Yevhen Dykiy, the acting head of Ukraine’s National Antarctic Scientific Center, taps on a little white dot on the extreme bottom of a world map, close to where the expanses of cold southern ocean meet the snowy mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula.
“That’s where our nice little base is,” he smiles, looking lovingly at the dot.
The dot marks his life’s purpose, an object that often keeps him busy in his office in the dead of night. It’s the Akademik Vernadskiy Station – Ukraine’s only scientific base in Antarctica.
Against all odds, and despite the turmoil in Ukraine over the last few years, the distant outpost 2,700 kilometers from the South Pole and more than 15,000 kilometers from Ukraine is still operating, and the Ukrainian explorers stationed there continue their research, even in the face of chronic underfunding.
But under Dykiy, a decorated combat veteran of Russia’s war in the Donbas, Ukraine’s Antarctic program is now finally starting to revive. After just a year under Dykiy’s leadership, Ukraine sent its biggest scientific expedition to the frozen continent in many years, and is now modernizing the station – for the very first time in its 23-year history under the Ukrainian flag.
And even though funding remains low and barely sufficient for conducting scientific research, Dykiy believes Ukraine can soon rise again as a polar exploring nation, and Ukrainian scientists will no longer have to emigrate to reach the top in their academic fields.
British gift
Ukrainians were actually among the first explorers of Antarctica.
Anton Omelchenko, a simple hostler originally from the city of Poltava, participated in the ill-fated expedition of British explorer Robert F. Scott, who reached the South Pole in March 1912 – only to find that he had been beaten to it by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Tragically, Scott’s group of five explorers perished on the way back from the pole.
Ukrainian-born explorers have almost always been present on the continent since those early, heroic days. But when Ukraine emerged as an independent nation in 1991, Russia declined to give Kyiv any of five former Soviet Antarctic stations.
However, help soon came from the United Kingdom: in 1996, the UK sold Ukraine its Faraday Station on Galindes Island in the Bellingshausen Sea for the symbolic price of just 1 pound sterling. Since then, the outpost has flown the Ukrainian flag, and has been named Akademik Vernadskiy Station.
Today, the station consists of 12 buildings, including a residential block, a geomagnetic observatory, a very-low-frequencies oscillations receiver, and a biological laboratory. The station’s scientific instruments together monitor Antarctica from its very depths to outer space above it.
In winter, it is home to between 10-24 polar explorers, who maintain the station and conduct regular scientific studies.
Unlike many other bases on the continent closer to the pole, Vernadskiy Station is sited in a place with a comparably forgiving climate. Due to close proximity of the ocean, local temperatures rarely fall below -20 degrees Celsius even in the winter months. Now, in February, the station is enjoying summer, with temperatures between -1 and +1 degrees Celsius.
Still, the weather is harsh – heavy snow and icy rain fall 300 days a year there, in addition to constant freezing winds that blow at speeds up to 40 meters per second. In winter, digging pathways through two meters of snow between the base’s buildings is routine work for the Ukrainian polar explorers.
First modernization
In better days, the station used to host big expeditions of nearly 50 scientists. But starting from 2002, funding shortages resulted in severe cutbacks. There were even seasons when there was only enough money to maintain a skeleton staff year-round.
Things changed when Dykiy took over the management of the station.
A biology scientist, he volunteered to fight in the earliest days of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2014, joining the Aidar Battalion, where he was in charge of its 2nd company. He participated in the bloody battle of Luhansk, but was demobilized in November 2014 due to health issues.
He returned to science, and was appointed head of Ukraine’s Antarctic Center in February 2018.
Poor funding was still a major issue – the government allocated only Hr 57 million ($2.1 million) for the whole program in 2018. But in 2019, in addition to the annual Hr 60 million ($2.2 million) budget, Dykiy managed to raise another Hr 34.6 million ($1.2 million) for the first major overhaul of Vernadskiy Station in 23 years.
“The only major construction Ukraine managed to install there was a big diesel fuel storage tank built in 2006 – which turned out being worse and cheaper than even the old British one,” Dykiy said.
The Antarctic Center plans to modernize the station’s worn-out power generators – the three diesel generators that have been working there since 1980 will be replaced with new Volvo generators. The station’s water desalinator, in use since 1986, and its two old boilers will also be replaced.
“Even the roofs need a total overhaul,” Dykiy said. “They have to cope with severe temperature drops and wild winds. It’s not good when our scientists have to collect water leaking from ceiling in buckets at the country’s only base in the Antarctic.”
The station’s internet connection has to be modernized too. The internet data traffic is currently limited to just 30 gigabytes a month – and it costs $5,000.
“However, that’s much better than what we had before,” Dykiy says. “A year ago when I came, the station had just 500 megabytes – 60 times less than now. You could say we had practically no internet there — that was enough just to exchange emails between Kyiv and the station.”
So while the station’s crew members can keep in touch with their families via online messenger services, browsing YouTube through the endless polar night is hardly an option yet. Dykiy said the center would have to spend some $100,000 to install a more powerful aerial to have unlimited, though still rather slow, access to the web.
Meanwhile, everyone at the station – both technicians and scientists – are busy with the repairs, which will hopefully be completed in 2020.
Some of the work is already done.
