A look at life in one of the most extreme places on Earth | Podcast

Located in Antarctica, Concordia Station hosts European Space Agency (ESA) scientists studying human adaptation to extreme environments.

Imagine living for months without seeing daylight in a place where temperatures range from -80 to -20 degrees Celsius, and spending an entire year with only a small group of colleagues.
If you’re an extrovert who loves sunny weather, this scenario probably sounds like a nightmare. But if you’re a space enthusiast passionate about research, Concordia Station might be your ideal destination.
Located in the heart of Antarctica, Concordia Station is a joint French-Italian research facility that became operational in 2005. It hosts scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) who are interested in researching how humans can adapt to extreme environments.
In this episode of Euronews Tech Talks, we meet Jessica Studer, a Swiss ESA medical doctor who landed in Antarctica in November 2023. 
“While going through medicine, I always felt that something was missing,” Studer told Euronews.
This feeling changed when she participated in Asclepios, a student-led space simulation. This experience inspired her to focus on space medicine and once she completed her degree, she decided to apply for a position at Concordia Station and was selected. 
Before heading to Antarctica in 2023, Studer underwent an intensive training programme with her crew, travelling from one corner of Europe to the other. Then, it was off to the South Pole.
Studer still remembers her conversations on the plane with team members:
“We had never been in Antarctica and [none] of us knew what was going to happen,” she said, talking about her crew being scared of the extreme weather.
“We put everything on we could, and then we went out, like little astronauts”. 
Studer and her scientific colleagues made it to Antarctica and survived the extreme weather conditions, but the freezing temperatures were not the only challenging aspect of their experience. 
“In Europe, we’re so used to having noises around us, and then you come into this environment and there is nothing,” Studer told Euronews, describing the unreal silence outside Concordia Station.
“For some people, [they] can be a little bit anxious” she added. 
The feeling of almost total isolation, which is tough to handle for most human beings, is a key element of Concordia Station and one of the main purposes of the crew living there. 
The idea for Concordia began in the 1990s, driven by the need for a permanent research centre that could operate year-round and support diverse scientific activities. Its construction started in 1999 and took several years due to the extreme weather conditions. Since its opening in 2005, Concordia has played a crucial role in glaciology, astronomy, and human psychology.
ESA, for instance, conducts isolation studies that work as simulations.
“We put together a crew of five to six people, and we mimic that we’re on a space mission, for example,” said Angelique van Ombergen, team lead for Human Exploration Science at ESA.
In this way, van Ombergen explained that ESA can assess how isolation impacts human beings’ psychological and physical health.
“We look into what is the impact on sleep. What are the psychological coping mechanisms put into place, etc,” she said. 
All these studies have already led to some results, among which is the assessment that different groups of people can react differently to isolation, an evaluation that is helpful for space exploration.
“By knowing this, you can identify the main complement for a team, the right composition for a long-duration mission,” van Ombergen told Euronews. 
Research conducted at Concordia Station can also be extremely relevant when it comes to space missions. Studer, for instance, examines blood samples to understand metabolic and immune system changes due to stress as well as microbial isolation, an approach that aims to enhance our knowledge of long-duration space missions. 
But, believe it or not, isolation, might also have some positive effects on your body and your mental health. Tune in to this episode of Euronews Tech Talks to find out which ones.