I survived 48 hours in the most isolated camp on earth

i survived for two nights in the most remote frozen ice camp in the world so that i could show you what it takes to live in the arctic circle surrounded in every direction by 200 miles of frozen ocean what could go wrong what is the likelihood this one will break up you know what mother nature and the arctic always have their way always prepared for whatever happened about eight months ago i got an email from a u.s navy lieutenant who worked for the quote submarine readiness squadron 32 inviting me to the arctic circle when i said yes to this this is about all i knew in the last iteration of ice x we were able to provide access to the ice camp and one of the nuclear-powered submarines surfacing through the ice there uh yeah i'll go but i was not prepared i reflected in my journal a couple days after we got back on all the things that stuck in my mind because they were so totally beyond any experience that i'd ever had in my life so i first wrote about flying in planes that have skis i want to show you what it takes to get to camp queen fish there's no uber and then i wrote about landing in a tiny prop plane on what shouldn't be a runway to immediately getting on a snowmobile in the arctic with all of our professional equipment dragged on a sled like we were children rushing to a helicopter for our ride to dive in a nuclear submarine this camp had some extreme infrastructure so why is it here it's apparently a crucial exercise for the united states and yet it's a camp that most people haven't heard of so i want to share why they make this camp and then i wrote about the badass trip to the bathroom it was the most hardcore bathroom experience i've ever had so i want to share with you simply about how to survive at that camp why did they need 10 people just to keep you alive and beyond staying alive i wanted to leave with all my toes so what does it take to stay alive in a camp floating on sea ice so beautiful oh my god i'm diana and you're watching physics girl so i had a phone call with a stranger from the navy named lieutenant seth koenig who said just get your flights to prude bay and bring some warm clothes and we'll get you to the ice cap damn diana you're watching arctic girl we started our journey feeling a bit on the edge it took us days to pack our gear holy crap levi there's a lot of stuff didn't you have a list of like 50 things it was over 200 items i had 200 and then the journey just got more and more intense as we went hand warmers i bought like 60s if we got out of outside of any vehicle or building wearing this it would be frostbite within minutes oh really i kind of want to try and then we were like okay we have a full night layover in anchorage it's fine we'll just sleep should we move i thought that was you that was snoring i know are you like embarrassed for me a little bit even harry potter and spanish can't drown that out that's what i fell asleep too i'm not here so by the time we got to prude bay we were still on the edge but now we are sleep deprived we have prepared for minus 40 below you don't have to say minus 40 below if you if you say minus four it was in this mental state that we met lieutenant koenig in person so no complications in your trip it looks like they didn't pick up any of your luggage we had made it to the unincorporated community of dead horse alaska in prude bay a place that's actually kind of famous because it's where the main ice road trucker's route ends so you know if they're known for driving to the most isolated intense location in the world this is it we're about 250 miles north of the arctic circle average lows this time of year is about negative 20 negative 25. you know when you asked whether you could walk to the store there's no sidewalk if you were to so we're in this place that's so frigid that you can't go to the store or you die storms come in so fast that you can die there's no alcohol or you die so basically getting to dead horses like completing a grueling marathon and at the finish line is prohibition and bears i don't know if i really made it clear like dead horse is on the northern coast but we were heading north from there before we head north a quick message being so isolated out in the arctic makes you want to feel something warm and fuzzy again thank you to betterhelp for sponsoring this video let's talk about your mental health and therapy one of the best ways that i found to talk to my friends about therapy is through analogies we get our car service to prevent bigger issues down the road we see the dentist to prevent cavities going to therapy is like all of that routine maintenance but for your mental and emotional wellness it doesn't mean anything is wrong with you it means that you're investing in yourself to keep your mind healthy better help is customized online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist so you don't even have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to you just fill out a questionnaire to help assess your specific needs and then you get matched with a therapist in under 48 hours then you schedule secure video and phone sessions plus you can exchange unlimited messages and everything you share is completely confidential one of the things that i've learned in my own mental health journey is how to prioritize time to reflect on life reflect on a recent