Hello, everyone!

Sundays are always a treat. You can sleep in a bit longer (at least some of us can …), and there’s not so much work to do (schedule permitting …), so you can just ease into the day and take care of the things you never get around to, and which are better done in peace and quiet …

And today is a Sunday: a good day to write something for the blog and take a look back at the past several days. To me, it seems like the days go by faster during the Polar Night. The days turn into weeks, and before you know it, it’s almost July … July? Memories come back: biking to work in shorts, biking to the nearest lake to cool off after work, and watching the sun go down on the lake at 9 pm.

Nearly July … it sure doesn’t feel like it, with wind-chill temperatures down to 47 degrees below zero. For the past few days we haven’t had any major storms; the sky was often clear, treating us to a wonderful display of colours around noon. There was little wind, though the polar air was bone-chilling. We used the time to take care of a few outdoor tasks, and even managed to measure the sea ice. Our meteorologist Anna-Marie, who was responsible for completing the task, is now preparing a separate blog entry about it.

When it comes to taking photos, I find myself taking the same shots over and over again, but the mixture of colours during the Polar Night is different every time you look at it … and so once again I took off one of my gloves and snapped a picture with my smartphone. But it had to be a fast one, or I’d get too cold.

At night, we often used the heated workshop in the station’s basement to work on our signposts, which the overwintering teams traditionally put up at midwinter. In some cases, making the signs involves time-consuming and very delicate woodworking – though for my sign, I decided on a more rustic, not too complicated version … so more like what you might find at a certain Swedish furniture company and not so much like a stylish designer piece … and burning the letters into the wood was a lot of fun.

A week before the actual solstice (21 June), we started getting the first midwinter greetings from the other Antarctic stations. So we started our own preparations for midwinter, took postcard-style group photos, wrote and designed our own greetings, while our cook Wanderson planned a five-course meal. It was amazing how many midwinter greetings we received from the other stations every day. Plus we got our fair share of crazy photos, which unfortunately I can’t share because of copyright. But many of them can probably be found online, too. My personal favourites came from Troll (a Norwegian station and our neighbour, 250 km away), Base Carlini (Argentina), Bird Island (UK), Syowa (Japan), Bharati (India), Zhongsan (China), Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole (USA) and Concordia (France/Italy). It’s worthwhile trying to find them online; the Internet has made the world a smaller place … what surprised me was the fact that many countries operate more than one research and supply station all through the winter – that, and the sheer diversity of countries with winter stations … Russia, South Korea, Australia, Chile, Brazil, Poland, New Zealand, South Africa (warm wishes to our neighbours at SANAE), Ukraine … we were all delighted to receive so many great photos, and made them into a slideshow that we watched over and over again on the solstice.

On the morning of 20 June, when I checked my mails I found midwinter greetings from Polarstern, the AWI’s icebreaker, which is still on the MOSAiC expedition in the High North. The photo even showed the ship’s current coordinates … 82 degrees North … compared to us, at 70 degrees South … I wrote a quick mail for Polarstern, clicked on ‘send’, and my mail and the photos attached were already on their way to the ship. The miracles of technology; and now I’ve even joined a Messenger group for ‘Antarctic overwinterers’. It’s a small world … it always makes me think of the pioneers, who conducted research here without all our modern technologies. I feel a great deal of admiration and tremendous respect for their achievements and their boldness.

On Sunday, 21 June 2020, we began our official midwinter festivities at the Neumayer III station. In the morning we took down a few older signs from the overcrowded posts in front of the station (at 40 degrees below zero), and then went inside to the workshop, where we put our brand-new signposts in the brackets from the old ones, with fingers that were still numb from the cold. After lunch we ventured outside to put them on the posts, which wasn’t so easy with our icy fingers. After an hour-and-a-half of work, we took a few photos, as long as our batteries held out. My thoughts turned toward home, and I had the feeling it was the same for the rest of the team. I felt a warm glow of sentimentality … out in the ice at minus 40.

Around 6 pm that evening we ceremoniously opened the crate of wine, which is brought to Antarctica every year and comes from Neustadt an der Weinstraße in honour of Georg von Neumayer (who hailed from the Palatinate), and drank to the health of our fellow Antarctic stations. Then to Polarstern, to our colleagues and friends back home, and finally, to our families. And once again I felt a tingle in my stomach, but not from the wine …

At 8 pm our Brazilian cook Wanderson began serving a five-course meal … in a pristine white chef’s uniform, complete with hat. Everyone dressed up for the occasion; even I traded in my usual t-shirt and sweater for a button shirt. And we really had a wonderful, festive and mouth-watering night in Antarctica, not to mention one with a great deal of sentimental feelings … in my case, and surely for one or two of the others. It was also a night for reflecting on the last eleven months … how we all met for the first time, in Bremerhaven on 31 July 2019, then the preparation phase, the last holiday before leaving, the flight bound for South Africa, the delayed connecting flight to Antarctica, the first steps we ever took on the Antarctic continent, the moment I first stood before the Neumayer III station and was awestruck by its size and scale, how at first we kept getting lost in the unfamiliar station with its twists and turns … and how we’ve since made it into our home (far) away from home.

And now that midwinter has come and gone, each day brings us closer to the first dawn. I take a glance at my monitor, which tells me the Polar Night will end 23 days and 2 hours from now … today is 29 June, and it usually takes another two days before the blog entry is posted online; after that, there will only be three weeks left. Just three weeks … I expected the Polar Night to be much longer and darker. In the twilight phases between 10.30 am and 2 pm, you can always see beautiful light patterns in the sky, though I’ve yet to encounter any polar lights that could be seen with the naked eye. But when it’s dark, the star-filled sky is breath-taking … Before I wrap up this entry, here are a few more snapshots taken while doing outdoor work. After all, our workplace is one of a kind…

Last but not least, I’d like to mention the campaign Virtual NCT Run Against Cancer: Alone. Together!, which also took place in Antarctica this weekend. The pictures show the Antarctica Neumayer III team, which, on the weekend from 26 to 28 June, covered a not-too-shabby distance of 83 kilometres …

Hope to hear from you soon, warm wishes to the rest of the world, and especially to our loyal readers, and our loved ones back home…