Space2Sea Antarctica marks the inaugural voyage in a series produced by FUTURE of SPACE (FoS). This innovative journey blends Earth’s uncharted territories with the inspiring narrative of human curiosity and exploration. It encapsulates the core mission of FoS to: Embrace New Frontiers, Celebrate the Human Experience, and Elevate the Conversation. Student journalist Gabe Castro-Root of American University is chronicling the mission for FoS. You can read his latest dispatch below.
By the beginning of 2025, Valeriia Subotina and Mariia Chekh will be back at war. The two Ukrainian soldiers have spent much of the past three years on the battlefield defending their country from Russia’s invasion — including a year in Russian captivity before they were freed in prisoner exchanges.
But Subotina and Chekh spent the second half of December in a starkly different environment: on a cruise ship in Antarctica, photographing penguins and glaciers and socializing with celebrities like “Star Trek” actor William Shatner and astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Visiting Antarctica — and, in particular, Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base on the continent’s peninsula — was a lifelong dream of both women. During the 2022 siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Subotina sent an email from the front line to researchers at the base, saying that she hoped to visit them if she survived the war.
“When we plan something for the long term, it means that we are not going to give up,” Subotina said in an interview aboard the ship last week as it sailed along Antarctica’s northern edge. She spoke in Ukrainian, with Chekh translating to English.
Chekh, who has a degree in biology, had planned to spend a year working at Vernadsky around 2016. But then she joined the army and, she said, “I forgot about my dream completely.”
Vernadsky is one of the world’s most isolated research centers. It’s also a critically important provider of global climate data, having conducted daily readings of atmospheric ozone and other environmental indicators dating back to the 1940s.
Operations at the base have been repeatedly impacted by the war, despite its location some 9,500 miles from the front lines. Vernadsky’s outside communications were temporarily cut off in 2022 after a Russian missile struck the National Antarctic Scientific Center in Kyiv. And more than two dozen polar researchers have joined Ukraine’s…
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