Until recently, there was a formidable ice-flow inland from an inhospitable bay of Antarctica directly south of New Zealand that was named the Marchant Glacier. Then it was erased off the map.
It wasn’t global warming that disappeared the glacier, however, but a name-change agreed to by the New Zealand and US geographic authorities. An intensive investigation by Boston University had proven that famed geologist Prof David Marchant, who had given his name to the glacier, had sexually harassed then 22-year-old graduate student Dr Jane Willenbring at a remote field camp in Antarctica 18 years earlier.
The varsity ruling resulted in Marchant’s firing and the glacier’s name-change was welcomed by Willenbring, now an award-winning associate professor in geology at Stanford. But it sent shock waves through the polar scientific community — being reported in leading journals such as Science and the New York Times — and brought the #MeToo movement to some of the most inaccessible human settlements on earth.
Now, an overwintering team member at SA’s Sanae IV research base on a windswept rocky outcrop in Antarctica has been accused of assault and sexual harassment. The allegations were made by email on February 27, weeks after the SA Agulhas II, the supply ship of the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment (DFFE), had dropped the nine-member team off.
The DFFE said it had “immediately activated the response plan to engage the individuals involved through trained professionals to mediate and restore relationships at the base” — critical as the overwintering team faces 16 months together in claustrophobically close confines, with outside temperatures that can plummet to -75°C.
The department stated that the accused team-member had apologised, shown remorse and had also agreed to participate in psychological evaluation, while the rest of the team receive professional counselling.
“This process has been ongoing on an almost daily basis to ensure that those on the base know that the department is supportive and willing to do whatever is needed to restore the interpersonal relationships, but also firm in dealing with issues of discipline.”
But it admitted a separate case of sexual harassment, involving the same team member and a second victim, was also being investigated.
Sexual predation in the frozen deep south is far from rare, however. In June 2022, a report by the US Antarctic Program disturbingly revealed that almost three quarters (72%) of women working under the stars-and-stripes on the icy continent had been either sexually assaulted or harassed. This comes in the wake of an earlier study by Prof Meredith Nash of the Australian National University that showed 63% of women under their flag had experienced similar depredations there.
Of concern in the US findings were that only 23% of Program leadership considered sexual assault and only 40% considered sexual harassment to be problems, while there was almost no preventive programmes, staff, or funding in place.
“Leadership has not earned the most basic level of trust for more than one fourth of survey respondents who reported not believing or not knowing if the organisation for which they work cares if they are safe,” the report warned. “The percentage rises considerably for groups that are often marginalised and/or in lower-status positions, including gay and lesbian community members, seasonal employees, younger workers, those who earn less, and women.”
No similar research appears to have been done on SA’s National Antarctic Programme (Sanap) and Meredith’s 2021 research into various countries’ Antarctic programme responses to sexual predation did not detail Sanap.
Sanap runs three bases: a substantial weather and research station on the SA possession of Marion Island (about 25 staff) 2,160km from Cape Town, a small weather station on the British possession of Gough Island (about 10 staff) 2,600km away, and the Sanae IV base on Norwegian territory in Antarctica (usually about 10 staff) 4,280km out. SA has no territorial claims to Antarctica.
The very remoteness of field work conducted out of such stations often enables sexual abuses to take place far from the presence of any witnesses and makes it harder for victims to get out of danger, while the US and Australian studies showed that few young victims reported abuse out of fear of wrecking their emergent careers.
In 2018, the Sunday Times ran a full-page article on a formal case of sexual harassment against a Marion Island team member’s supervisor. It was confirmed by the DFFE, but after an investigation “the finding could not confirm her allegation. She was offered counselling.”
It also reported meltdowns of some personnel at the Marion Island base, one of whom attacked a colleague in the kitchen with a frying pan then trashed his room with an axe, but was not removed from duty — unlike other aggressive team members who had previously been airlifted home from Gough Island and Antarctica. For criminal law purposes Sanae IV residents are subject to a special 1962 act, which is administered by the Cape Town magistrate’s court.
Antarctica was only first sighted by Western explorers 205 years ago, and in the “heroic period” of its exploration in the 1890s-1920s, became fixed in the public and scientific imaginations as ultra-macho terrain, famously described by British polar travel writer Sara Wheeler as a “testing ground for men with frozen beards” like Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. The first all-woman expedition, under US geochemist Dr Lois Jones, only took place in 1969/70.
A 2020 report by Meredith Nash and Hanne Nielsen noted that women working in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (Stemm) fields experienced more sexual harassment than women in any other field except the military. They say this is enabled by neoliberal institutional stances that assume Stemm is purely meritocratic and value-neutral when it comes to gender, so structural inequalities are not addressed.
“Although almost 60% of early career polar researchers are women, women in Stemm are 3.5 times more likely to experience sexual harassment during fieldwork compared to men,” they write.
For Women’s Month in 2020, Sanap celebrated the women leading its expedition teams: Dr Abigail Paton, a medical doctor and the first SA woman to complete three sequential overwinterings on Antarctica, and medical orderly Winnie Moodaley, the team leader at Marion Island. It was a long way from the Sanae expedition in 2000, in which an all-male team posed naked in the snow for their official group portrait.
Paton, who is probably the SA woman with the most Antarctic experience, having been on six overwintering expeditions, admitted in an interview that “small-team dynamics is one of the big challenges” of working at Sanae IV, and although “I’ve never had a team go sour on me … that is something one has to keep in mind.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.