The Long Winter Night

A scientist describes the brutal and awe-inspiring wonders of living and working on the frozen Polar oceans

- Dr Vishnu Nandan

IMAGINE A WARM, summer day at Juhu Beach in Mumbai. Ocean waves crash along the shore; a balmy wind brings sea spray upon your face; the sun glimmers on the horizon. But what if the sun sets in Juhu and doesn't rise again for months? It's pitch dark all hours of the day and the sea freezes over? And you can walk, run or even drive your car across the frozen beach floating on top of an ocean. Sound surreal? Well, this is the kind of place where I've spent long stints of my professional life over the last decade or so. As a sea ice remote sensing scientist, I overwinter in the 24x7 polar darkness and frigid temperatures of six month-long nights in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

Living and working in the one of the most extreme and remote parts of the world was a happy accident. Like many middle-class Indians my age, I trained to be an electronics engineer and, after graduation, was placed in an IT company. It was dreary work and before long, I resigned. After a year-long struggle attempting to crack various PSU exams with no success, I ended up pursuing a Master's in Earth Observation Sciences from the International Institute for GeoInformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC) in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO. That changed my life. I finished my degree in 18 months, and moved to the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany as a research associate and started working on the Antarctic ice cap. A PhD in Geography from the University of Calgary, Canada, three more post-doctoral fellowships and 15 field seasons at the north and south Poles later, I am proud to be an experienced research scientist.