Since 2007, Michaela Musilová has dreamt of visiting Antarctica.
As an astrobiologist, she has two goals: To discover the bounds of life on Earth and to evaluate the chance that life as we comprehend it exists elsewhere within the universe. Researching how life behaves in the intense environment of Antarctica is essential for her work; microbes that manage to survive the frozen environment at the top of our world could teach us rather a lot about their potential beyond Earth, too. Through the years, Musilová has tried a dozen times to set sail to the southernmost continent, but it surely never worked out.
It wasn’t because her mission proposals were lacking, she says.
“Unfortunately, more often than not it was because an older male colleague or professor didn’t need to let me go or took my place,” she recalled in an interview with Space.com.
Women have worked in Antarctica only because the late Nineteen Seventies, prior to which they were officially banned by countries which organized research programs on the continent. Apparently, “the pains of the continent were too great for the ladies and the pains of providing separate bathroom facilities were too great for this system administrators.” On her twelfth attempt, the analog astronaut and former director of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) habitat is now onboard a cruise ship on her solution to Antarctica finally, with over 100 women in science, technology, engineering and arithmetic fields.
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Seventeen years – I actually have been attempting to get to Antarctica for 17 years now and it’s finally happening! Fingers crossed that it will work out 😊🤞. pic.twitter.com/BpAlHEni2nNovember 13, 2023
In the course of the voyage and while on Antarctic ice, this trip is designed to encourage each of those women on a journey toward becoming empowered scientists, in an environment where they feel secure and heard.
“I actually like the concept of getting this global network of ladies to work with, to assist one another, to encourage one another,” said Musilová, adding that working on her leadership skills also inspires her to create platforms for ladies and girls to become involved in STEMM fields.
“Together, we’ve a support network and training related to lot of the standard challenges women must take care of basically, but additionally particularly in STEMM fields,” she continued, “whether it’s discrimination, harassment, bias — all those very negative things — to fitting in, having the ability to have a family and still maintain a profession, which is something normally women must face greater than men.”
Leaders in astronomy tackling climate change
The voyage now underway has gathered early-, mid- and senior-career women climate researchers, medical doctors, ecologists, civil engineers in addition to a handful of astronomers. The passengers, hailing from at the very least 18 nationalities, are connected by a mutual interest in sustainability and climate motion for a rapidly changing Earth.
“The sustainability of our planet is in crisis and so is the state of leadership in our world,” notes the website of the Australia-based Homeward Certain, a non-profit organization which has led all-women Antarctic expeditions like this one since 2016. “It’s not that men can’t or won’t do that. Somewhat that, when time is brief, it might be that the balance of men and girls on leadership teams will serve us all.”
As of late last 12 months, women comprised only 20 percent of astronomers around the globe. If current hiring practices remain unchanged, it will take one other 60 years for the ladies workforce in astronomy to rise to 30 percent, researchers previously found.
“Greater than 50 percent of ladies in technology roles leave the industry before they turn 35,” Homeward Certain CEO Pamela Sutton-Legaud said in a statement. “We exist to enable more women inside this sector, by helping them harness the tools they should excel of their industries — particularly within the fight for the sustainability of our planet.”
To drive home the necessity for sustainability, regions of Antarctica rapidly warming because of human-driven activities were chosen to function fragile backdrops in the course of the voyage. These are areas which have seen record-low sea ice levels and an alarming lack of penguins, amongst other worrying trends, because of the crisis.
“I will probably be far more wearing a citizen hat than an astronomer hat,” Anna Frebel, a physics professor at MIT who’s also on the ship, told Space.com. “Obviously, it is going to be all beautiful, however the scientist’s eye may even pretty quickly reveal what we’re not seeing, which is just not enough ice and never enough live penguins.”
By 2036, this system goals to construct a network of 10,000 women scientists in leadership positions around the globe poised to assist address climate issues.
“Most of us feel very strongly about what is occurring on the planet and the way our surroundings is changing and the way us humans are impacting it,” Musilová said. “Going to Antarctica and seeing it for ourselves goes to be very transformational.”
