Embracing uncertainty

9 March 2024

Elise Droste (Alfred Wegener Institute)

A ship is its own little cosmos. It is isolated, has its own routine, and resources are limited. Then we put a bunch of enthusiastic scientists on board with an ambitious mission, and send them to Antarctica, one of the most remote and extreme places on Earth. What could possibly go wrong?

PICCOLO has scientific objectives to fulfil, and each scientist will have additional smaller ones. Opportunities to steam to the Southern Ocean and to do research around Antarctica don’t come around every day. It could be a once in a lifetime experience. We leave families behind for months to sample seawater. We put our lives back home on hold to be here. Driven by curiosity and wonder for the natural world, we choose to be on this ship and are grateful for it, but of course, there is a pressure to come back with lots of data. Good data.

We’ve brought with us hopes and expectations for what we want to achieve. Sharing these with each other fuels the excitement and increases the ambition. However, from the moment the ship left port in Punta Arenas, all the promises we made in proposals and plans were placed into Poseidon’s hands. It rapidly becomes clear that our circle of influence, the things we have direct control over, is very small in this place. It is dwarfed by the waves, the weather, the ice, but also limited by (un)available resources on board, and people’s energy to keep going despite constant change.

What was true an hour ago, might not be true now. The plan we made only works if the sea ice cover doesn’t change too much, but the winds and currents don’t care. The plan was to go south and then north, but a storm forces us to first go north and then south. And even when everything is going swimmingly, that’s when your analysis instrument in the lab decides to misbehave and screams for hours of troubleshooting. Say goodbye to that one hour of social time you were looking forward to.

There is some irony in struggling with uncertainty as a scientist, seeing as science revolves around uncertainty and the unknown. We speak its language, understand its implications, and accept its presence, but when it comes to our own lives, how well do we really deal with it?

It’s human nature to avoid change and uncertainty. It can be stressful and unwanted. When we find ourselves on a (very sophisticated) floating piece of steel in the middle of the ocean and plans tend to change from hour to hour, we want to find a way to navigate that constant change. People on board are in constant adaptation mode. It’s a given, flexibility is key, and we soon find that creativity becomes an extremely helpful – or even necessary – skill to have.

When change is sudden and threatens work into which we’ve already invested many hours of our time, it can be painful and difficult to accept. However, the more extreme the situation, the more we are forced to see it from a larger perspective. A medivac caused us to literally instantly drop our preparations to jump onto an ice floe found half an hour previously, and strap all equipment down to steam to the other side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Within minutes, emotions leapt from almost child-like excitement with the prospect of stepping onto the Antarctic ice, accompanied by some pressure to get all the preparations done in time and the anticipation of something new and epic, into a void where there was only concern for the patient and uncertainty as to what was going to happen next.

In this case, the highest priority was crystal clear and easy to accept. In other, perhaps less dramatic scenarios, priorities can be more challenging to identify, and different perspectives are harder to see. But without fail, the people on board manage to do so anyway. They see change as opportunity. With it comes the attitude to make the best of the given situation. We can’t change the circumstances, but what can we do with the little things that we do have control over?

I identify this resilient attitude with life and science on board, because this is where I’ve been hyper-aware of it being put into action. Certain challenges feel intensified on a ship. We don’t have the usual people in our lives around us who we can turn and rant to about our struggles, we can’t extract ourselves from our surroundings to get away from it all, and we certainly cannot let off steam in the pub.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether these challenges are any different from the ones back on land. Do we find it easier to deal with the ones on board only because we feel like we don’t have a choice? Maybe none of it is easy at all, but we are just willing to embrace uncertainty more in some situations than in others. It is then a nice reminder that if we can embrace the uncertainties when in unpredictable seas and ice, perhaps we can embrace the uncertainties of our lives on land a bit tighter, too.