The Year of Antarctic Women
A lot went wrong in 2016 but for Antarctic women, it was a good year with hopeful reverberations beyond.
This story begins in 4th century BC. No wait, earlier; 33.6 million years ago during the Oligocene epoch. Well, maybe 1931, 1935 or probably 1956.
Let me begin in 1995. The first time I went to Antarctica I thought I was going to help protect the environment. We did, but I also learned what it means to be human in a far away place. This was before the Anthropocene was a word — the term proposed for new geologic epoch in which human generated and driven changes to the ecosystem are significantly greater than the previous geological epoch, the Holocene.
My recent visit to Antarctica (Dec 2–20, 2016) was on an all-female science and leadership expedition, Homeward Bound. I looked hard at myself and I feel we 76 women scientists together yet through different lenses, also looked deeply at our planet and our role on it.
I went to Antarctica 20 years ago in the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty and Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection to do a pilot cleanup a Polish research station, Arctowski, then a joint ecological project at a Russian station, Bellingshausen. We did humble cleaning but ultimately the lessons were to share, collaborate, respect nature and science and see beyond status, nationality, gender etc. because when times get tough, we need one another.
My recent visit reiterated the same but now I have more knowledge of climate change, the gender and effectiveness gap in science and leadership, and I met fantastic people to share and work with. I have a deepened love and respect for polar regions — our world’s precious refrigerators.
Early in our stay at Bellingshausen in ’95 I was in Sergey the base commander’s office when he told me, “You are the first women to live at this station in 26 years.” There are still few women in Antarctica, said Sergey.
But who is Marguerite, I thought?
As Sergey spoke I was looking at the Antarctic map on his wall. There it was, “Marguerite Bay”, a dip in the port side of Antarctica’s tail.
Aha, I thought, so there were women here, at least symbolically, ages ago. I would find out who was Marguerite.
Antarctica was mapped in the imagination in ancient times but its human history is new. The ‘last continent’ was seen reportedly in 1820 by Fabian von Bellingshausen, the Russian station’s namesake. The first humans, Carsten Borchgrevink and team, landed on the continent in 1895 (or possibly American sealer John Davis set foot in 1821). Roald Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole on Dec 14, 1911.
I do like what humanitarian and explorer Fridtjof Nansen said of this feat: “the rails of science are laid; our knowledge is richer than before.”
Who was Marguerite? Her name reached the Antarctic because her husband, Dr Jean-Baptiste Charcot, leader of the French Antarctic Expedition, discovered a bay and named it for her in 1909. There she was, symbolically, as were many of the other women to Antarctica — names on maps.
Before Marguerite (bay) there was Adélie (land). Jules Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842) of France named a coast and land he discovered in 1840 after his wife, Adélie. There was also Queen Maud Land between 37°E and 49°30'E discovered during Lars Christensen’s Norvegia expedition of 1929–30, and named after of Norway’s sovereign. These names are amongst hundreds of other female place names in Antarctica’s mapping that continues today.
It wasn’t until 1931 that Norwegians Ingrid Christensen alongside Mathilde Wegger were the first women to physically sight the continent. They were on the Thorshaven ship, owned by Christensen’s whaling magnate husband. A coast was named in Christensen’s honour.
Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, also in the Antarctic in 1931, got a shock when he apparently saw Christensen and Wegger on a ship and reported to the Sydney Morning Herald,
“much astonishment was excited by the dramatic appearance on their decks of two women attired in the modes of civilisation. …they are, perhaps, the first of their sex to visit Antarctica.”
It’s also possible that sealer and whaler wives from the US, Argentina or Chile saw Antarctica earlier, but their stories were unrecorded and remain as secret as subglacial lakes.
Still in this day, parts of Antarctica, and its secrets in the ice, subglacial lakes, mountains, and species are lesser known and mapped than the moon.
I’m blown away to learn the subglacial mountains, the Gamburtsev range or “Ghost range” were only discovered in the 1950s, mapped in 2009 with no human ever touching a sample from them yet.
When Ernest Shackleton advertised his 1914 Antarctic expedition, “three sporty girls” begged to join. He replied: “regrets there are no vacancies for the opposite sex on the expedition.” I saw the letter exchange at the Scott Polar Research Institute archive. When I led an expedition to Antarctica in 1995 I didn’t give being a woman much a second thought, though I was likely an early Canadian woman working there.
Caroline Mikkelson was the first woman to step on Antarctica in 1935, landing on the Tryne Islands. She arrived a century after men. Another “whaler’s wife”. No big deal was made. She has a mountain named after her in the Transantarctic Mountains.
