On the New Year Trip to Antarctica. Part One

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
— André Gide

Antarctica isn’t just the most isolated continent on the planet. It’s a challenge to human nature itself: silent, icy, and indifferent. Fewer than 0.001% of all people have ever set foot on this edge of the Earth. And there are reasons for that.

Antarctica is a paradox. It’s the highest, the driest, and the most lifeless point on the map. Officially — the largest desert on the planet. In some of its valleys there has been neither snow nor rain for the last two or three million years. NASA uses these territories as a stand-in for Mars — the soil is more sterile than an operating room.

In 1983, the Vostok station recorded the lowest temperature in the history of observation: minus 89.2 °C. At conditions like that, metal turns brittle, diesel fuel freezes, and a single breath can damage your lungs.

But that isn’t even the point.

Under four kilometers of ice lies Lake Vostok — a closed ecosystem, sealed off from the outside world for more than fifteen million years. The pressure inside it is comparable to the floor of the ocean. Scientists allow for the existence of life forms that have never touched the Earth’s atmosphere.

This is the home of katabatic winds — ultra-dense currents of air that pour down off the ice plateau at up to 320 km/h. They can last for weeks without the slightest pause.

The atmosphere of Antarctica is its own thing. Water vapor doesn’t exist here as a gas. It turns to ice instantly. The clouds are made not of droplets but of ice crystals and nitric acid. Below minus 78 °C they shimmer like mother-of-pearl, like oil on water. They’re called polar stratospheric clouds — one of the strangest atmospheric phenomena on the planet.

You’re literally breathing air that remembers mammoths.

Antarctica holds about 70% of all the fresh water on Earth. If all that ice were to melt, the level of the world ocean would rise by 58 meters. New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg — gone. A great deal would be gone.

In winter, it’s the quietest place on the planet. No wind. No sound. No people. No planes. Only silence. Absolute, pressing down on you. Some polar explorers admit it: they could hear the blood moving in their ears. The heart beating. And then — what sounds like footsteps. A rustle behind the wall. Someone’s presence. You check — no one. They call it the Third Man syndrome — a psychological response to an extreme level of isolation.

In Antarctica, the geography you’re used to breaks down. Every direction is north. Compasses behave strangely. There are formally no time zones — each station lives on the time of its own country. You literally choose for yourself what hour it is.

Because of the dryness and the low humidity, there’s no sensation of “damp cold.” But that’s an illusion, and the mistake can be fatal.

Antarctica doesn’t forgive carelessness. It’s a place where even the strong break. Not because of character, but because it strikes at the foundations of perception:
— no smells,
— no color,
— no sound,
— no organic life.

The brain gets no confirmation that it’s on “its own” planet, and it triggers anxiety — unconscious, but all-pervading.

The paradox: an almost total sensory void — and at the same time the most blinding light, wind, dazzling white. It’s overload and reset at once, a road to derealization, depersonalization, hallucination.

Antarctica destroys the illusion of control. The very one our whole modern civilization stands on.

In the journals of the wintering crews at the Soviet Vostok station, you can read:
“Sometimes it feels like the station is alive. Like it’s watching you.”
“You’re afraid to step out of the room — not because it’s cold, but because beyond the door there’s emptiness.”

Here time has neither rhythm nor structure. There’s no day and no night. People mix up the days, lose the sense of sequence. Time stops being a straight line — it crumbles, like ice underfoot.

Antarctica doesn’t want you here. But that’s exactly why it’s so tempting to see it.

Because here a person realizes: the Earth is not necessarily a friendly planet.

More on the personal experience — in the next part…