An alleged outburst of aggression at South Africa’s Antarctic research station highlights shortcomings in the psychological screening and participant selection for long-duration missions in isolated environments. Space psychologists are watching the drama unfold to make sure things don’t go similarly wrong on a future crewed trips to Mars.

Near the northern coast of Antarctica’s Norway-controlled Queen Maud Land, the SANAE IV polar research station perches near the edge of the plunging Vesleskarvet cliff. The 20,000 square-foot (1,850 square meters) base made up of three linked modules has become a backdrop of a crew-member’s psychological unravelling which, according to leaked reports, threatens the safety of fellow crew members. 

Allegations of sexual harassment, death threats and an atmosphere of fear, have been reported in South African media, jeopardizing a mission which is meant to last until December. 

Those crew members, a group of nine adventurers, have been locked up together for weeks, thousands of miles away from civilization, amid the endless snow-covered plains of the icy continent. With nowhere to escape and no uninvolved counsel to turn to at times of stress, interpersonal tensions can flare up easily during such missions. Although serious incidents are nowadays statistically rare, acrimony and discord can quickly take over among the isolated crew.

“These are extraordinary situations that can easily bring out the best but also the worst in people,” said Richard Addante, an associate professor in psychology and neuroscience at Florida Institute of Technology. “In these isolated settings, time stretches and everything gets magnified. Everything that people experience in regular environments on Earth, being it work or relationships, it feels like under a microscope or on steroids.”

Addante speaks from experience. A principal investigator for NASA’s largest psychology study investigating impacts of space travel on human psyche (the Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA), he has taken part in several simulated space missions including a 45-day stay in a tiny capsule at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He has also been overseeing the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, a series of experiments which subjects teams of astronauts to two-week simulations in an underwater habitat off the coast of the Florida Keys. 

The psychological discomfort experienced by participants in such missions goes beyond the mere nuisance of being stuck in a small space with a group of people who might not be a personality match. The unusual setting affects each individual on a physiological level, causing changes in sleep patterns, appetite and hormonal secretion.

“These extreme environments, being it Antarctica or a Mars analog habitat, disrupt all of the subsystems of your body,” Addante says. “Changes in nutrition, exercise, light exposure, sleep patterns — that all will have an effect on how you feel and how you react to all sorts of little things that under normal circumstances wouldn’t be a big problem.”

Psychologists are trying to select applicants that are stable and level-headed enough to be able to handle the pressures, but as Addante admits, there is only so much that psychological questionnaires and interviews conducted in the comfort of a warm office can reveal.

“These tests are mostly trying to select people out, but they are not great at selecting people in,” says Addante. “They are a way to take the temperature of the air, but they’re not a way to know conclusively the temperature everywhere. It’s a measurement at a moment in time. It’s a very coarse tool that can filter out the obvious red flags, the lowest hanging fruit, but they are not blood tests. The human psyche is too complex for that.”

John Leach, a veteran extreme environment and military psychologist, agrees. Putting together a successful crew for a mission to Mars or polar winter-over, involves gauging the elaborate interpersonal alchemy that goes beyond just weeding out people with obvious issues. 

“For example, studies show that if you put two extroverts together, they won’t last very long,” Leach says. “On top of that, you are selecting from a pool of people who are not completely normal. These are people who have an appetite for doing extreme things, dangerous things. Inherently, the candidates are likely to have something missing from their lives.”

Still, the mental health toll of Mars analog missions and Antarctic research expeditions is nowhere near as severe as it used to be in the age of early polar exploration. Leach, who is currently a senior research fellow in survival psychology with the Extreme Environments Research Group at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., recalls a story that to our ears may sound like taken from a cheap horror novel.

“When American polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd planned his first expedition to Antarctica in 1928, his team carried among their supplies two coffins and twelve straightjackets,” says Leach. “He expected psychological problems.” 

