During Nguyen’s 1994 tour of duty, the National Science Foundation for the first time named a woman as station chief.
“She was outstanding,” Nguyen said of his station chief, Janet Phillips, a mechanical engineer. “She had total respect and authority through the whole season. We were a very tight group. We had very few of the morale problems Jeff saw other years.”
Indeed, Johnson said the addition of women has dramatically improved the quality of life at the winter station.
“Bringing women in added a sense of normalcy to the group,” Johnson said.
Their presence dramatically reduced drinking, bad language (“dome mouth”) and what Johnson calls “testosterone poisoning.” That is the exaggerated, mean-spirited pranks and horseplay that he said in past all-male crews occasionally led to violent reprisals or the breakdown of group unity.
Women took the lead in organizing social conventions within the station, he said, lessening boredom and other negative behavior by organizing dinners, parties and recreational activities.
Mixing men and women, most of them otherwise unattached, in such close quarters inevitably leads to affairs of the heart. Because they often last only the duration of the mission, they are called “ice romances.”
And because of the mix of scientists and support staff, it is not so unusual for a Ph.D. to fall in love with a carpenter.
“By the end of one season , a number of romances had blossomed between female scientists and male tradesmen,” Johnson said. “At least one of them ended up in marriage after the season, and now there is a baby.”
On the other hand, when romance goes bad, it is worse than in the real world. Except for the private 5-by-8-foot sleeping cubicle each crew member is assigned to, there is no place for spurned lovers to escape to.
Johnson tells of one male at the station who fell obsessively in love with a female crew member who had no interest in him.
Pained and shamed by his one-way interest, the male went into hiding for the rest of the winter. Because the station is so small, he could do that only by venturing out of his cubicle at odd hours, doing his work when everybody else was asleep.
“If somebody is exiled at the station, either by choice or by being ostracized by the others, it has to be a temporal exile instead of a physical one,” Johnson said.
Character–and characters
Hien Nguyen doesn’t even think a South Pole winter is all that much a test of character.
“It’s no big hardship,” he said. “Hardship is living through war, or sitting in a refugee camp with no future in front of you.”
He has done both, escaping on a boat in 1981 from Vietnam when he was 17, ending up in a Hong Kong refugee camp before getting to California. Once in the United States, he learned English and quickly found a future, getting a degree from Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Princeton.
Australian Jamie Lloyd, who is younger and won’t begin work on his Ph.D. at Berkeley until next year, has seen something of the world too. He was airlifted out of Iraq, where his father was the Australian ambassador during the Gulf war.
A bit of an adventurer, Lloyd got a summer job at the pole two years ago, where he attracted the attention of University of Chicago scientists with his brightness and technical competency. They hired him and brought him to Chicago last year to train him to replace Nguyen.
Beyond being hardworking and competent, Lloyd is also a bit eccentric. That, Johnson said, can be an asset at the South Pole. Each year, he said, somebody on the crew fills the role of “court jester,” someone who can lighten the mood of a group that tends to take itself too seriously.
Lloyd might very qualify for that role. As soon as he settled into his winter stint, he decided to cause a little sensation among the crew by styling his hair into a mohawk.
When the novelty of the haircut wore off, he found some food coloring and dyed it green.
“The color was great,” he said, “but it was very impractical, since anything I touched with my hair became stained green too.”
Talking with his colleagues back in Chicago every day by Internet, they discussed what they could send to him on the midwinter airdrop that might shock the rest of the crew.
He asked that more permanent red and purple dye be sent to him.
As for dressing in drag, Lloyd insisted it was an idea borne jointly between himself and his boss back in Chicago, Dr. Bernie Rauscher. His Chicago associates sent him a cocktail dress.
At the time of his Internet interview, he said he had not yet sprung it on his fellow workers. “The reaction the red hair dye was not too impressive,” he said. “I think I have already desensitized everyone with the green mohawk.”
The biggest pleasures to come from the airdrop, he said, were the fresh food.
“After four months without any fresh fruit or vegetables,” he said, “the flavors and smells are just amazing.” “We did get fresh, real milk. To have real milk is just fantastic.”
The airdrop is a great moment for Johnson, too, because it gives him insight into the crew members and their morale, both individually and collectively. He is not down there, however, because he has never wintered at the pole with those he studies.
To do so, he said, would make him a part of the group itself, and thus taint his own perceptions. Instead, he studies the crews with extensive interviews before, during (via Internet) and after their stints.
“The dynamics of such a group is fascinating. Sometimes I think it would be fun to write a novel about it, maybe a murder mystery on the South Pole. That would be fun.”
Maybe so. But a male character with a red mohawk wearing a cocktail dress might be just a bit too bizarre to be credible.
