 Hei, mae'n gweithio i'r Stade J a'r ddweud yw'r awddiad ar EFM 2016. Mae'n gweithio i'r ddweud Beth Healy, sy'n dweud 14 ymgyrch yn y pobl south, ac mae'n gweithio i'r ddweud o gweithio gael y cyfnodau a ddwylo. Felly, mae'n gweithio i'r Beth. Hei, mae'n gweithio i'r ddweud, ac mae'n gweithio i'r ddweud i'r antartica yn y dyfu wrth dyddiad a tafodu o'r awddiad lleolion yng Nghymru. Mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r醜io eu mirio a gyda'n gweld i'w modd cyfnodau. Felly, yna wnaeth eich ymweld o'r gweithio eu mynd i'w fidein os ydym o'r cyfeirio sy'n ddweud. Mae'n gweithio i'n ddefnyddio eich clywriaeth sydd clynutu am hyffordd. Bydd ymgyrch yn gweithio y Llywodraeth, mae'n ddwylo ar hynny, sy'n dói gyda ni yw hyffordd. Mae cyfnodd yn ymddiad yma'n gweld yma. Mae'r artistau, mae'n amser o'r gwahau a'r hwn. Mae'r cyfnodd yn ymddiad, mae'r cyfnodd yn ymddiad. Yn ymddiad, mae'n cyfnodd yn ymddiad, mae'n cyfnodd yn ymddiad. Mae'r ardal yn ymddiad yn ymddiad, a'r ymddiad yn ymddiad. Nid ymddiad yn ymddiad. Mae'r cyfnodd yn ymddiad. Mae hynny yn rhaid iemddio wrth sydd am ei bwysig fel ydym yn ddod. Mae'r cyfnodd yn ymddiad yn ymddiad, a'r cyfnodd yn yr ardal. Mae'r cyfnodd yn ymddiad, mae'r cyfnodd yn yr ymddiad. Dyma yn ymddiad. felly mae'r cyfwyr yma, yw'r hyn o'r hyn sydd yn ein panhau. Efallai ein bydd yna'r cystafai yn llunio ddiwylliant, o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn. Felly ei ddaui eich llunio ays i chi ar y cyfoedd yma, ydyni chi'n gweithio beth ychydig yma yn yr oeddenau hefyd. mae'n golygu. A o'r llwyddo, o'r maes. Y ffutur y ffraith cyflau hwn yn ymddangos. A mae'n rhaid o'r ffraith. Rhaid o'r ffraith. Rhaid o'r ffraith, beth hili, meddwl drf-f-e-s-e-s-e-r-g-n-cordia-stasi-n oedd y ffasg-y-er. Rhywb i'n meddwl i'n llwyddo i'r antartica i'r ffraith o'r gweithio'r wath. Fy enw'rchnoedd ychwanegion o'r ddweud yn cael ei meddwl hwn. Dwi'n ddylaiechion y gallwn ffordd i chi gutu'r bly Familiad wedi'u dweud am ysgrifwysig iawn cyfrifiadol am y ddisgu. Fyddo i chi gwych yn gweithio ar ei meddwl, ac mae hoffa'r gweithio ar y land-onir opa hwn. Ac mae angen i chi'n fydd o edrych ar y cwsadod, ac yno hwn yn tyg honno'n dweud am ein gael ar Ddaintarn Tantarsg้au ffort yw Isa. So, I'm a medical doctor, and I've got a background of working as part of expedition medicine teams. So, part of medical logistical support teams for endurance races, mainly in polar environments. So, I've been sort of North Pole, Greenlands, Falbards, Siberia, and places like that. So, if there's any medics amongst you, which are interested in that kind of thing, come and see me often and we can have a chat about that. But, while I was at university, I was really fortunate because I got to go to the European Space Agency and learn a bit about space medicine, which ultimately led to me getting the job working for you, Sir Dynan Antarctica, now that I am a doctor. So, I'm just wondering, does anybody know what a space-flight analogue is, or if they've got any experience of analogue programmes? So, probably one of the most popular ones, and the ones that most people would like to do, is to spend two months in bed and get paid quite a lot of money for it. But there's loads of different analogues, and all of them are good at looking at different things. So, if, for example, you've got sort of bed rest studies, which is looking at the effects of microgravity and not using your muscles for long periods of time. And you've also got other ones like underwater programmes, which is like the NEMO project, which is NASA run, and that's mainly used for astronaut training. Concordia is a little bit like Mars 500, and so much that we're really looking at the isolation period. So, Mars 500 came before Concordia, and this was 500-day simulated Mars mission, which was done essentially in a Russian car park. So, the crew of six people were recruited, as you would astronauts. We had a mission control, and we did the full simulated Mars mission. And this was really good in loads of different ways, like the research was really well controlled, and also the crew was much more similar to a crew, which would be selected for a space-flight mission. But there is one limitation of an experiment like this, and that is that you do have a door which you can walk out at any point. And after being down in Antarctica, I think actually, I would have found that a lot harder to deal with, because if I had known there being a door which I could walk out of at any point, I think I probably would have spent 499 of the 500 days wondering whether or not I should do that. And whereas in Antarctica, because you don't have that option, it puts different pressures. And whether it's easier or more difficult, I'm not really sure, but it's definitely a different psychological pressure that you have as a crew. Whereas in Antarctica, during the long polar winter, which is nine months, you're actually completely isolated, even in case of emergency at Concordia, because the temperatures are so low there that we're not able to fly in during the winter. So this was Concordia, and this was my home for 14 months. I just got back in January. It's one of only three of the inland stations in Antarctica, and it's up on the Dome Charlie Plateau. It was actually originally built for the ice core drilling, so up at Dome Sea, we don't actually have much precipitation or snowfall at all, which means if you drill down to the