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Paris (ESA) Apr 26, 2011 They are more cut off than the crew of the International Space Station. They are at Concordia in Antarctica, and one of them is ESA researcher Eoin Macdonald-Nethercott. If you want to follow in his footsteps, ESA is looking for his successor. The flat landscape around the Concordia research station is 3200 m above sea level and virtually inaccessible from February to November. During the southern winter, Concordia is under almost total darkness. With temperatures down to -85 degrees C and the thin air, aircraft can't land and snow tractors can't reach the station. Eoin arrived in November in a rugged Twin Otter aircraft, hunched in a cramped seat behind a large battered aluminium case, flying over a flat desert of snow. They made a bumpy landing at the second attempt on the icy strip. "So this is my home for the next 363 days," thought Eoin, a medical doctor from Scotland, looking at the station's two domes. He applied last year for the almost-out-of-this-world opportunity as ESA's member of the station's winter crew - an 'hivernaut' as they call themselves, after the French word for winter.
Science paradise ESA uses Concordia as a laboratory for fundamental research into many subjects important for human missions to the Moon or Mars, like coping with stress and changes in the immune system, blood clotting and changes in the circadian rhythms. ESA also supports the French Polar Institute and the Italian Antarctic Programme, the station operators, in medical monitoring, testing life-support technologies and psychological training of crews.
A fantastic adventure "The research I'm doing is looking at how our environment here affects our thinking, mood and sleep quality, and whether good exercise helps with all these things," explains Eoin. "With a bunch of astronomers and cosmologists, just plain nightowls, and on the one hand with a technical crew that is up bright and early for a respectable 8am to 6pm working day on the other, any semblance of normality disintegrates." Eoin writes about a typical day at the Concordia station in his letter from Antarctica. His own blog talks of eyelashes instantly freezing together and plumbers who make good phlebotomists.
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West Antarctic Warming Triggered By Warmer Sea Surface In Tropical PacificSeattle WA (SPX) Apr 14, 2011 The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed rapidly for the last half-century or more, and recent studies have shown that an adjacent area, continental West Antarctica, has steadily warmed for at least 30 years, but scientists haven't been sure why. New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator and near the Intern ... read more |
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