 Pretensions spent Thursday night listening to a talk by Felicity Aston. Briton Felicity Aston was originally trained as a meterologist but is now an adventurer and travel writer, travelling to the wildest parts of the globe for documentary purposes or just for the hell of it. Her bio says that she has "tracked the jaguar in Paraguay, rafted iceberg choked rivers in Alaska and searched for 'hidden people' in Iceland's lava fields.
Felicity joined the British Antarctic Survey in 2000, and was posted to Rothera Research Station in the Antarctic Peninsula. She spent two and a half years there, helping to run the research station and monitoring ozone depletion and climate. 
Felicity began the talk by asking us to imagine ourselves lost in the vastness of the Antarctic. "Imagine yourself standing on an vast plain of snow and ice that stretches endlessly in every direction that you can see. It is only broken by rocky upcrops and what look like mountains in the distance, no buildings, no human-created structures as far as you can see. The sun glares off the endless field of white, but despite being in Antarctica during the brief summer, you are still cold, huddled in your three layers of clothing and your breath steams. What is most striking is the silence. There is no noise at all, no sound of birdsong, or airplanes passing overhead. It is as if the world is holding its breath."
Felicity spent nearly 3 years at the frozen South Pole, arriving during the brief Antarctic summer (from July to October) when Rothera's one runaway was open. During summer, the station is relatively crowded with visiting research personnel, but they soon leave come October, just before the last ship arrives bearing 7 months supply of food and other provisions. At the end of October, the seas begin to freeze over, and the climate becomes too cold for aircraft, meaning that the station and its 20 personnel are completely isolated during the long Antarctic Winter. 
The 20 staff members included:
Mountaineer/adventurer types Mechanics Communications specialist 1 Chef 1 Doctor/Dentist (MD with 2 weeks dentistry training) Various scientists Base Commander
Life at the research station was gruelling. Due to the heavy snowfall, all personnel were rotated through chores involving shovelling snow away from doors, windows etc. Likewise, all personnel had some fireman training, but when a fire did break out on an auxiliary lab, it spread too quickly for anyone to do anything about it. 
Felicity also had the fortune/misfortune to experience the Antarctic winter, when temperatures can drop to -60C and the sun is merely a glow on the horizon for a few hours a day. She told us that it was impossible to go outside for too long in conditions like this. However, the scientists simply had to - many of the marine biologists even continued diving under the ice in the freezing conditions (apparently your face hurts a lot for 3 minutes and then everything goes numb, so its OK).  Felicity herself had the unenviable task of keeping a large number of automated weather stations working and also of monitoring the ozone hole over the Antarctic. Despite the ban on CFC use, the ozone hole has not shown signs of shrinking, infact it was at its largest ever 3 years ago. Climate records of the Antarctic region show an alarming 3C temperature increase over the last 50 years, with similar rises in Siberia and Alaska. The rise has not been confined to air temperature but is also reflected in the water temperature. As a result, krill populations have decreased and penguin colonies have started moving further south.
However, Felicity also wanted to point out that temperature rises in the Antarctic also affected the rest of the world, as global atmospheric circulation is created by the dual polarities of the tropics and the poles. Essentially, warm air in the tropics rises and moves north and south towards artic and antarctic, where it cools and descends. The whole circulation creates weather patterns and if the differential is lost, it creates abnormal weather. She feels that much of today's floods, hurricanes and tsunamis may be due to the effects of global warming. In order to draw attention to the plight of Antarctica, Felicity would like to encourage tourism to the area, but tourism must be properly regulated. In fact, there is currently a UN conference on the subject going on in Iceland to mark International Polar Year. Read more about it here. For her part, Felicity is leading 7 women from 7 Commonwealth countries - Cyprus, Ghana, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand and Jamaica back to Antarctica next year. They will brave blizzards, crevasses and temperatures below -50C to ski 800km to the South Pole. The expedition aims to raise awareness of the value of the Commonwealth, highlight the achievement of women around the world and foster inter-cultural understanding. You can visit expedition's blog for more information. The Singaporean applicants have been narrowed down to two and P thinks she saw one of them at the talk. The duo are 36-year old Sophia Pang who manages to juggle being a mother-of-three with working as a freelance IT consultant and kickboxing instructor and 36-year old Lina Goh who is a Senior Engineer at the National University of Singapore. P wishes them all the best - she wouldn't last 5 minutes!  
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