Since 2007, Michaela Musilová has dreamed of visiting Antarctica.
As an astrobiologist, she has two goals: to identify the limits of life on Earth and to assess the possibility that life as we know it exists elsewhere in the universe. Research into how life behaves in the extreme environment of Antarctica is central to her work; microbes that manage to survive the frozen environment at the end of our world could also teach us a lot about their potential beyond Earth. Musilová has tried dozens of times over the years to sail to the southernmost continent, but never succeeded.
It wasn’t because her mission proposals were lacking, she says.
“Unfortunately, it was usually because an older male colleague or professor wouldn’t let me go or took my place,” she recalled in an interview with Space.com.
Women have only been working in Antarctica since the late 1970s, before that they were officially banned by countries organizing research programs on the continent. Apparently “the hardships on the continent were too great for the women and the hardships of providing separate bathroom facilities too great for the program administrators.” On her twelfth attempt, the analog astronaut and former director of the Hawaii Space Exploration performed Analog and Simulation (HI-ZEE) habitat is now finally on board a cruise ship bound for Antarctica, with more than 100 women in science, technology, engineering and math.
Related: Satellites reveal a catastrophic year for emperor penguins amid Antarctica’s climate crisis
Throughout the journey and while on the Antarctic ice, this journey is designed to encourage each of these women on a journey to become empowered scientists, in an environment where they feel safe and heard.
“I really like the idea of having this global network of women to collaborate with, to help each other, to inspire each other,” said Musilová, adding that working on her leadership skills also inspires her to create platforms that women and girls can access. involved in STMM fields.
“Together we have a support network and training on many of the common challenges women face in general, but also specifically in STEMM fields,” she continued, “whether it be discrimination, harassment , prejudice – all these very negative things – to fit in, to be able to have a family and still maintain a career, which is something that women generally have to deal with more than men.”
Leaders in astronomy tackling climate change
The journey now underway has brought together female climate researchers, doctors, ecologists, civil engineers and a handful of astronomers. The passengers, from at least 18 nationalities, are bound together by a mutual interest in sustainability and climate action for a rapidly changing planet.
“The sustainability of our planet is in crisis and so is the state of leadership in our world,” the organization notes website from Australia-based Homeward Bound, a non-profit organization that has been leading all-female Antarctic expeditions like this one since 2016. “It’s not that men can’t or won’t do this. Rather, it’s that, when time is short, it may be that gender balance on leadership teams will benefit us all.”
Since the end of last year, only women existed 20 per cent from astronomers around the world. If current hiring practices remain unchanged, it would take another 60 years for the female workforce in astronomy to increase to 30 percent. researchers previously found.
“More than 50 percent of women in technology roles leave the industry before they turn 35,” Pamela Sutton-Legaud, CEO of Homeward Bound, said in an interview. rack. “We exist to enable more women in this industry, helping them leverage the tools they need to excel in their industry – especially in the fight for the sustainability of our planet.”
To highlight the need for sustainability, regions of Antarctica that are rapidly warming due to human-induced activities were chosen to serve as a vulnerable backdrop during the journey. These are areas with record levels of sea ice and an alarming loss of penguins. among other worrying trendsbecause of the crisis.
“I’m much more likely to wear a civilian hat than an astronomer hat,” Anna Frebel, a physics professor at MIT who is also on the ship, told Space.com. “It will all be wonderful, of course, but the scientist’s eye will also reveal quite quickly what we don’t see: not enough ice and not enough live penguins.”
The program aims to build a network of 10,000 women scientists in leadership positions around the world by 2036, ready to tackle climate challenges.
“Most of us have a very strong sense of what is happening in the world and how our environment is changing and how we humans influence it,” Musilová said. “Going to Antarctica and seeing it for yourself will be very transformative.”
As part of the program, Musilová and the others completed a preliminary assessment of their leadership skills and are taking these results with them on the trip. Building on these results, the group will undergo workshops, lectures and networking sessions to further improve their leadership skills, with a particular focus on principles such as empathy and inclusivity. In this way, the program “highlights many values that are unfortunately not as popular as they should be in work environments, including the space industry,” Musilová said.
“It’s still a male-dominated industry.”
Over the next three weeks, the group will cross the Drake Passage, a colossal, noticeably choppy body of water prone to forty-foot waves. The scientists will then – weather permitting – set foot on the remote Falkland Islands and the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia before sailing around the Antarctic Peninsula on their way back to the drop-off location in Ushuaia, Argentina.
“We’ll make a lot of lifelong friends, possibly hold each other’s hair when we puke because we’re so seasick,” Frebel said.
During this self-funded trip, the group will be cut off from the rest of the world, with only sporadic access to the internet. “Our day jobs and our families and all these things that we care about — but that eat up our mental bandwidth — don’t have access to us,” said another passenger, Tiffany Vora of Explore Mars, a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts. Space.com.
Vora plans to take the leadership skills she learned on the trip home with her, and will continue to advocate for female leadership in the space industry long after her Antarctic escapade. Another important goal, she said, is to demonstrate that there is no fundamental conflict between improving life on Earth and expanding human civilization beyond our planet: “We don’t have to make a choice between Earth and space if we make the right kind of choices starting today.”
In addition to the agenda of building leadership skills during the trip, participants are looking forward to having some fun on the trip, including taking a “cold dip” in the Antarctic sea, building some arts and crafts projects and even dressing up for a costume party.
“I’m still deciding on my outfit – my top three options are to dress up as Barbie, a disco ball or Ernest Shackleton,” Isobel Romero-Shaw of the University of Cambridge in Britain told Space ahead of the trip. com.
Creating impact
While the trip is generally intended to inspire leadership for a sustainable, climate-friendly future on Earth, Vora and some other astronomers see clear parallels with space exploration.
“In my view, space travel is fundamentally a sustainability issue,” she said. ‘You work on the edge of what is possible. Not everyone is on board with you. How do you lead during that time?”
She hopes to spark conversations among ship participants whose expertise lies outside of astronomy about how they can contribute to the space industry and ultimately form a long-term support network.
“To me, it aligns beautifully with what we need to do to think decades into the future where humans make their home beyond Earth,” Vora added, “such as learning to work in resource-constrained environments in the face of polarity, confusion and discomfort. .”
“To create any significant impact, we need broad cooperation and a very large network,” passenger Mariya Lyubenova, astronomer and editor of the European Southern Observatory’s quarterly magazine The Messenger, told Space.com. Lyubenova plans to apply her leadership skills in advocating for dark sky conservation, for which cooperation between countries is crucial, she added.
Scientists are known to have well-trained, highly logical brains, and while this can help them approach problems in a systematic way, strategic planning alone does not translate theoretical solutions into impactful actions. So astronomers on the ship also hope to learn soft skills through the program’s teamwork assignments.
“We need to learn certain transferable skills,” Debatri Chattopadhyay, a research fellow at Cardiff University in Britain and a passenger on the ship, told Space.com. “We know physics, of course, but physics is not going to teach us how to deal with people.”
Others on the all-female trip consider it a “giant focus group.”
“We keep each other honest, but also focused on what our goals are and how we can achieve them,” Frebel said. “At the end of the day, we all agree that we want to do something for the planet.”
The group’s diverse background would play an important role in having difficult conversations about leadership, as the trip takes them out of their daily echo chambers and forces them to look critically at creative solutions to climate problems.
Frebel will carry paintings by a local artist depicting different species of penguins, a whale, a krill and a seal. She plans to photograph them in the Antarctic snow and exhibit those photos at a future exhibition at home in Massachusetts.
“Climate change is real and if we want to continue seeing penguins, we better do something.”