Psychological problems during early Antarctic expeditions were indeed not rare and were likely exacerbated by insufficient nutrition, lack of vitamins and insufficient equipment to maintain basic bodily comfort. The first crew to overwinter in Antarctica was that of the Belgian Belgica ship that got stranded in pack ice during an attempt to circumnavigate the polar cap in 1898. Two of its crew members — Jan Van Mirlo and Adam Tollefsen — developed psychotic states during the polar night that involved paranoid delusions and threats to kill fellow crew members.

A little over a decade later, radio operator Sidney Jeffreys who served on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition led by British explorer Douglas Mawson, too, descended into insanity during the Antarctic winter. Convinced his crew mates were conspiring to kill him; he took to sending frantic messages to Australia calling for help.

Leach points out the Jeffreys case as a cautionary tale showing that reports of discord and danger at Antarctic research stations need to be carefully evaluated. Perceived threats may sometimes be a result of heightened emotions in the confined setting, misunderstandings, personality differences or even an onset of paranoid delusions on the side of the complainant. In other cases, incidents may erupt seemingly out of nowhere after weeks and months of accumulated tensions.

“It's usually a number of things that come together, and it builds up and builds up, and then there's usually a trigger,” Leach said. “That trigger could be quite small, the sort of thing in other people's behaviors that might irritate you but which you would be able to handle in a normal world.”

In 2018, one such squabble at the Russian Bellingshausen Station resulted in one crew member stabbing another. The victim survived. According to an article in GQ, the perpetrator had been provoked by the victim’s constant spoiling of the endings of his books.

A mission to Mars could, in many ways, be even more challenging than an overwintering in Antarctica, Addante concedes. Stuck 4,000 kilometers from the South African coast, the expeditioners at SANAE IV could be reached by a rescue team in two weeks. There’s no chance of removing an afflicted crew member from a Mars-bound spacecraft. The range of available activities that could help dispel tensions and maintain one’s mental health is also considerably more restricted on a spaceflight mission.

“In Antarctica you can still go out and enjoy the outdoors, the fresh air in your face,” Addante says. “These missions can attract people who might be photographers and enjoy taking images of auroras and wouldn’t mind either the cold or the isolation. In a space trip, you mostly only have your mental cocoon to retreat into so it may be harder to get a respite.”

Addante thinks that the one big opportunity to improve outcomes of long duration missions in extreme environments and reduce the probability of interpersonal conflict is better training of psychological coping skills. As surprising as it may sound, psychological preparation of crew members is currently almost an afterthought in the busy training schedule of technical skills and job competencies.

“Training for any mission is usually very busy and there is a lot of different things to train on,” says Addante. “Training for psychological coping has only recently begun to be taken more seriously. Frequently, you have crew members based around the world, at different locations, and there simply isn’t time and resources to bring them together to practice and train.”

As Leach puts it, when it comes to missions in extreme environments, “you get out of it what you take into it.”

Addante compares the success or failure of an Antarctic crew to that of a marriage. Most participants of either start off with the right intentions, not all have what it takes to make it to a triumphant end. 

Leach points out that despite the occasional headline-grabbing drama, most Antarctic over-winterers who take part in the British Antarctic Survey’s missions volunteer for another rotation. 

“It’s not all perfect, they have problems and worse times,” says Leach. “But overall, they enjoy it and many of them want to come back for another stint.”

According to the latest reports, the situation may have calmed down. No evacuation mission has been initiated. Instead, South African authorities have implemented psychological support measures including frequent phone calls with psychiatrists and counsellors. The alleged perpetrator is reportedly willingly participating in the activities designed to restore relationships at the base and has written an apology letter to the alleged victims. 

According to Addante, forgiveness in such situations is as important to the successful outcome as careful participant selection. 

“I think it’s important not to be too judgmental of these mental breaks and the people who have them,” he says. “These really are extraordinary situations, and it should be interpreted with a little bit of grace and forgiveness.”