All-Female Trek to the North Pole

September 7, 2018 2:36 PM

It’s a bonding exercise, yes, but also a unique chance to study the female body in extremis. The group of women were hand-selected for this this trek—the Women’s Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition—by the mission’s creator, Felicity Aston, and as part of the mission the group allowed scientists to study their vitals to learn more about the effects of cold exposure on the female body. The women came from all corners of Europe and the Middle East—Qatar, Sweden, Oman, Iceland, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Kuwait, and the UK—and their ages ranged from 28 to 50.
posted by MovableBookLady (10 comments total)

Good for them, but I am obliged to point out that the all-female Yelcho Expedition made it to the South Pole more than 100 years ago. (See Sur by Ursula LeGuin, published originally in The New Yorker and later in The Compass Rose.)
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 3:12 PM on September 7, 2018 [10 favorites]

It's not "all female" as in, "the first." It's "all female" in that it's research specifically on the female body under extreme cold temperatures. Which, I suppose, has not been studied much, let alone on women...?

The combination of physical demands and the emotional strain of an expedition—managing team dynamics, anxiety about frostbite and other injuries, the threat of encountering polar bears—cause the body’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol to spike. And to top it all off the sun never sets this close to the pole; it just circles overhead, throwing off the body’s internal clock and disrupting its natural sleep patterns, cortisol production, and blood sugar levels. These physiological responses were all targets of the researchers’ scientific inquiry.
posted by amanda at 3:36 PM on September 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

As a side note, flipping through that old New Yorker (thanks for that - will read more!) I noticed that all the cartoons are men or featuring men. The ads are men or objects with the first woman showing up after the article a hot beauty advertising Dior. There are more cars than women in that magazine. Weird. Yes, we need to study women. Or at least, we need to act like we do so that women can do fun and interesting stuff, too. Yay, trek to the North Pole! Men do stupid stuff like this for special man reasons all the time! We won't even have to kill the animals while we do it.
posted by amanda at 3:48 PM on September 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

That headline was vaguely depressing to me at first and I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized that an all-male expedition would just be called "an expedition."
posted by Basil Stag Hare at 5:11 PM on September 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

Now I want to read Sur. I'm on a Le Guin (RIP) bender lately, and one of the things I noticed on this most recent read-through is that a lot of her writing involves hiking. She wrote many fictional accounts of treks through frozen, mountainous landscapes, and of course she's one of the most feminist writers in the SF canon. I'd be really interested to read her relation of a non-fictional, all-woman expedition to the South Pole.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:44 PM on September 7, 2018

Ha, Sur was the first thing coming into my mind when I saw the headline. Well, it was the other pole.

(And I don't know in how many years North Pole expeditions would turn into something totally different... Is the Arctic still covered by solid ice? It saddens me, because the young kid who used to be me, obsessing over geography, wouldn't have asked this question in total sincerity.)
posted by runcifex at 9:32 PM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

That was fascinating to read. I wish they hadn't feel the need to illustrate it with ice dyed a lurid pink, but the actual photos of the team were marvelous. I hope we hear about some of the findings later.
posted by Margalo Epps at 6:36 PM on September 9, 2018

they hadn't feel the need to illustrate it with ice dyed a lurid pink

I thought by "they" you meant the research team and I was thinking about how pink is sort of the backlash to the backlash but no, you meant the staff at Wired in charge of adding illustrations to stories and, yeah, that is real stupid and lazy. Hot pink "ice" makes no sense. If you notice it, you'll roll your eyes.
posted by amanda at 7:35 AM on September 10, 2018

One detail that kind of surprised me is that none of the Qatari elders whom Al Thani contacted knew how to determine the qibla (the direction in which to pray) for the North Pole. My impression is that the great-circle method is pretty common in this day and age, and imagining the lines of longitude on a globe to emanate from Mecca is a pretty easy way to determine which direction to face from the North Pole. There's even a website one can use to calculate great-circle distances and bearings between any airport, including from the North Pole to Mecca.

Perhaps someone who has more knowledge of geography and cartography can come along to explain why a modern Muslim who is aware of world travel, and presumably has had to think of these things, would not be sure of this answer.
posted by skoosh at 8:46 AM on September 10, 2018

Just saw a recommendation elsewhere for the book entitled " Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic" by Jennifer Niven and thought I'd share the title name with y'all.
posted by aniola at 6:45 PM on September 18, 2018