Other Antarctica: Murder

It can seem like there are no mundane tragedies in Antarctica. The perceived call of the wild makes our explorers’ earthly suffering look like a meeting with destiny. We don’t hear of people choking on their dinner or accidentally slipping in the shower, breaking their necks. Neither do we imagine malice or lunacy, though the hothouse environment in the polar stations can twist minds and, sometimes, end in the kind of degradation no mission hagiography can obscure. In the 1950s a man on the Mawson base spent most of the winter season imprisoned in a storage room after becoming deranged and indiscriminately violent. It is also said that, in 1996, a cook at the McMurdo station turned on his colleagues, attacking one of them with a hammer. A Russian once cleft a man’s head in two with an axe after losing a game of chess, and, in 1983, a staff doctor burned the Argentinean Almirante Brown station to the ground when the setting sun announced the onset of winter – apparently the thought of spending the next seventy days without light was unbearable and so he decided to evacuate himself and other residents.1

1 See Scott Harris Friend, SUSTAINABILITY AND HABITATION IN ANTARCTICA, PhD, MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2009