core, it means that you don't have to drill so far to go a lot further back in time. But that's an aside. So White Mars, this is what we're often known as by ESA, and there's lots of different reasons for that. As I mentioned, the isolation is certainly one of them. But there's also a few others which are really useful for us to use Concordia as a space flight analogue. So one of them is we're an international skeleton crew, and so this is my crew that I spent the nine-month overwinter period with. It's about a 50-50 mix between technical team and scientific team, and so there's lots of different researchers down there, and I was the only one working for ESA down there, so all the other participants were volunteering for us. But we're international, so we had six French and five Italian and myself, so all different languages and also a Swiss-German chap. So that brought in a different mix compared to a base like British Antarctic Survey where the predominant language is English. And we ended up having our own language which we actually called Concordian, which was a mix of everything. And it really came to light when we had emergencies. So we were actually very fortunate as a crew, so we didn't have any big emergencies at all. But as you can imagine, even small emergencies in those kind of environments can get out of hand quite quickly. And because it is such an extreme environment, if things do happen and go wrong, then it's very serious. So to give you an example, we just had a big leak coming through the roof because of burst water pump, and immediately everybody went back to their native languages, and it was absolute chaos in terms of communication. So we learnt a lot from those kind of experiences. And we're also isolated for the nine months, but you're also very confined as a crew. So with temperatures at about minus 80 outside, although you can go outside and a lot of people did most days, you can only go out for short periods of time. So you're actually living sort of on top of each other, and that leads to this kind of forced human interactions, which again is a lot like space flight because you are living in a confined isolated environment. You're also limited with your supplies, so for nine months of the year, we couldn't get anything in or out at all. And it's a big logistical operation to get things in during the summertime. And we actually get that on an overland traverse, which is a big land supply train. But unfortunately, if you forget anything like in space, you can't get it halfway through. So as many of you might know, we've got an abnormal day and night cycle down south. So I actually was 105 days without seeing the sun at all. And then during that period in the summer, the opposite way around, so 24-hour night time. And that affected a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And that was another big thing which you so really interested in, especially the effects of the artificial lighting on your eyes and also the way that that affects your sleep wake cycles. So I've been working up in the Arctic a lot, so I'm really used to sort of 24-hour daytime, and I went down quite smug thinking I'd be absolutely fine because it's never affected me the 24-hour daylight. But the second that we lost the sun, I was all over the place and my sleep wake cycle went to pot. And I probably didn't sleep for about the first three days. And that was really interesting for us as a crew because we actually ended up forming subgroups. So we're a crew of 13, and quite typically you form subgroups within that size. And we were actually shifting our sleep wake cycles out of sync with other people, which is a real problem for communication as a crew. And so we actually had to enforce having lunch and dinner times together to make sure that we did stay sort of in as much of the same circadian rhythm as possible. And Concordia is also an extreme environment. So this is giving you, this is a normal screenshot during a typical winter day, so you can see it's really low temperatures, we've got minus 81.4 there. What you might also notice is that we're actually at very low pressure. So Concordia is actually 3,300 meters altitude. And because we're in a polar environment, that's personified because, and giving us a sort of alpine equivalent pressure of about 4,000 meters, which is essentially a little bit like living on Mont Blanc for the year. So that affected a lot of people as well. And also you have real danger when you're going outside, so it's cold, dark, and so you have to be very careful, and this is what it looked like. And you're also there for a very long time. So I was there for 14 months, and nine months of that was the overwinter period where we didn't see anyone else. And we also have water recycling technology, and this is also developed by ESA, and it is actually one of the original prototypes which was due to develop the current water recycling system, which is now used on the International Space Station. So that meant having to use sort of not normal shampoo or conditioner for entire year, which for the girls amongst us was a bit of a struggle. So you have to use special things in the shower to accommodate for that. We also have really good telemedicine facilities, so if we are thinking of going on longer durations, space flight missions, we do have to think towards a similar medical model to that that we have down in Antarctica. If at the moment we have a