He spent over a month on a research station in Antarctica. Extreme cold, isolation, no nature outside… Youtuber Jacob Karhu told Brut nature what his daily life looked like.
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00:00I stayed outside for two minutes and well, it didn't help me to freeze.
00:05A meter of carrot like that, it's worth 6,000 euros.
00:09It's expensive the ice cream.
00:30I was on the Concordia station, it's a station inside the land on the Antarctic Plateau so in fact we are at 3223 meters of altitude so it is relatively high, below it is only ice and we are away more than 1,000 km from the coast.
01:00So we are really very far away.
01:05I didn't have a very good night, I wake up about every hour, there are several reasons for that, there is the time take-off, there is also the fact that it is daytime all the time, it is quite disturbing.
01:15We meet in the morning, we always have a technical meeting around 8 o'clock, we are told what is going to be done in the day, technical level, scientific level.
01:23So generally we are around 60 people on the base, so we are half French-Italian, it's a Franco-Italian base and we are almost half scientific and technician for the maintenance of the station.
01:41The thing that was a bit painful was always to dress well before leaving the station, we had to put on all the layers of clothes, all the gloves and what shocked me a bit was the speed at which we were cold.
01:56The worst here is the wind, because as soon as there is a little bit of wind, the feeling goes down and in fact I have already had feelings here at minus 60 degrees and there it does not forgive.
02:06You should never have a small piece of skin that protrudes, otherwise it freezes instantly.
02:11Antarctica is an entire continent that is completely isolated in the South Pole and as it is a continent that is especially isolated compared to others, the purity of the ice is exceptional because there is no contamination and we have a record of ice that is 800,000 years old.
02:29Every day I went to a cave buried 6 meters under the snow to get pieces of ice and then I went back to the surface to be able to cut them with a circular saw in another cold chamber.
02:42This carrot was 2,500 meters under the ice, under the feet, 2.5 kilometers, which corresponds to about 400,000 years.
02:59There are gas bubbles in there and these gas bubbles are also 400,000 years old.
03:05So we can find the atmospheric composition of the time and find the concentrations of greenhouse gases, CO2, methane.
03:12We can also find the temperature that there was at the time 400,000 years ago.
03:16The data that we collect will also be used to feed climate models.
03:20In fact, there are people on computers who enter all the data, so they enter the composition of the gases, the temperature they had, etc.
03:26In climate models, they run the machine and they see what it can produce.
03:31And if they do the same on what is happening now with the current climate changes due to man, they can also predict or model what could happen with more probability.
03:41At lunchtime, we meet for lunch.
03:46So we're all going to eat together. We have a chef who's going to prepare food for 60 people.
03:55We work from Monday to Saturday, all the time, all day.
03:59And we still take Sunday off to rest.
04:02I didn't cut ice all day. Sometimes I tried to do something a little different.
04:06All the projects are research destinations.
04:09Among them, there is also meteorology, glaciology.
04:16In glaciology, there are several areas, for example, there is surface snow, there is deep snow, there is drilling ice.
04:23There is also astronomy, medicine, to see how people behave in a confined environment.
04:29And what effect that has on their physical and mental health. It's very important.
04:33You have difficulty sleeping because the day-night cycle is different.
04:36Like I said, it's very monotonous here. There's no nature outside.
04:40Your family is away, your work is different.
04:43There's a lot of stressors, so to say, that are interesting because they mimic space.
04:48And that's why we do research in a place like this.
04:55We meet again in the evening to eat dinner.
04:58And generally, in the evening, it's pretty quiet. We read comics, we talk, we play baby-football.
05:04Anyway, we spend time quietly.
05:06We have here the computer room.
05:09We have two computers available.
05:12The flow is really very low, a bit like the 90s.
05:16We can talk about videos on YouTube, nothing at all, just check your emails.
05:20And it's already not bad.
05:21And once a month too, from time to time, we're going to have a little party.
05:24To just relax and enjoy. It feels good anyway.
05:29The next day
05:34Sometimes, when we come back from the base, we hear the ground cracking.
05:38It's the big cracks that make the ice vibrate under our feet,
05:42that rise up in our body and fuse far from us.
05:46It was the only noise because there's no nature, there's nothing at all.
05:49There are no animals, there are no plants, there is absolutely nothing.
05:53And it was just a reminder of what nature can produce.
05:57And I thought it was super pretty.
05:59The next day
06:02It's time to go to sleep.
06:03The problem is that it's still daylight.
06:06So the only solution is to close the blinds.
06:10I think I had an incredible chance to access this great white continent.
06:16Desert.
06:17And I don't think I'll ever go back there.
06:20So I really feel privileged compared to that.
06:23And I don't know if other generations will be able to access it
06:28insofar as we are polluting and adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
06:33One day, it will completely stop existing.