When you think of the South Pole, you definitely think of the cold. But what you probably wouldn’t think about is just how high above sea level the South Pole actually is. Amundsen-Scott station is located on top of nearly two miles of ice and sits at a physiological elevation above 10,000 feet – that’s twice the height of Mount Katahdin.

Because of this, altitude sickness at the pole is actually more of a health risk in one’s first week than frostbite is. The flight from McMurdo Station in Antarctica doesn’t allow time to acclimate en route; the elevation change is sudden and dramatic. Most people feel shortness of breath and have difficulty sleeping in their first days at the South Pole. Every year, though, several people experience more serious symptoms such as fluid in the lungs or swelling of the brain and have to be evacuated immediately to a lower elevation, usually traveling in a decompression bag.

“What’s serious altitude sickness like?” I remember asking a Polie back in Denver before I deployed.

“It’s kinda like seasickness,” he told me. “First you hope that you won’t die, and then you start hoping that you will.” It was to my great relief that I did not end up with more than the usual symptoms.

The Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minn., has been conducting a study on altitude symptoms at the South Pole to determine the frequency and severity of symptoms in people working here. Because people going in and out of the South Pole are restricted – each arrival is accounted for – Amundsen-Scott station is an ideal place to study altitude sickness. Researchers have a controlled group of people to work with. Plus, we’ve already recorded detailed personal medical histories and had lots of medical testing just to get here. We make better subjects than random samples of hikers on high-elevation mountains. The Mayo Clinic is hoping to help predict what characteristics make people more prone to altitude sickness.

After many of us volunteered for and participated in the Mayo Clinic’s study, we were able to talk to the researchers about the results. Every Sunday evening, we gather in the galley for a weekly science talk. The scientists get to share their work, and we nonscientists are kept in the loop on what research is happening here – a great reminder of the station’s purpose and the importance of our work. In the altitude sickness study, the Mayo Clinic researchers had the rare opportunity of getting to present their research to the subjects themselves.

Aside from these Sunday evening talks, my work brings me into contact with some pretty exciting science projects. The Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory is one of the more fascinating research projects going on in the world today. It’s home to a neutrino telescope being constructed in deep Antarctic ice, made by placing thousands of optical sensors between 1,450 and 2,450 meters deep into the ice. The drillers working on this project use hot water to dig the holes. It’s pretty astounding to eat lunch every day with the people whose work is expected to have a major impact on our understanding of the universe. Though I am often at Ice Cube in a maintenance capacity – delivering or repairing heaters or snowmobiles and the like – I always take the time to ask the researchers as many questions as possible, and they are just as often happy to take the time to share their work.

You might ask – since the South Pole is such an extreme, inhospitable environment, with dangers ranging from frostbite and hypothermia to altitude sickness – why are we doing research here at all? Well, projects like Ice Cube are here for a reason. It’s the extremely cold and dry atmosphere at the South Pole that provide the world’s best conditions for astrophysical observations, particularly of such phenomena as remnant cosmic radiation from the big bang. Almost more valuable than the Antarctic sky is the ice: Ice cores provide the most complete and continuous record of climate change that we have, dating back through the last ice age, approximately 250,000 years ago, and into the last interglacial period. The ice trapped the ancient atmosphere within it in little air bubbles, providing us with essential information for understanding – and predicting – global climate change.

And perhaps some of the research being done here, such as the Mayo Clinic’s study on altitude sickness, will make it even more possible to push forward with scientific investigation here at the South Pole.

Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, shares her Antarctic experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventure or information about Antarctica or to e-mail questions, visit the BDN Web site, bangordailynews.com.