In 1929, twenty-five women applied to the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE), and were also rejected. When a British Antarctic Expedition was proposed in 1937, 1,300 women applied to join. None of those 1,300 went to the frozen continent. (Everipedia)
The first women to overwinter in the Antarctic (1947–1948) were Americans Jackie [Edith] Ronne and Jennie Darlington, wives of leaders of the private Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition based at Stonington Island. Ronne (female) was the official expedition recorder and thus also the first US woman to work in Antarctica. She loved her time there. Darlington, who honeymooned on the expedition, suggested women shouldn’t return.
Ronne has an ice shelf in her name. First it was called Edith Ronne Land in 1947 as it was presumed land, but then was renamed Ronne Ice Shelf by the US Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in 1968 as it was ice, not land.
Then Russian marine biologist Maria Klenova in 1956 visited Antarctica on a research vessel and also helped make the first Soviet Antarctic Atlas. Klenova Peak is the Ellsworth Mountains is named for her.
Now a woman wasn’t only on an Antarctic map but was in situ making one.
There was a moment I can’t get out of my mind. A group of women scientists led by geochemist Lois Jones made up the first all-female scientific Antarctic expedition in 1969. It was inspired by Jones who was determined to collect her own rock samples from the McMurdo Dry Valleys for her research at Ohio State University. But women were banned from Antarctic expeditions and male colleagues were bringing home rocks for them (like the male penguins do for the rookery nests.)
US Rear Admiral Dufek had said over his dead body would women go to the Antarctic. Yet with the support of Colin Bull, head of the Institute of Polar Studies, Jones and a small expedition of women would go, but had to stay at their own field camp.
I had the honour to help update Jones’ and other female Antarctic scientists biographies as part of a “Wikibomb” at the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Conference in Malaysia in August 2016. The goal was to raise the profile and percentage of bios of women in Antarctic science. Through volunteer efforts led by Jan Strugnell, Thomas Shafee, Justine Shaw, Mary-Ann Lea, Jenny Baeseman, and others we wrote and updated over 75 biographies of Antarctica women and launched them in celebration.
The (SCAR) Women of the Antarctic Wikibomb in collaboration with the Women in Red (addressing content gender gap “structural bias”) recognized “the work of women in Antarctic research, to help redress some of the gender bias prevalent throughout the encyclopaedia, and to provide more visible female role models.” In November 2014, just over 15% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies were about women. The figure is up to 16.82% in January this year. One by one.
I learned that the US Navy decided the women that 1969 season could also visit the South Pole. It was orchestrated that they jump off the plane together to ensure they were all the simultaneous “female firsts” so no one would claim being first. It’s ironic that men planned to avoid a possible (unlikely) scrimmage over “firsts” when much is made of male “firsts” and even disputed firsts (Robert Peary to the North Pole) and nothing was made of Christensen and Mikkelson’s Antarctic “firsts”. They were, after all, women, and “passengers” and “wives”.
Powder Puff Invasion
When the first women arrived to the south pole, the news paper reportedly had a sexist headline, “Powderpuff Explorers invasion of South Pole” (Satchell, 1983).
In interviews they were reportedly also asked if they would wear lipstick in the Antarctic (not sunscreen?).
The US Antarctic Program’s newspaper has a fantastic retelling of that moment:
“A ski-equipped LC-130 flown by the Navy took the women to the South Pole... By that time, there were seven women in Antarctica. Jones’ team was working the Dry Valleys. Muller-Schwarze was with her husband at Cape Crozier. Pam Young was a young Kiwi biologist doing research with the New Zealand Antarctic program. And Jean Pearson, a respected science writer for the Detroit Free Press, was on the Ice filing news reports.
Terrell [female scientist] admits the event [jumping off the Navy plane ramp together] was overly staged, but also says the visit probably held more meaning for Jones, who was older than the rest of the team and had faced gender discrimination for years. It also served as an example that women could be more than nurses or teachers, as she’d been told in grade school.” The Antarctic Sun, “Breaking The Ice: First U.S. Female Scientists Enter Antarctic History In 1969”.
Happily I also learned that Lois Jones has an Antarctic feature named after her, Jones Terrace, located in the Antarctic Olympus Range.
At the same time as the Ohio State all-women’s expedition, Argentina sent four women scientists, biologist Irene Bernasconi, bacteriologist Maria Adela Caria, biologist Elena Martinez Fontes and algae expert Carmen Pujals to Antarctica in 1969. — Everipedia
It still stuns me that only at the time I was born, the women’s liberation movement was manifesting at least in this part of the world. There’s is a far way to go today especially for women in countries where rights are not guaranteed or respected (Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria for starters) and in countries like Canada, Australia, France or the US where there’s still conscious, unconscious and structural bias women face.
