Glaciologist Albane Barbero tells us how she’s spent the winter at Concordia and what it was like to see the Sun rise again. Loosely translated from the original in French.
Concordia in the moonlight. Credits: IPEV/PNRA–C. Leroy Dos Santos
It all began on Sunday 5 May, when the Sun said goodbye for what would be quite some time. We all gathered at the Astronomy Laboratory to enjoy brunch and some good mulled wine. We’d already spent 3 months in isolation, so this “grand day out” was doing us the world of good. But it brought with it a sort of revelation: “This is it! Winter has truly begun…”. It was a wonderful day, complete with photo sessions to say goodbye to the Sun (which made the briefest of appearances), then games and especially a trilingual version of Pictionary in Italian, English and French (it goes without saying that my team won despite our three different nationalities!). We rounded off the day with a hairdressing masterclass (Simonetta trimmed my hair) and a woodworking session to continue our bookshelves, complete with small dividers separating each letter: a very professional affair!
The start of ‘real winter’, as I call it, was marked by all sorts of training sessions and exercises: first aid training, fire drills, emergency simulations, medical team training, etc. All this, on top of the new tests I suddenly had to carry out for my job, left me absolutely no time to sit and contemplate being in darkness – which was a real plus, believe me. Well, the darkness was never total: we had some sort of glow on the horizon for an hour or two (in the morning, of course, although those of us with more ‘irregular’ schedules never saw it).
I’ve been following the lives of my family from afar thanks to Skype and telephone conversations. My nephew has started to crawl, which is pretty funny: he’s fast, the little devil! And now he can say BABOU (which is supposed to be my surname but which for him means BALL [in French, BALLON]). He’s impatiently awaiting the arrival of his little sister, as we all are. (I won’t meet her until January or February when she’ll already be 3 or 4 months old, about the age of her brother when I left.) My father is making progress, albeit slowly. As for the rest, they have been busy with their various activities, trips away, holidays and evenings out, while we were sinking into winter and into the routine!
But happily, along came Midwinter to break up that routine and give us back some zip! With a mixture of sadness and elation, we realised that we’d now completed more than half our stay here. At the same time, Midwinter also means the Sun is clambering its way up towards reappearing in our skies on 10 August!
The biggest and longest aurora. Credits: IPEV/PNRA–Y. Reinert
July whizzed by: it was as if it never happened! We were kept so busy with birthday presents for colleagues, finishing off our bookcases, starting on a new TV stand, designing logos for our T-shirts, choosing and ordering the website, gazing at fantastic aurora australis and of course, carrying out our own work, that suddenly there were just a handful of days left before the return of the Sun!
In July, we reached our record for this year (so far): -80.5°C! Yann, Christophe, Elio, Simonetta and I grabbed the chance to have our photo taken in our swimwear on the roof of the base. I must say that we didn’t hang about outside! It was really cold. A few days later, we reached our record windchill: -100.6°C ! Brrr, even well wrapped up you could feel the difference that day.
Gradually, the mornings became lighter. We stopped needing our headtorches to go out to work or simply to see where we were going. Some colleagues put away their alarm clocks too because the light became strong enough to wake them. It was magical: you really felt as if the Sun was just below the horizon and that before long, we would see its beautiful light again. The glow gave us amazing skies. In early afternoon, as the glow dipped low on the horizon, we were treated to an array of intense colours: red, orange, purple, pink… before night fell bringing with it the Milky Way, or the Moon and its silver-plated landscape.
The return of the Sun. Credits: IPEV/PNRA–A. Barbero
Last Saturday, 10 August, the Sun returned. Even the late-risers amongst us got up for the occasion. Some of us didn’t go far, just to the roof of the base to welcome the Sun and take photos: we’d almost forgotten what it looked like! Others, like me, took the opportunity to go for a short walk (just to the summer camp, not very far from the base) and to playing in the snow, taking photos. The Sun attracted us all, and even the clouds of pollution from the power station blew in our direction! Which was a bit annoying when it came to the photos… To celebrate the return of the Sun and the start of the last stretch of winter, Luigi prepared a light buffet complete with champagne cocktails!
This morning, Monday 12 August, Elio and I took our cameras to the shelter to take more photos of the Sun. It was almost whole, and it rose so quickly. Before the end of the week, we’ll see the whole Sun and that will be fantastic for morale. It feels a bit like summer, like being on holiday by the sea! But there’s also the sense that the end of our stay is near and these feelings of happiness and sadness are strangely intertwined, rather melancholy…
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