time spent with friends reflect on videos that we've just finished when i set aside that time to reflect on my life and goals i feel so much more present and content with better help you can request a new therapist at no additional charge any time so many people are using betterhelp that they're currently recruiting additional therapists in all 50 states join the 2 million people who have taken charge of their mental health with better help get 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com physicsgirl and now back to the arctic so we were heading out onto the frozen ocean the arctic ocean doesn't have a great track record of smooth expeditions an explorer in 1902 named evelyn briggs baldwin was paid by a baking powder tycoon named william ziegler to lead an expedition to the north pole for the first time ever but he failed to make it because he was accused of insincerity drunkenness refusal of vital equipment lack of ambition for actually reaching the poll insufficient preparation and insanity so we're going sober but we also felt kind of insane we didn't even know where we were going when we finally reached the hangar where they did all the staging we were there getting weighed by the royal canadian air force with all of our gear on they've got weight restrictions on what they can travel so we are exactly 400 pounds that's impressive and we're getting ready to get on a plane with them but we only found out where we're going right before we got on the plane okay so we're that yellow dot here yeah at the hanger you're gonna be headed this way so you're gonna be heading or northeast so this is the runway area where you'll be landing in the plane and then you'll just do a little trek over to where the camp is kind of to the east hi um this is uh diana we were calling to tell you that we're actually not coming back um tonight we're officially out yeah things were getting real do we wear like all of the arctic gear on the plane on the flight yeah because it's not this particularly well heated flight as you get further and further north to see the temperature drop it was at this moment i realized we were leaving habitability they talk about the goldilocks zone of habitability for finding where life can survive on other planets and it felt like we were leaving the goldilocks zone but staying on earth aircraft marlon nice to meet you this is levi and you're from the royal canadian airport from the air force amazing should be a nice flight uneventful about an hour and ten minutes and these are these are the skis the 600 pound skis they how do they so right now we're rolling on the wheels and then when we cycle them down what happens is they hydraulically move so that this bucket sits below the wheel so the aircraft rests on the skis there's no southwest line to the middle of the arctic ocean so you have to charter a flight or in our case the u.s navy coordinated with the royal canadian air force trip out's gonna be about an hour an hour and 15 minutes if at any time you start feeling queasy or anything like that let me know anybody beautiful perfect in the event of a emergency landing i will yell at you brace brace brakes everybody got seatbelts enough let's make yourself comfortable and they flew us in one of their twin otter planes i never heard of these before but levi actually learned that the twin otter plane it's the plane that they used recently when they did the only ever winter rescue of someone from antarctica so they've never rescued anyone before from antarctica during the polar winter but they used a twin otter plane so it's known for its reliability and i think now is a maybe a good time to remind us that antarctica is not the same as the arctic antarctica has land to land on we were heading out to the middle of the ocean i finally had some time on what ended up being a two-hour flight to finally take a breath and write down some thoughts about this whole journey so far so it's march 3rd and i wrote i'm in a tiny propeller plane about 50 miles off the northern coast of alaska flying to land on an ice camp the ice going by is seriously breathtaking giant cracks long cracks with ice freezing in it little cracks i feel like i could stay on this plane forever okay maybe like three hours and then i would get a sore butt and have to use the bathroom but right now between thinking about how cool all of this is looking out the window at an alien planet landscape and the comfortable lull of the engines i don't want this to end [Music] you're going to want to cover your face when we go back because it's kind of windy i don't want you get frostbite [Music] [Music] this is our uber driver hector ever well welcome to ice camp queen fish everything you see here wasn't here three days ago three days ago this would have been a literally a chunk of ice floating in the arctic ocean these orange tents are housing tents basically where people can sleep at night uh obviously we've got our helicopter back there that big green tent in the back is uh basically a cafeteria tent where people eat meals three meals a day the camouflage tent there is our command center where we're communicating back and forth with the mainland uh a little bit out further is the mechanics tents the snowmobiles and things of that nature need to have work done on them they're done over there i'm in the so uh arctic new people here today so i'm going