How to travel to the fire office on Earth

The plane is Hercules C-130, very great. You reach this small bus, see this brutal plane, and enter the back. Then you sit next to each other in these longitudinal seats. Then he leaves a seven-hour trip without toilets, with a small snack, and a lot of sound around you-only sitting until you see, for the first time, a little of the Antarctica.

Concordia is more isolated than the International Space Station, 240 miles above Earth.

Image: Esa/Ipev/PNRA – A. Kumar

You see these wonderful ice shelves of the small windows you have there. The first thing you see when it comes out is ice everywhere. You are really new in this environment, and sometimes you feel it is somewhat similar to another planet.

There is an Italian station there, and we were supposed to stay for one day. But what we learned very quickly is, in French, we say, En Antarctic Pas de PronostiqueIn the sense, “do not predict the Antarctica”, because the weather cannot be predicted. So, instead of staying one night, we stayed for about a week.

This station is just one logistical. It is not intended to host people, and everyone who remains there prevents others from coming. It is a real logistic challenge for people who work there, so they want us to leave as soon as possible. But the weather is so unpredictable that you cannot take a plane and go inside. You need to wait for the weather to be almost stable, and the pilot says, “I am ready to fly,” because he has the last word.

I still have a data problem before, and I was trying to connect to the Internet. There, it was like the nineties of the nineties – as you know, The sound of the sound of the whistle. I tried to log in, and finally, after two or three hours, on one computer, I arrived at the theater he said, “Well, I will log in to your account so that you can download your belongings. Please give me your phone number. I will send you a short text message to log in.” This was the double verification, and it was not working because it is clear that there is no phone service. So I could not access my data due to this double verification.

Finally, we took a plane. This younger plane, the BT-67 plane, which comes from Canada to fly inside Antarctica and then return to Canada at the end of the season. It took four hours to ride the plane. It is a non -compressed plane. You can make sure to put all your clothes, to be ready to go out in Concordia, because it is about 30 ° C. We were very afraid.

The first thing after landing in Concordia was this feeling of dizziness, dizziness. What I did not know when I got there is that you are 3200 meters above sea level, so you feel a little height. After four hours in this small plane, where you see a flattening of eggs, and nothing else, it descends to Concordia.

From a distance, you see the station. This station looks very small because there is nothing around it literally – no mountains, nothing. You have this little Boulot Dans L’StomacAs we say in French, like butterflies, because, as you know, “Wow, this will be my home for one year.” We got to the Concordia station, and the crew that just spent a year was leaving the station now, and he was waiting for us and welcoming us with great heat. They made us inside the station because we were sometimes afraid of height disease. They want to make sure that no one holds anything heavy, and that we do not do physical activity. They told us, “Just stay calm for the next few days.”

Concordia can only be reached by planes during the summer months, from November to February. In winter, temperatures decreased to a minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Image: Esa/Ipev/PNRA – A. Kumar

A station made of two towers, with 18 faces per tower. It is essentially white, with a little orange, and this is all. You can enter through a tunnel between the two towers. You take off your shoes and leave all your things there. It is very small. Then you can go to the left, which is the “calm tower”. Inside, you have dormitories, laboratories and hospital. It has three floors. The middle floor is divergence, and the upper floor is laboratories. It is called a “calm tower” to keep it calm. Then we go to the other tower, on the right side of the entrance. She has technical things. On the second floor, there is a video room for movies and sports room. At the top, you have a living room, the eating area, and the kitchen.

Within five minutes, I toured your new home. It’s very impressive because you think, “someone had to build this in the middle of anywhere. Someone had to take the first steps.” This is incredible. Many people go to Antarctica without anything. We got here, and we have the luxury of this building to protect us from this environment.

It is outside this world to be there. We have seen many pictures of Antarctica, and we may have read a lot of books, but you were not in the middle of Antarctica, which is completely different. There is no life – no birds, no trees – nothing literally, nothing but ice and wind.