medical problem up in space, we can evacuate normally within the day, and Antarctica is a very different story. So we actually had two medical doctors down there, so it was myself and also an Italian surgeon. And between us we can more or less deal with most problems that could come into a doctor's surgery. So now I'd like to just share with you a little bit of my experience and what it was that I was doing down there. So before I went away, I was sent off to Chamonix where I learnt from the PGHM, which is the mountain rescue team about pre-hospital care and retrieval medicine, and I also went to all the different institutes who are running the experiments down in Antarctica for ESA. But probably the most important part of my training was actually at the European Astronaut Centre. And so here we are as a crew meeting for the first time at the Astronaut Centre in Cologne. This is actually at the Neutral Buoyancy Facility. And here we had what's called Human Behavior Performance Training, and some of you might know that before astronauts go up into space, they're given a lot of training by this team, which is about living and working together in close proximity. And so we're given all the same training that astronauts have before they go up into space. So we're really lucky to have this as a crew. And we also got to look around all the training facilities and have a bit of fun as well. So that was really good. And this is astronauts, Samantha Christofretti, who actually was our mascot for the rest of our mission and called us up from the International Space Station down in Antarctica, which was really, really cool. Especially for the Italians amongst the crew. But like with any experiments, so we had to do all of the baseline testing before we went away. And this is NVHAV, which is a big medical research facility which is run by the DLR, which is just outside of the Astronaut Centre. And this is actually where Tim Peake had all of his testing before and after going to space. So one of the experiments we're doing is doing functional MRI scanning of our brains before we went down and afterwards, and then again six months after. So I've just had my last one taken in Cologne. And we're looking for any structural changes which might have occurred during that isolation period. We also had loads of blood tests and loads of different other tests and some of them were more fun than others. And I think this Italian chap particularly enjoyed this one as there were two pretty nurses taking his blood. And these are the bed rest studies. So this is actually where all the bed rest facilities are based as well. So this is the other analogue that I mentioned before. So once we've done... Oh, sorry. Once we've done all the testing it was time to go to Antarctica. There's two ways of getting there. You can either go by a boat or you can go by plane. And so on my journey down I actually went by plane. And this is the Hercules plane which took me from Christchurch to Antarctica. And then from there you get a smaller plane which is called a Twinotter plane from the coast to the central station at Concordia. I actually got a boat on my way back and that was an amazing experience too. So that's sort of a two-week journey back. So here I am. This is 16,500 kilometres from home. And this is the summer time. So I was like, oh my goodness when I arrived. So pretty chilly. So in the summer time you're talking about minus 30 at Concordia is the average temperature. But you do have 24-hour daylight and a really low humidity. So it's actually quite comfortable to live in. And this is my predecessor, Giornos. And he was the user doctor before me and he taught me probably one of the most important things for anybody thinking of doing an overwinter in Antarctica and that's how to learn baby football. So a very useful tip. And then all the food and fuel came during the summer. So this is the Overland Traverse. And this travels from De Mont de Ville station all the way to Concordia which is 1,300 kilometres. And it does this twice during the summer season. And this is how all the experimental equipment arrives from ESA. So this was one of my ESA boxes. And so the summer is a really busy time for setting up all the experiments which we do overwinter. ESA are only really interested in that period of isolation. And so that's the main part of our work. We do a little bit before and after but we're really looking at the effects of the crew. And so there's lots of other experiments going on down there. So lots of glaciology, lots of digging. And this is actually the Epica Coring project. So this has got actually the one of the oldest, well the oldest ice core ever drilled which is 800,000 kilometres, 800,000 years old. And this is pretty much what it looks like everywhere at Concordia. So it's completely flat. So you do have sort of sensory deprivation as well. And like Tim Peake said when he came down from space you don't actually smell anything in space and it's similar in Antarctica. There really isn't any smells. So that's one of the first things that I noticed when I came back on the ship is just the smells that are all around us here. And this is like a typical day during the summer so pretty comfortable outside. And also lots of sport that happens as well. So it's actually during that period quite nice busy time. But it's all in preparation for the winter time. So this is learning how to sort of do these fire