It is unlike any workspace in the world. Each day starts off with frigid, record-low temperatures. In the Antarctic, everything depends on the weather.
“If the weather is good, we head out. Else, we stay in,” says polar researcher Vishnu Nandan, as he settles down reluctantly to the temperate climate of his hometown Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, after a 40-hour flight from Antarctica. “It is not warm enough here,” he says. “Or maybe by now I have been so used to the cold that this isn’t warm enough,” he adds quickly, as an afterthought.
Vishnu has just returned from an eight-month odyssey in the Antarctic. He was one of the two scientists who were part of a 25-member team of the British Antarctic Survey, braving the extreme weather and the polar darkness at the Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, West Antarctica as part of a scientific survey. The research is part of a U.K.-based project called DEFIANT (Drivers and Effects of Fluctuations in sea Ice in the ANTarctic), which set up a ground-based radar system to take measurements of sea ice.
