Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak.
It was a suitably icy farewell salute: a handful of snowballs arcing through the sky towards RSS Ernest Shackleton as the ship slipped away from the wharf. The vessel was setting out across the stormy Southern Ocean, leaving 26 hardy souls behind on a snowbound island at the frozen tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Those waving goodbye from the shore were watching their last tangible link to the rest of the world glide off through the bitterly cold water. Ahead of them lay six months of winter, effectively marooned, in the coldest continent on the planet.
"They say it is quicker to get to someone on the International Space Station than it is to medically evacuate someone from Antarctica in the winter," says Marlon Clark, one of those 26 international researchers and support staff left behind at the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, just to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula in March 2018. Antarctica is the least-inhabited continent on the planet – it has no permanent human population – with just a handful of research stations and bases scattered across the 5.4 million sq mile (14 million sq km) frozen landscape. "So, you're isolated," says Clark. "There's a lot of mystery and lore about 'a winter in Antarctica'. Anticipation was the strongest feeling as well as realising, 'OK, this is real, I’m going to be here for a long, long time'."
Over the following 26 weeks of near perpetual darkness and harsh weather, Clark and his fellow inhabitants at Rothera would work, eat and socialise together with barely any contact with home. Satellite phone calls are expensive and so used sparingly. With just each other for company and limited entertainment on the base, the "winterers", as they are known, would chat to each other – a lot.
"We would be talking to each other while working, on our breaks, playing pool or in our rooms," says Clark. "We got to learn each other's stories pretty quickly. There were a lot of conversations about weather – these crazy winds we'd get, the sea ice, icebergs, clouds. We were very comfortable with each other." Their common language was English, sprinkled with slang words unique to the Antarctic research stations – more on this later.