“What used to be our ‘biology room’ is now a full-fledged laboratory with all the equipment needed to extract DNA and RNA from living tissue, just as our more fortunate foreign colleagues can,” Dykiy says.
“Besides, we are installing new automated and precise meteorological equipment so our meteorologists won’t have to make measurements manually eight times a day.”
A year of hard work was capped in January 2019 with the departure of a team of 26 scientists for a two-month mission – the longest and biggest Ukrainian expedition to Antarctica since 2001.
For more than two weeks already, the team has been exploring the continent’s coastline, generating 3D models of glaciers, researching various bacteria and viruses, and studying the blooming of algae in the Antarctic waters.
Sheer enthusiasm
But even with increased budgets, there is still barely enough money to cover the mission’s minimal needs.
“We need at least $3 million a year just to keep going somehow,” Dykiy says. “In a perfect world, we should have been given $10 million a year, the same level as Poland or Turkey, to bring good, tangible results and get at least into the first league, let alone the premier league of explorers.”
Another big problem is salaries.
The average monthly wage of Ukrainian polar explorers is about Hr 22,000 ($810) – that’s including all of the bonuses for hazardous work in the severe Antarctic climate. A work shift for a station maintenance worker lasts 13 months.
“Try and imagine this,” Dykiy says. “The same 12 faces surrounding you for most of the year, strict isolation in a sea area that’s frozen solid for nine months. To top it off, you have a six-month-long polar night. Of course, such tough working conditions deserve better money for the guys’ families here in Ukraine.”
Of all missions now present in Antarctica, the Ukrainian crews are still the lowest paid.
Nevertheless, the program surprisingly has no shortage of enthusiasts ready to spend a year in the frozen continent. When the agency in 2018 ditched its Soviet-style “it’s-who-you-know” hiring policy and announced an open competition for places in the 2019 team, it received a record-high number of job applications from 178 top-qualified scientists and technicians.
“We were simply stunned to see what a genie we’d let out of bottle,” Dykiy laughed. “We had 3-4 good candidates for each vacancy, and the choice was really tough. I never knew we had so many dreamers in Ukraine ready to work at the world’s end, 15,000 kilometers from home, for no money – in the name of science, or to further their career, or even just for the adventure.”
The new crew of 12 carefully selected polar explorers – 10 men and 2 women – will take over at Vernadskiy Station in late March for the next year of modernization and research. One of them is mechanic Anton Omelchenko – the great-grandson of the first Ukrainian in Antarctica from Robert Scott’s 1910-1912 expedition.
Tourist stronghold
Interestingly, the Ukrainian base is one of the most visited spots in Antarctica.
During the warm season, which lasting only 3 months, from December to February, as many as 4,000 tourists from all around the world visit the station, “which is damn a lot,” Dykiy said, laughing.
The station has something to offer its curious guests, a museum of British polar missions of the 1940s and 1950s, a small Orthodox Christian chapel – the world’s most southern one – and a small souvenir shop, where visitors love having their mail envelopes marked with Verdanskiy’s special postal stamp, which features the base’s coordinates.
But the station’s greatest pride is the Faraday Bar, a classic English pub with only three tables, which has been there from the time the base was British. Sometimes, Ukrainian crewmembers treat their visitors to a shot of “the Vernadovka” – a sort of samogon (home-distilled vodka) made at the Faraday Bar.
“(Being open to the tourists) is a big headache, but it’s totally worth it,” said Dykiy. “It is a great promotion for Ukraine – lots of people hear the name of our country for the first time ever when they come to us. (While) formally we’re entitled to close the base to tourists, the polar community wouldn’t understand this.”
The base doesn’t charge for tourist visits.
As a thank-you for this, some captains of commercial tourist ships cruising between the South America and Antarctica transport small cargos to the Ukrainian station at no cost – another way for the Vernadskiy explorers to save a bit of their meagre funds.
Just recently, Dykiy said, the Ukrainian Antarctic Center managed to deliver six large bags of scientific equipment to the station from the famous Argentinian port of Ushuaia, the gateway to the Antarctic.
Different world
More than that – there is an unwritten rule for those residing on the icy continent that money should not change hands when polar explorers help each other.
“Antarctica is a land where slightly different rules apply,” Dykiy said. “Everyone is encouraged to help others for free. The harsh nature there doesn’t tolerate those unwilling to cooperate.”
And on the frozen continent, events in the wider world beyond can diminish in importance and relevance.
This even includes the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, which broke out exactly five years ago when Russia invaded and started to occupy Ukraine’s Crimea, and then launched its proxy war in the Donbas.
In the harsh conditions of Antarctica, even this hateful, undeclared war loses its significance.
“Last December I made an unplanned visit to (Russia’s) Bellingshausen Station, at the Russians’ invitation,” Dykiy said of his first trip to the polar region.
“The Russians welcomed us very warmly, they even rang their chapel bell in tribute to us. One should give them their due – all of them talked only about Antarctica matters, nothing else, as if the world beyond it didn’t exist.”
Everyone at the Russian station was aware that Dikiy had been a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas.
“Despite that, they acted with proper respect and steered clear of contentious issues between us. However, one of them in informal conversation told me this:
“If we start bringing our problems from home to Antarctica, there’ll be no more land left where we can live together.”
