Alexander Kumar, a physician and researcher at Concordia Station, writes from Antarctica, where he conducts scientific experiments for the European Space Agency?s human spaceflight program.
My mind is set upon my departure and return to civilization, planned for mid-November, Antarctica permitting. In the meantime, I have been drowned in messages containing the same question: What have I missed the most?
Besides my friends, family, Siberian husky puppy, Mishi, and a hot bath, I guess I miss the ability to stand outside in normal atmospheric pressure and be able to take a walk in a pair of shorts and sandals, without becoming short of breath.
I have missed oxygen.
Back in England last year, I stepped out of John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford after a long shift, for the last time, into a fresh, clear, out-of-season evening, before embarking on this adventure. I now further appreciate taking a long-drawn breath of oxygenated air.
Having spent the past year in the world?s largest, coldest, highest and driest desert in the world, most of us have suffered from an awful sleep night after night and have become short of breath climbing a flight of stairs ? all while enduring heated discussions with fellow crew members as to which World Cup national football team was the best ever.
At our altitude, 3,233 meters (10,607 feet), there is less oxygen in the atmosphere, and that is worsened still by our increased distance from the Equator and the extreme cold temperatures, which further decrease hypobaric pressure. Hypoxia is the lack of oxygen in the body, and despite our apparent increase in circulating red blood cells through the process of acclimatization, it is most debilitating.
As an anesthetics trainee doctor at home, I am like a deliveryman, responsible for pushing and pulling oxygen into and out of a patient?s lungs during surgery. I must ensure that each delivery contains more than the required 250 milliliters of oxygen per minute for an average-size human (the average adult lung capacity is five to seven milliliters of air per kilogram of body weight). It?s simple physics and fascinating physiology, which takes us on a journey back several hundred years.
High-altitude environments have proved to be useful platforms for hypoxia research. Mont Blanc in Europe is such a location, endowed with a fascinating history of tragic deaths and research.
As early as 1787, Horace-B?n?dict de Saussure, conducting earth sciences research, documented mountain sickness there. Around 100 years later, Henri Marie Joseph Vallot constructed various scientific observatories at about 4,350 meters (about 14,270 feet).
A tragedy involving the curious death of a doctor at one of the high-altitude observatories resulted in an autopsy performed by a Dr. Egli-Sinclair, who concluded the death was caused by the effect of high altitude (for some reason, Dr. Egli-Sinclair?s first name has been obscured by history). Later in 1913 Vallot, using squirrels, demonstrated a decrease in physical performance at the top of Mont Blanc, leading to the study of ventilation and the discovery of acute mountain sickness and acclimatization.
Almost another 100 years later, a team from University College London, led by Mike Grocott of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest expedition, reached the summit of Mount Everest, reigniting the past century?s fascinating research. Alongside multidisciplinary studies on the effects of hypoxia, Professor Grocott?s team?s research, in taking and measuring arterial blood samples, demonstrated the lowest oxygen level ever recorded in a living human.
The Antarctic winter is a place for dreams and nightmares, offering particularly vivid images as your mind begins to stretch and your senses are blunted in the groundhog days of complete darkness.
Alongside my medical role to ensure everyone remains oxygenated and upright over the year, one aspect of my research role has been to monitor sleep patterns, quality and duration regularly before, during and after the Antarctic winter.
An element of this has been to measure people?s oxygen levels overnight. These have been shown to drop to extremely low levels in my fellow crew members and myself, as we struggle through the Antarctic winter. This finding should be interpreted with care, though, taking into consideration the effects of isolation, sensory deprivation and altered light cycle, which add to an already complex environment.
In July, our crew experienced the lowest atmospheric pressure recorded on site, about 610 hectopascals, or about 88.5 pounds per square inch. I will never forget that day ? waking up unusually short of breath, later feeling nauseous and struggling for oxygen in between bites of lunch. Our normal atmospheric pressure here hovers at a low 640 hectopascals ? about one-third less than that found at sea level in New York City or London. Unfortunately, our exchange rate isn?t as good.
This is one very important aspect in which Concordia Station, the space-analogue environment in which I am currently living, differs from the artificial environment and atmosphere that will eventually be created for a manned mission to Mars.
On the International Space Station, and in future long-space travel, today?s and tomorrow?s astronauts can sleep easier, relying on onboard life systems that recreate Earth conditions within biologically closed systems. They process and recycle used oxygen and water in particular, providing a healthier oxygen supply around normal atmospheric pressure. That, in turn, provides an ability to think more coherently, concentrate and escape memory difficulties ? some of the cognitive difficulties associated with an arrival here.
Wherever you are in the world reading this: If you are fit and well and want to simulate life up here, try holding your breath for 10 seconds, then breathe, and keep doing this over a few minutes. Soon you will get the feeling of living at Dome C, high up in inland Antarctic.
In the words of the polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, ?Take it all in all, there is no human on the planet that has a worse time than an emperor penguin.?
Now you can sigh and breathe deeply, appreciating all that oxygen you have and feeler richer for it, knowing you were born on the right side of the world, on the better side of the exchange rate for oxygen ? the currency of life on this planet or the next.
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