escape which is like a big sock which comes out of the side of the building which is absolutely terrifying. But we also learnt lots of roles. So like because it's a skeleton crew you learn lots of shared roles. So although I was there as a doctor I sort of also learnt lots of other things about cooking. I had cleaning jobs. We taught sort of the plumber how to scrub into theatre and vice versa. I taught how to sort of be a fireman. So this is a really busy time for us to take on new skills and learn how to do different stuff. And that's really important as a crew living in that environment is that you are able to take on different roles and a lot like in space. So this is the last plane leaving so a pretty emotional time for everybody. And this is actually going away. And here we are now as a crew of 13. And this is the beginning of the overwinter. And ESA are often called as hivernaughts which hiver in French means winter so it's sort of winternaughts. And this is the ESA lab. So this is my home for 14 months and I'd like to just give you a bit of a flavour of the experiments that we're doing in there. I can't really cover everything here today but if you'd like to catch me afterwards I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. And do stop me if there's something you'd like to ask. So neuropsychology, this is a big experiment that we were running between ESA and NASA and it was developing a tool in space which is looking at the cognition of astronauts and it's a four part experiment but the main part was a cognition battery. So the idea is that astronauts do it on a regular basis that looks at lots of different areas so it's looking at risk taking behaviour, memory testing, reaction times but essentially it's a red flag system. So astronauts are just tested against themselves and any different performance is a red flag for mission control to be like why are they dipping? Are they getting enough food? Are they getting enough exercise sleep? Are there emotional problems going on? So this is a big thing that we're developing and that's a really exciting thing about Concordia is not only are we looking at the isolation but also often used to increase subject numbers for experiments which are also happening up in space and that's because astronauts are very few and far between and so in order to develop things a bit more quickly and to have enough subjects to get a reasonable power for the experiments and we're often used to supplement that. And also as part of this experiment was the functional MRI scanning which I mentioned before and also wearing activity watches. So these activity watches are really useful for not just looking at our general activity levels but also our sleep wake cycles and how that was changing over time. But perhaps more interestingly these are also interacting with each other so my watch would interact with your watch and so it would know how much time we're spending together as a crew and how our relationships are changing over time and it would also know where we are on the base so it's looking at habits so sort of how often am I going to the gym how much time am I spending working and interestingly also how much time am I spending sort of seeking out social interactions so in sort of social spaces for example the living room or how much time am I spending isolating myself and it's really looking at myself and it's really looking at critical time points in the mission where people are more at risk of isolating themselves and also to have big arguments and conflicts and formation of subgroups within the crew so it's really looking at sort of crew dynamics. We also were a heart monitor looking at our heart traces and as I mentioned the cognition battery which we were developing so these are the beacons which we had on the walls and that's what was actually detecting where our watches were on the base and here's the cognition battery that we were developing and here it is also being done at exactly the same time by Scott Kelly up in space and excitingly it's now been taken out of the research phase and this is actually going to be implemented on the ISS it's just part of normal astronaut routine in the next couple of months. Another experiment is video diary so again a bit big brotherish so we're just speaking doing a video diary once a week and from this we're trying to develop technology which can pick up non-verbal cues about what we're saying so it wasn't really looking at the content of what we're saying but how we were saying it and whether we can infer from that how people are really feeling despite what they're saying. I was also doing an experiment called back finder which again was run by the DLR and this is looking for extreme bacteria that can survive in the environment that we have at Concordia so with such low temperatures the conditions are really similar to other planets for example Mars and so if we could find new species of bacteria which are able to survive at Concordia then perhaps this can tell us a little bit more about perhaps we could find on other planets elsewhere. At the moment we've never found anything to be able to survive at Concordia outside other than of course the humans living there as Nova winter crew but we've never found any bacteria outside so my samples have come back on a ship and they've only just arrived back in Europe but fingers crossed would have found something exciting there and this carried on