Connor here: Hopefully it’s not an experience we’ll face anytime soon.
Daniela McChahay, assistant professor of history at Texas Institute of Technology. Her research seeks to connect Antarctica, the ocean and atmosphere to themes of modern world history. It was originally published in conversation.
As the midwinter day of Antarctica, the longest and darkest day of the year approaches, winterers on the frozen continents continue to follow traditions up to over a century and early days of Antarctic exploration.
The experience of winter in Antarctica can be disastrous, even when living with modern agreements, such as hot running water or heated buildings. At the beginning of the current winter season in March 2025, the Global News Outlet reported that workers from South African Institute Sanae IV “shaking” when one worker was allegedly threatened and assaulted other members of the station’s nine winter crew. The psychologists intervened – remotely – and the order was clearly restored.
The desolate, isolated environment of Antarctica can be difficult for its residents. The history of Antarctica is the realization that the Antarctic environment can be deeply disturbed and even push people into insanity, and the events of Sanae IV representation of reality.
Antarctic winters cost us long and constant near-darkness. Andrew Smith, via the Antarctic Sun, CC by-nd
Early scenery
The earliest examples of Antarctic literature depict continents that affect both the mind and body. In 1797, for example, the British poet Samuel Taylor Colleridge wrote “The Lime of the Ancient Mariner” over the 20 years the continent was first spotted by Europeans. It tells the story of a ship blown away by a storm into an endless maze of ice in Antarctica. For unexplainable reasons, one man killed Abtros and faced lifelong pain in doing so.
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published the story of “Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” Even before they arrive at Antarctica, the story includes rebellions, cannibalism, and a ship with dead men holding crews. Once the story ends, Pym and the other two differ south, encountering a huge, clearly endless cataract of mist in that part before their boat, revealing a large ghostly figure.
HP Lovecraft’s 1936 story “At the Mountains of Madness” was almost certainly based on the actual story of polar exploration. In it, the fictional Antarctic expedition man encounters a situation where he “wanted to escape a world of devastation and gloomy madness as quickly as possible.” One man experiences a nameless “last horror” that causes serious mental breakdowns.
The 1982 John Carpenter film, The Thing, also includes these themes. This is when a man trapped in an analctic research station is hunted by an alien who is totally impersonating the basic members he murdered. There was a lot of paranoia and anxiety, team members were desperately radioed for help, men were imprisoned, left outside for others or killed.
Whether or not they defend themselves to what could come as a fun tradition, the winter crew at South Pole Station in the US watches the film every year after their last flight departs before the winter begins.
It’s true
These stories of Antarctica’s “madness” are based on history. The long breakdown of modern Antarctic world belongs to a fatal wounded man, a colleague playing a Chessa match at the Russian Vostok station in 1959.
What’s more certain was the report in 2018 by Sergei Savitsky Stabbied Oleg Belogzov at a research station in Bellingshausen, Russia, over multiple complaints, including the ones he most read. The criminal charges against him have been dropped.
In 2017, staff at the Subantique Marion ISAND Station in South Africa reported that team members had collapsed into a co-worker’s room with x beyond romantic relationships.
Healthy Health
Concerns about Antarctica’s mental health go back further. From around 1897 to 1922, in the so-called “heroic age” Antarctic exploration, expedition leaders prioritized the mental health of men’s expeditions. They knew of the crew, who were trapped with the same small group for months in the darkness, extreme cold.
Frederick Cook, an American physician who accompanied the Belgican expedition from 1898 to 1899, was the first group known to spend winters within Antarctica circles, and in a helpless cell “destined” by the “mercy” of natural forces, he wrote about his worries about the “pressing effect of the unknowledgement soul” in the darkness of winter. In his 2021 book on that expedition, author Julian Sankton called the ship “the madhouse on the edge of the earth.”
Cook’s Fear Scholarship is authentic. Most men complained of “general sturdy, inadequate heart behavior, mental lethargy, and general inclusiveness of universal sense of discomfort.”
“When he became Ors Lee Alus Rias, Cook wrote, “The men certainly felt they were going to die,” and showed “the spirit of a hopeless spirit.”
And in the words of Australian physicist Louis Bernacci, a member of the 1898-1900 Southern Cross Expedition, “There is a particularly mysterious and eerie subject matter in the effect of the grey atmosphere of Antarctic night.
On a trauma trip
A few years later, the Australian Antarctic expedition held between 1911 and 1914 experienced several major tragedy. A 100-mile walk of relative safety took him to the moon.
A set of lesser known events at the same time that wireless steregraph operator Sydney Jeffries, who arrived in Antarctica on an A supply ship in 1913. Cape Dennison, the expedition base, was in compliance with the most severe environmental conditions that everyone had encountered on the continent, including winds estimated at over 160,000.
Jeffries, the only man in the crew capable of operating the Radio Telegraph, began to show signs of delusion. I sent a message back to Australia saying he was the only sane guy in the group. He claimed that others were trying to kill him.
In his account of Mawson’s expedition, he condemned the conditions and wrote:
”
After five months of quarantine in remote Antarctic conditions, 22 men were pleased to be rescued in August 1916.
The broader problem
Unfortunately, the general focuses on Antarctica as a place that causes intrusive action, making it easier to grasp larger and more systematic issues.
In 2022, the US Antarctic Program, announced by the Australian Antarctic Division, reports that sexual assault and harassment are common in Antarctica bases and in more remote field camps. Scholars generally do not link these events to details of cold, darkness, or isolation, but rather to a continental culture of heroic masculinity.
As humans appear to live in other extreme environments such as space, Antarctica represents a place where human behavior changes, not just the international scientific community of cooperatives, but also the places that block society as a whole. A midwinter day’s celebration of respect is a celebration of survival in a mysterious place that is also a place of terror, and the greatest threat is not outside, but in your heart.