Halley station (UK) only allowed women to overwinter in 1996 — the same year Lena Nikolaeva, Wendy Trusler and I arrived at Bellingshausen as the start team to our Joint Canadian-Russian Ecological Project with the Russian Antarctic Expedition (a civilian clean up initiative).
Yet the numbers of women working in the Antarctic keeps increasing to now over 1/3 of research station personnel are and have been women from many nations, increasingly diverse. Women also lead top polar bodies such as Dame Jane Francis (British Antarctic Survey) and Katrin Lochte (Alfred Wegner Institute) — featured in the recent Wikibomb.
As there was systematic gender bias, in the Antarctic there was also racial bias, as a microcosm of the world. Lize-Marié van der Watt and Sandra Swart’s recent book The Whiteness of Antarctica: Race and South Africa’s Antarctic History explores how apartheid South Africa constructed Antarctica as a white continent, particularly a white continent for men.
[note, great read: Antarctica as Cultural Critique. The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change, by awesome Elena Glasberg.]
Now Antarctic has many more nationalities present than the initial “white western” and South Americans present. These stories of other ice ceilings broken are invaluable too. Leilani Henry whom I’ve had the pleasure to virtually meet writes about her father, George Washington Gibbs Jr., the first African-American to set foot on Antarctica. He was a member of Admiral Richard Byrd’s third expedition to the South Pole in 1939–40. This was decades before the civil rights movement. (I note Gibbs Point was named in his honour by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in 2009.)
Things change, people help change it. Colorado State University scientist, prolific researcher (13 seasons in the McMurdo Dry Valleys) and soil ecologist Diana Wall said in the Denver Post in 1998: “It’s not so much that we notice anymore who are women and who are men, but we’re doing science, and it’s a big team effort.”
Mapping Antarctic Women
I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Wall at a Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) History Humanities and Social Science meeting in Colorado in 2014. She pioneered for women in science. I appreciate her comments that science is a big team effort and women have come far. I was thrilled to include her place name, the Wall Valley on my map.
I presented this prototype map of female place names, inspired by Marguerite whom I “met” in 1995. I’d started collecting female place names then but really got into it in 2014 with a spreadsheet and google maps. While I was presenting, fellow participants from Argentina and Australia tweeted and emailed new female place names to me: Eva Perón Bay (renamed Mobil Oil Bay) and Betty’s Peak (after Roald Amundsen’s childhood nanny).
I’m at over 200 names and still discovering more.
At the Antarctic Open Science (SCAR) Wikibomb I presented the next prototype map. Scientists from around the world added new names on ribbons. I was delighted glaciologist Christina Hulbe added a place named after her — Hulbe Glacier. And terrific men also contributed names such as Tilav Cirque for Turkish astrophysicist Serap Tilav (cirques are bowl-like hollows that glaciers occupy).
The Wikibomb, the map, the storytelling of female Antarctic history all increase visibility, role models and the facts of history.
“As with Wikipedia as a whole, there has been systemic under-representation of notable women Antarctic scientists. Compounding this is Antarctic science’s unique history of exclusion…Women scientists have now risen to prominent positions... Nevertheless, women remain under-represented in official recognition (e.g, Polar Medals), and public awareness (e.g., Wikipedia biographies). With 60% of polar early career researchers now women, better representation was needed.” Wikipedia Signpost 2016.
All the while another Antarctic women’s story was coming to life at this time. After two years of preparing for something cool, a group of 76 women scientists including me, recently spent 20 days in the Antarctic for a women in science and leadership expedition. It was the largest all-female expedition ever, Homeward Bound.
Who will read the map? We will, women and men
Cartography of Women in Science, Leadership and Climate Change
Homeward Bound was the brainchild of Fabian Dattner and marine ecologist Jess Melbourne-Thomas. It aims to promote women with a science background into positions of leadership to have an impact on policy around the sustainability of the global environment.
I wanted to return to the Antarctic for a good reason. A global and earth health activist who knows the marginalization some women face and how women and girls are often on the frontline of climate change and conflict, I wanted to know more and to encourage the next generation of women in all fields.
I read a few articles on our upcoming expedition in the news before I left to meet the ship in Ushuaia, Argentina.
One guy posted in the comments section I think of an Australian newspaper article. “All women? But who will read the map?”
I laughed and hoped he said it in humour. But I was annoyed. Sexist, stereotyping, binary.