throughout the whole winter so this is me finding the poll where I was taking my samples from and that's actually a lot harder than I thought so the first time I went out during the winter I did what I normally did and just you know took my pad took my equipment and it really did let me know that I was sort of in an extreme environment so I opened up my pad and the glue on the spine of the pad just broke completely straight away all the pages went flying I took out my experiments to take all the meteor data and all the batteries had run out completely because I'd had them in my rucksack and my goggles were completely iced up and my fingers were freezing so I had to go back inside and sort of start again but it really did make me realise how difficult it is to take these kind of data in an environment like this and this was just after doing it we also looked to the effects of artificial lighting on our eyes and this was particularly looking at apatupal reactions and I just like this experiment because it demonstrates how although all the research is designed by ESA and sort of for space flight it's also very relevant to a lot of medical research which is happening back in England so for example this one is really relevant to people working for long periods of time using artificial light for example sort of factory workers doing a lot of night shifts so a lot of the experiments although they're designed towards space are actually relevant to a lot of people and this is just to say that there were lots and lots of other samples as well so I've actually got a little bowl patch on the back of my head still because they took so many hair samples from me as well so it was constant constant sample time so it's really being the ESA doctor at Inconcordia is very much just by like being Mr motivator so you're constantly asking people if they'll donate things for you if anyone's thinking of doing it be prepared for that and then this is one more experiment that we are doing so if we are to go on long duration missions it's a lot easier to build space flight at slightly lower atmospheric pressure than here on earth so it's interesting to look at this chronic low level hypoxia so we're not really interested in sort of what it's like up on the top of Mont Blanc sorry, Mount Everest but we are more interested in looking at sort of the pressures that you get around the Mont Blanc which is what we were at so this is an arterial blood gas machine and I was taking venous and capillary samples down there looking at sort of our oxygenation status so this is me at the gym and this was just a few well actually the month before I was about to leave and so I've been here for 14 months and I definitely acclimatised I could tell that from my blood so I was actually alkalotic in terms of my pH which is typical for somebody who's acclimatised well but you can see here even with a little bit of exercise I was saturating at 88% and for anybody that's medical amongst you typically it's supposed to be about 98% and if I presented to an A&E department with those saturations in England I would sort of be admitting myself so you really are having sort of really low oxygenation even at the end of the acclimatisation and this is just to say that and there's lots of different experiments happening there and they tend to change each year so this is a new one that we've bought in this summer and this is the Sawyer Space Flight Simulator so this is the actual one that we use to train astronauts on and this has been taken down to Antarctica to look at skill retention over time so this one we're training crew on different training schedules and looking at sort of what's best in terms of retaining skills without putting too much pressure on a crew and this is also to look at whether we need to be considering taking something like a space flight simulator on a longer duration mission because the last thing you want is your astronauts to arrive at Mars and not be able to land the spaceship so this is the kind of thing that we're looking at here and then this is just to give you a bit of an idea about what life on-base is like other than doing the ESA experiments so as ESA MD I was out doing a lot of the medical rescue training so this is us and it's a lot harder than you might think to pick up a casualty with sort of three different languages and big balaclavas and things so this is a lot of our time we spent training doing things like this we also do a big evacuation of the entire base during the overwinter as well which takes a couple of days to do and this is because the temperatures are so low that if we were to have a power failure it would be catastrophic unless we were able to set up the new generators which live in the summer camps so there's lots of lots of other things which you might not sort of think about when you're working down for an overwinter I also did the analysis of the water that we had down there so the grey water recycling and we had lots of problems with people peeing in the shower unfortunately, unlike on the ISS we're not able to remove ammonia from the showers so if people do pee in the shower at Concordia, please don't so it's my advice it's pretty grotty so now lots of my friends and family are just like why on earth would you want to go to Antarctica for 14 months so I'd just like to show you some of the pictures and sort of explain why it is a great place to go and sort of do some research