Antarctic Anecdotes

Sunset was official at 12:54 New Zealand time on Thursday, March 23.   I was up early in the day to see the last sliver of our solar companion begin its’ final plunge below the horizon.   I can’t honestly tell you it was a particularly remarkable sunset, or a sunset more or less spectacular than one you might see elsewhere in the world.   What made this sunset different is that it’s the only one I’ll even see in Antarctica.   There are no 24 hours cycles hereof dark and light, just one long day and one long night; and today the former has ended and latter has just begun. There are three unique holidays we celebrate at the Pole.   Like druids of old, we celebrate sunset, mid-winter, and sunrise.   We do not, however, prance about naked with ribbons and streamers in the forest.   For one, there is no forest.   Second, nobody should ever prance naked near the Pole, because while I won’t speak for every over-winter physician there’s no way I’m going...

(Gentle Reader:  This is kind of a strange post, really just a set of thoughts and gleanings that I can’t really fit into a good narrative story.  Hopefully there’s some nuggets of interest in there for you.  If not, feel free to move along.  And thanks to Miss Manners for the salutation.) How do you tell the time when the sun is always up, and you can’t use markers like sunrise and sunset to track the movement of the sun across the sky and differentiate morning from evening?   That’s a real problem at the South Pole, where Apollo’s chariot doesn’t race through the heavens, but instead rotates in a plane about a point.   It does so because during the austral summer, the earth’s axis is tilted such that the southern hemisphere is closest to the sun.   At the equator, the earth is large enough that its’ daily rotation takes the more temperate latitudes out of view of the sun for at least part of each day.   At the Pole, the diameter of the earth i...

  In the haste to put down memories of my first few weeks at the Pole, I’ve kind of forgotten to tell you what I’m actually doing to pay the mortgage and feed the dogs.   I’m the over-winter physician here at the station, and a background player at best.   That sounds self-obvious…it’s a station built for science, and most of us are simply here to support that…but for a physician it’s a very strange feeling.   In my Universe of the Small Rural Emergency Department, I’m the center of attention and everything has to go through me.   I see the patient, order labs and x-rays, talk to consultants, make medical decisions for admission or discharge, write prescriptions, and provide patient education.   I’m not the only one doing this, of course.   Nurses and other providers are partners in this effort, and once there’s rapport with a certain core team they can anticipate what I do and what I might say, and often add valuable insights of their own.   But ...