As a part of this system, Musilová and the others accomplished a preliminary assessment of their leadership qualities and are carrying these results on the trip. Constructing off of those results, the group will undergo workshops, lectures and networking sessions to further enhance their leadership skills, focusing especially on tenets like empathy and inclusivity. This fashion, this system emphasizes “quite a lot of values that unfortunately aren’t as popular as they must be in work environments, including the space industry,” Musilová said.
“It’s still an industry mostly dominated by males.”
Over the following three weeks, the group will cross the Drake passage, a colossal, notably choppy body of water liable to 12-meter waves. The scientists will then set foot on — weather permitting — the distant Falkland Islands and sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia before cruising across the Antarctic peninsula on their way back to the drop off location in Ushuaia, Argentina.
“We’ll make quite a lot of friends for all times, possibly hold one another’s hair once we puke because we’re so seasick,” said Frebel.
During this self-funded trip, the group will probably be cut off from the remaining of the world with only sporadic web access. “Our day jobs and our families and all these items that we care about — but that eat up our mental bandwidth — cannot access us,” one other passenger, Tiffany Vora of Explore Mars, a non-profit corporation based in Massachusetts, told Space.com.
Vora plans to bring the leadership skills she learns from the trip back home, continuing to advocate for ladies leadership within the space industry long after her Antarctic escapade. One other one among her key goals, she said, is to display that there isn’t any fundamental conflict between improving life on Earth and increasing human civilization beyond our planet: “We haven’t got to choose between Earth and space if we make the correct form of selections starting today.”
Along with the trip’s leadership skill-building agenda, participants sit up for having some fun in the course of the trip, including taking a “cold plunge” into the Antarctic sea, constructing some arts & crafts projects, even dressing up for a dressing up party.
“I’m still deciding on my outfit — my top three options are dressing as Barbie, a disco ball, or Ernest Shackleton,” Isobel Romero-Shaw of University of Cambridge within the U.K. told Space.com prior to the voyage.
Creating impact
While the trip overall goals to encourage leadership for a sustainable, climate-friendly future on Earth, Vora and few other astronomers see definite parallels to space exploration.
“In my mind, space is fundamentally a sustainability problem,” she said. “You are working on the sting of what is possible. Not everybody is on board with you. How do you lead in those times?”
She hopes to spark conversations amongst participants on the ship whose expertise lies outside astronomy on how they’ll contribute to the space industry, and ultimately form a long-term support network.
“To me, it maps beautifully onto what we’d like to do for pondering many years into the longer term where humans make their home off Earth,” Vora added, “like learning to work in resource-constrained settings within the face of polarity, confusion and discomfort.”
“To create any significant impact, we’d like a broad collaboration and a really big network,” passenger Mariya Lyubenova, an astronomer and editor of European Southern Observatory’s quarterly journal, The Messenger, told Space.com. Lyubenova plans on applying her leadership skills to advocating for dark sky preservation, for which collaboration amongst nations is crucial, she added.
Scientists are known to have well-trained, highly logical brains, and though this can assist them approach problems in systematic ways, strategic planning alone doesn’t translate theoretical solutions into impactful actions. So, astronomers on the ship are also hoping to learn soft skills through this system’s teamwork assignments.
“We want to learn certain transferable skills,” Debatri Chattopadhyay, a research associate at Cardiff University within the U.K. and a passenger on the ship, told Space.com. “We all know physics, after all, but physics is just not going to show us the way to handle people.”
Others on the all-women trip view the journey as a “giant focus group.”
“We keep one another honest but additionally focused on what our goals are and the way to get there,” said Frebel. “At the top of the day, all of us agree that we would like to do something for the planet.”
The varied background of the group would play a crucial role in having tough conversations about leadership, because the trip uproots them from their every day echo chambers and forces them to look critically at creative solutions to climate issues.
Frebel will probably be carrying paintings by an area artist featuring several types of penguins, a whale, a krill and a seal. She plans to photograph them placed within the Antarctic snow and display those pictures at a future exhibition back home in Massachusetts.
“Climate change is real and if we would like to maintain seeing penguins, we higher do something.”