so and the first one is the Aurora so here you can see like a tiny little Aurora which is coming off the left hand side of the tower there also in terms of the social side we did so this is our chef Luca so we actually had an Italian chef there so I can't complain too much although we didn't have any fresh fruit and vegetables for the entire time that we were there as part of when you're working down in Antarctica we have lots of like sort of inter-antartic things going on so we have an inter-antartic film festival and we also have an inter-antartic darts tournament so we Skype all the other bases and play darts against each other essentially and halfway through my winter just after midwinter it was time to Skype with Scott Base which is sorry South Pole Base and halfway through the darts match they bought out a watermelon which I was absolutely devastated to see because I hadn't had fresh fruit and vegetables for all that time so if anyone's thinking of doing a winter definitely consider going to somewhere where they have hydroponic plant grey so I was pretty upset by that but Luca did a great job in terms of every Saturday night especially we used to have a different sort of meal and this is the English night that we had going on down there people often ask me about communication so we did have internet access and we could Skype as well so we had one Skype computer down there and if we were doing conferences and things like that we could dedicate the line to do a good sort of Skype call so we did have good communication with that respect and we also had WhatsApp so we weren't completely isolated but we didn't have sort of internet on individual computers so you'd sort of have to go to a special computer where you could access your emails and things and it was very slow I mean you could sort of check your Google check your Facebook probably but you couldn't really browse the internet so that's the kind of level that we had during the winter we did actually have two months where nothing worked at all so we just had a set of phone and I'm still on the fence as to whether it's easier or harder without good communication so when you have good communication it is great so if you have an argument or something you can quickly sort of WhatsApp back home and then be on Skype and not too long which was great but also it's quite hard to sort of detach yourself from home and sort of form as a crew so a lot of the time on a Saturday night a lot of my friends would send me sort of selfies on nights out in London and you know you did sort of consider why am I sat here in the middle of Antarctica on my own so and then during the period where we didn't have any communications you don't have any of that sort of external pressure and also you can have bad news and things coming from home which puts pressure on the crew and sort of relationship breakdowns and things as well and so some people actually find it a lot easier during that time where we didn't have any communications with the outside world so yeah I haven't really decided which was easier but they definitely both have their pros and cons and this is just to remind me that lots of science goes on all year there and these are some of the guys really dedicated scientists who are going out absolutely every day to take all these snow samples and things outside so as ESA doc you only have to go outside sort of once a month I did go outside a lot more than that but sort of in terms of the job description that's all you have to do but these guys were going out sort of absolutely every day and sort of climbing up big towers which were 40 meters high and sort of minus 80 conditions so there's lots of great science going on in Antarctica at Corncordia in particular we have seismocays which is look for seismic activity underground so occasionally you get to go inside them when they're doing sort of changes to the experiment so this is inside them and they're really weird you can sort of write on the wall and it glows through and we also have big lasers going off so these are called lidars and they're sort of testing the atmosphere as a lot of you might already know but this was the night sky and so this photo was actually taken around lunchtime and this is really what it looked like all the way through the winter period so it really was you could see the Milky Way clear as day at any time so it's the sort of Stargazer's paradise during these sort of at the either end of the period where we didn't see the sun you did actually and see it kind of looked a little bit like the sun had just set at the horizon so you have like that little glow at the edge that you could kind of tell whether it was day or night but during the middle of the winter like there was absolutely nowhere I could tell you what kind of you know what day it was and it is strange how we did shift in terms of patterns and it really was only our lunch and dinner which did keep us together as a crew during that period and it wasn't an intentional thing you know as a crew we were you know relatively on good terms all together but you just sort of naturally shift and sort of the scientists tend to work better at sort of later on at night time whereas sort of technical team you tend to have more of a structured day sort of working together so it really did form a big problem and we can definitely see that on the data that big shift that happened but these are some of the auroras we