Postcard from Antarctica — the last coronavirus-free continent

When Kelly Hogan said goodbye to her 10-year-old daughter to embark on a mission to the bottom of the Earth, the name Covid-19 had yet to be coined. It was late January and the global coronavirus death toll stood at about 20. The World Health Organisation was playing down any potential spread beyond China. There was nothing to suggest that, little over two months later, a health crisis would have consumed the planet.

Nor could Hogan, a British scientist, have imagined that she would now be cut off from it all in Antarctica, the only continent so far to escape the grip of the virus.

“We always feel far away from home here anyway, and when something big happens at home, I think you feel even more distant,” Hogan tells me by satellite phone from Rothera Research Station. The British Antarctic Survey’s base on Adelaide, an ice-bound island, is 9,000 miles from her home in Cambridge. “There’s a sense of helplessness,” she adds.

Hogan, a 41-year-old marine geologist and geophysicist, was supposed to have flown home last week, via Chile and Brazil. She had spent two months on an icebreaking research vessel at the foot of the Thwaites Glacier, a vast but rapidly melting mass of ice the size of Britain.

But when the airlines tore up their schedules, the British Antarctic Survey gathered all its teams at Rothera, where a runway and green, low-slung buildings are surrounded by icebergs and towering mountains.

At some point in the next week or so, they hope to fly by small aircraft to the Falkland Islands. A military plane will then transport them back to Britain, a country Hogan may now struggle to recognise.

In the meantime, one of the world’s most extreme environments has become its safest place. At the time of writing, there have been no cases of coronavirus on the dozens of international research bases that dot the coast of Antarctica. The biggest — the American McMurdo Station, which can house 1,200 people — reportedly threw the largest St Patrick’s day party in the world this year.

Rothera is home to as many as 100 scientists and engineers in the southern summer. A hardy skeleton crew keeps it ticking over through winter. Hogan says good hygiene is already part of life; much milder viruses can be dangerous somewhere so isolated. Even so, posters have gone up and hand-sanitiser stations have multiplied. New arrivals have been limited and standard medical screening beefed up.

With little else to do, Hogan is getting used to life back on dry land. She takes walks and calls her daughter, who is off school and with her father. She has also been able to start working through the data she came here to collect at an even more remote location. The Thwaites Glacier is a giant mass of ice on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, more than 1,000 miles from any research station.

“It’s one of the most stunning and brooding places I’ve been to,” Hogan says. It is also melting and fracturing at such an alarming rate that some glaciologists have referred to it as the “doomsday” glacier.

Aboard the research ship Nathaniel B Palmer, Hogan and colleagues collected sediment samples from the sea floor. By dating and examining the shell chemistry of fossilised micro-organisms in the mud, Hogan can deduce the water temperature at the time they lived. That historic data will improve modelling for future melting, and inform efforts to mitigate a slow-motion catastrophe.

While doing this work, in 12-hour shifts from noon to midnight, for eight weeks without a break, Hogan learnt that coronavirus was spreading way beyond China. The internet connection on the ship is too slow for TV, but brief phone calls home and a printed daily news digest told an increasingly alarming story. Leisure time is limited on the vessel, and alcohol is banned, but conversations in the mess hall soon turned to events beyond the ice.

“It started to feel like a huge deal when countries closed their borders,” Hogan recalls. “The obvious concern was — how will we get home?”

The Americans and other nationalities on the ship sailed back to Punta Arenas as planned, to try to find their own routes out. The ship paused as it passed Rothera, on March 22, so that a rigid inflatable boat could take the 10 Britons ashore.

Hogan is cooler than a glacier when contemplating her strange isolation and delayed homecoming. But she admits this trip has been unusually taxing emotionally. “I just can’t wait to see my daughter again,” she says, before returning to her data. She had planned to take an afternoon walk, but a vicious wind is blowing.

The scientists surveying a continent whose decline has disastrous implications for us all have also had time to reflect on the current global health crisis, and the emergency response to it.

“If climate change had an effect as immediate as coronavirus, I imagine you’d get a similar global response,” Hogan adds. “It can be frustrating because the pace of climate change is slower. But maybe it’s reassuring to see that a response of this magnitude can happen when we want it to.”

To read more about the British Antarctic Survey and the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration project, see bas.ac.uk and thwaitesglacier.org