Humans of Antarctica
We had Wynet Smith, a Canadian geographer on our voyage, British astronomer Sarah Brough and metereologist Alison Davies, we had many Australians including mathematician Ruth Less, chemical engineerk Jennifer Woodgate, social scientist Kate McMaster, neuroscientist Sharna Jarmadar and evolutionary biologist Ashton Gainsford, Swedish/Australian pharmacologist Christina Jorgensen, US educator Betty Trummel and Anne Christensen, PhD student in Natural Resources Science, to name a few. I wish I could tell you about every woman in our group and all the other men and women I met in the Antarctic.
Amongst our faculty were Antarctic scientists Justine Shaw, Mary-Ann Lea, leadership coach Marshall Crowley, strategist Kit Jackson and media activist Songqiao Yao as well as filmed faculty Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle and Christina Figueres.
What did we do over 20 days? In short: studied our own and evidence-based leadership styles, preferences and practices; learned about Antarctic science; discussed importance of, examples and tools for strategy mapping, visibility and elevating women in science, STEM and leadership; and shared ideas for next steps for ourselves, supporting women in our sphere of influence and climate action. For me it was difficult at times and brilliant at times.
Each of us came with a different background and reason for joining. While we have collective outcomes arising, we have our own takeaways and goals. Mine include to be more courageous, to share more women and science and history stories, to be a more effective activist for earth and global health. I want to live life fully and to enjoy my family, community, to love nature. I want to work collaboratively and boldly and help topple barriers remaining for women and other marginalized groups or peoples made vulnerable.
The great ship crew was largely male but for assistant expedition leader and historian Monika Schillat and a few women. Great people. Expedition leader Greg Mortimer, honoured Australian, mountaineer (first Australian to climb Everest, without oxygen “too expensive”), was a humble skilled leader who modelled leading by doing. We also met terrific scientists and support staff at US Palmer Station, UK’s Port Lockroy and Argentina’s Carlini Station. And we ‘ran into’ Ross Sea diplomat Lewis Pugh in Wilhemina Bay who came to our ship (didn’t swim to it) to share advocacy stories. We also opened a conversation on women in science.
The days of “powder puff invasion” are transforming — not over yet, plus our human survival on the planet is at risk.
The West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the fastest warming areas on earth. The likely culprit is warmer ocean waters underneath (NatGeo). The Arctic we know is in desperate warming — temperatures were 30 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (-1 to 10 celsius) above average in some places during the recent Christmas week (Scientific American). People and ecosystems suffer from the impact: extreme weather events, drought and malnutrition, infectious and non-communicable disease spread, conflict. The list goes on. We have a small window address how we live on earth.
In Antarctica there were icebergs galore. The were astonishingly beautiful. One purple sky night we watched a parade of tabular icebergs. I thought I’m at peace, I’m lucky. We know glaciers everywhere are receding. The news of the 17km crack in the glacier at the edge of the West Antarctic ice sheet near Halley Station landed just after we did back to Argentina.
Change is Glacial now means Way Too Fast
Fellow participant Elvira Poloczanska, climate change ecologist specializing in marine ecosystems (Alfred Wegener Institut, Germany) and author of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reminded us the facts:
Climate change impacts are widespread though occurring unevenly. The climate system warming is unequivocal. Each of the last three decades successively warmer at the earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.
“What temperature the world will warm to by the end of this century comes down to climate policy,” said Elvira.
The American scientists we visited at Palmer Station told us that they have watched the glacier ‘in their backyard’ recede significantly. Their ‘yard’ had grown due to climate warming. It was a lament.
Jessica Reeves, fellow participant and paleoclimatologist, reminded us climate change is natural but what we have to pay attention to is the rate and trajectory of change.
And women — our role? As half the world’s population we are more impacted by climate changed, especially women who are poorer. And we are also part of protecting nature, innovations, adaptation and changemaking.
- women make up only 28 percent of the world’s researchers and are particularly underrepresented at senior levels, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
- gender balanced leadership teams are renowned for better performance and decision making.
We stood on the deck of the MV Ushuaia, built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) turned expedition ship, and felt bittersweet about leaving Antarctica. Cape Horn was nearing and we’d see no more icebergs unless we lived near some or went to visit them. We know they are increasingly ‘endangered’, as are species such as the Adélie penguin.
This place was already under my skin and now I think it is my skin. I dream of majestic hazy or razor sharp morning views, hikes up an ancient mountain and the luxury of talking and thinking with incredible fellow humans who share a view that time is ticking for mother nature and we must do our best and more than put on the oxygen mask.
It was a good year for Antarctic women, so to speak. Now is our challenge and opportunity to help make it a better year and future for humanity. Ensemble. Now there’s 76 more ambassadors and more to come.
Tip of iceberg.
Carol Devine is a humanitarian, social scientist and a member of the Society of Women Geographers.