had down there as well so pretty beautiful and this is the sun that came back say this is the first time we'd seen the sun so really emotional time for everybody and you really did feel the energy levels just soar through the roof when this came so during the winter it's like really hard to sort of motivate you yourself to do anything back here in England I'm sort of running to and fro from lots of different places and always really busy go to the gym exercise regularly and those kind of things whereas actually you really slow down you feel like kind of hibernating a little bit and even writing an email is like a massive struggle but as soon as the sun came back we really did all feel energised and then this is what it kind of looks like for most of the other times you get this weird pinky purple and the sort of purpley grey that you can see there is apparently the shadow of the earth that you can see as you're rotating around which is pretty cool and this is the plane that came back to get us and this is Jim so he's a pilot that works out in Antarctica every year for I think the past 15 years and he was actually involved in the recent evacuation that you might have heard of at the South Pole base as well so it was really people like this which managed to keep everything running and I was very grateful that he didn't get lost on the way back when he came to pick me up and here I am on the day so and this was another point that I noticed was so people which weren't coping so well with the overwinter period and the isolation actually got on the first plane out of Concordia so it wasn't that initial plane that came in but it was the plane sort of a few days afterwards and so they had a massive shock between sort of going from sort of the isolation of the overwinter period into sort of normal society as it were but the people who were coping a little bit better actually had a more prolonged sort of reintroduction back to sort of normal life so it was quite interesting to see however and how people were coping going back into sort of seeing people and some people actually resented the first plane coming back because they felt like it was a big sort of invasion of their home so it was interesting to see psychologically how that affected people and also the loss of roles within the base so our station leader was obviously our station leader during the winter period but he was superseded by somebody he came during the summer and there's lots of conflict and friction with those big changes that happen and this brings me to the last part of my story in Antarctica so as part of the ether experiment back finder I actually had the opportunity to go on the overland resupply traverse which I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation so the big land train and so we went here from Capridome which is the little red dot on the coast there and this is where we set up all of the traverse and we drove back to Concordia station so I flew to Capridome to drive back and these are the some of the guys who again are working in Antarctica year after year and really are the lifeblood for all the experiments and everything which is going on down there so and these are really grateful to all these guys who managed to keep all the experiments running and it's a lot again it's a lot like spaceflight you know there's a huge teams behind all the experiments and all the astronauts going up into space and so this is just to just to show you all the guys that sort of dedicated their lives I mean some of these guys have worked for like 10 over winters in Antarctica and most of these guys working on the traverse had done about 15 15 or 20 years down that so so big periods of time so these are some of the guys that I was fortunate enough to work with so and then they kindly added me to their team and so it's not all glamorous working for Issa so I was here for two days changing the screws on a caterpillar tractor tractor so there's all different roles that you got to get involved with it it's just something that I really enjoyed and in true French style I was given sort of half an hour driving lesson which was involved sort of driving one these huge challenge attractors sort of around a little circuit they put on an L plate on the back of mine and then we were off across the Antarctic Plateau fortunately there's not too much that you can crash into other than the other tractors so it wasn't so bad and here we are so this is the land train it's quite hard to get the whole thing into the pictures to in terms of how it works you've got two challenger tractors which are these huge tractors which are made specifically for the traverse or modified for the traverse and so you drive in tractor pairs and we had four sets of tractor pairs so eight big challenger tractors and each tractor pair is driving sort of tied up to each other so you have one a big piece of rope a second one and then a huge amount of weight and equipment behind it on these sort of special skis and these little trailers here these are actually the ones which carry the fuel and so this is how we drive across we also have three snowplies so you have one snowplie right at the beginning one in the middle and then one at the back as well and the snowplies come and help you out if anything happens so they're sort of very manoeuvrable whereas the big tractors sort of go in a massive line so and that's how it works so here I am inside my tractor a bit of a tractor selfie there and this is in my tractor so I spent Christmas our new years this year driving in one of these tractors so this was yeah the second of January that this was taken and you can see in front of there that so we were the tractor pair there so that was my pair actually when you go from the coast you drive as a pair well not a pair at all three tractors so it's even more because actually the initial bit from the case is a lot steeper so we sort of drive as three for that first day just in case you're interested and also I got to experience some of the bad weather that you have in Antarctica you're quite sort of although the temperatures are really low at Concordia you don't actually see very bad weather at all the skies are always really clear because you don't have that precipitation you don't actually have much wind at all but it's certainly not the case at the coast so the temperature is actually a lot higher at the coast but you do get to see all these sort of exciting storms and this is one that we are driving through and this is actually my tractor tractor number six so but you do have your problems so this is how I spent new years eve actually so this all came off the sort of road that we built so the French said that this is the Italians the Italians said that it was the French as long as it wasn't the Brit I didn't really care so and this is how we did that and then these are yeah this is just the tractor so at night time you park up all the tractors together and we sort of plug them into an electricity supply as well so that's how they don't freeze overnight and but the reason I was doing this experiment is I was taking snow samples during the whole length of the traverse and we're looking at the transition between where we do find bacteria at the coast and animals obviously surviving so you've got all the penguins and things at the coast to somewhere like Concordia where we don't have any life surviving there at all and so we are looking and it's also the traverse provides us with a pristine untouched environment because this traverse only happens two times a year and so if you go off the track just a little bit you're walking in sort of part of Antarctica that's never been walked in before so it's really exciting opportunity to be able to take sort of snow samples from this virgin snow which was a real sort of pleasure to get to do okay and then it was home time so this is the boat that I got back so it's called the Italica and I got that back to Christchurch so I'd like to spend the rest of my talk just going through any questions that anybody has which hopefully you do have did you find the behaviour and location tracking sort of oppressive which I imagine it would in an ordinary job if you if people knew where you were all the time and we're analysing it it must affect your behaviour as well surely well I thought that might be the case at the beginning but the way we were tracking people was using watches I mean obviously everybody was consented to the experiment so everybody knew what the watch is for and what we're doing with them and the fact that we are tracking people but you are down there wearing these watches for 14 months and so sort of after a few weeks I think most of us kind of forgot really that we're even being tracked at all and certainly you know I don't think I changed my habits because of it I mean I think at some points you did I did wonder especially because obviously I'm working for Issa who are running the experiment I mean they know how often you're spending in the lab and like how often you're spending working and where you are doing things but it was all confidential in terms of sort of what we found so I think because nobody on the base got sort of direct feedback in terms of sort of their habits and what they were doing I don't think it really affected the crew but obviously I mean that is a limitation with all the experiments that you are doing with people because we do know that we're being tracked or doing experiments on I think I don't think the tracking one was really affected by that I think the one which was probably more affected would have been the koala which is the video diaries I think people felt a lot more self-conscious doing that having said that with something like koala again you're looking for non-verbal cues and astronauts would also have some similar pressures in terms of that they know that they're being watched and sort of analysed as well when they're talking to mission control so I mean it's difficult to say but I think just because we are wearing them all the time for so long I think that people did kind of forget that they were wearing them and there's also some things that you can't really modify in terms of do you know your sleep weight cycle as well which we were able to get data from but we were really lucky to get that data because it's quite hard to get ethics for that kind of experiment and it's one of the few that have ever been able to actually get that on a platform on sort of a research platform so it's quite a unique data set in that respect I can see sorry I can see we've got a few more questions unfortunately for time we haven't got time to ask them here right now but would you mind Beth asking answering questions outside just afterwards yeah absolutely so if anyone's got any questions please ask afterwards okay thank you thank you very much indeed for your talk