to go around the room introduce yourselves uh just kind of say what you're doing here at the ice camp i'm diana cowan um i am a physicist turned youtuber and so we're here making videos about the camp we won't be pranking you no kind of youtube shenanigans uh i'm levi i'm diana's videographer and editor you want to remind everybody our number one priority here is safety uh don't want anybody getting hurt um you know the cold takes it out of you you get tired easier it's easy to become dehydrated in the arctic you need to make sure you're drinking plenty of water for coffee they're both good you know stay healthy we need you around there's a lot to be done two days 80 degrees colder and 3000 miles later you get to a military ice camp in the middle of the arctic ocean it was time to find out why 60 people would eventually be at this ice camp for three weeks you know other than to see sun rise and set just above the horizon obviously ice x is really an exercise that the navy runs approximately every two years first of all america is an arctic nation we have arctic borders this is as good a place as any to prove that we can go into the most austere environments really on earth and succeed there so for instance among the things that we work with out here are submarines the first boat's going to arrive about midnight tonight local another one shortly thereafter so we'll have two submarines underneath us in the morning when eating breakfast with a 130 to 140 people we'll be living underneath us in the water this environment up here can get negative 60 negative 70 degrees so seth is saying that they use icex for taking the most extreme equipment like a nuclear-powered submarine to the extreme so we've got an unmanned underwater vehicle those guys had to solve a problem right goes underwater and normally it bounces sound off of the bottom of the ocean and gets it back and navigates based on that technology right up here it's too far away from any kind of ground underneath us for that to be of any use so what those guys did was they thought outside the box and they flipped those uh sensors upside down so now those things are bouncing those those sounds off of the ice and getting it back but that creates an additional problem set right it knows that the ground is where the ground is ice is moving ice is constantly moving the ice that we're standing on it seems quite stable so if you need a steady state to use as your lighthouse beacon if you will as you're moving around and then the thing that you're using is also moving around how do you know you're not standing still right it's everything is relative it's crazy math that these guys have to do to test that type of material out and the only way they know if it's working is if they come up here and plop it in the water and then take it for a spin but as a scientist i was told that there would actually be researchers out here so i was curious about that if you work at a research laboratory somewhere in the continental u.s and you're trying to get better data on the arctic it's incredibly difficult to get to where we're standing here without the infrastructure that the navy brings to the place so we've got a massachusetts institute of technology lincoln laboratory coming up so basically you need 10 people to make a camp like this possible and otherwise no one would be able to come out here professor diana cowan doesn't have the infrastructure to come do her own environmental research so this ice camp provides that opportunity but you know it's the military they probably have their own intense goals some of the submarines who are participating are firing torpedoes dummy torpedoes not going to blow anything up but they're going to put the submarine through the paces of firing a live torpedo into the ocean and it goes out under the ice what's interesting about it is to go get those torpedoes we have navy divers who are cutting holes in the ice finding the torpedo and swimming under the ice to go get it and bring the torpedo to the hole strap it to a cord and then a helicopter flies it out like it's ice fishing for torpedoes they're firing torpedoes underneath us because we're on ice floating in the ocean i forget that sometimes you couldn't really tell that you're on the ice though unless you do this we just walked laps around the camp and this is our gps path oh what is that crazy because the ice is moving this is what it looked like it was like a corkscrew does that make sense because the ice is moving and so we're still just drifting through the ocean i love that as soon as i stopped walking it tracked my movement and the ice just kept going so you stand still and you can track your movement everything about this place was so foreign especially the survival aspect about it and then another concern is polar bears so there's a certain escalation of force with air horns and trying to scare them off but if all spills we have shotguns in most extreme conditions i think it's time to talk about simply how they keep everyone alive at icex and you'll notice that this is the longest section of the video because this is the most extreme version of keeping you from dying that you'll ever see and it starts months before so back in january i started tracking ice clothes that looked ideal had that multi-year rough look that we'd want for camp at that bright red ice has recently opened and it's starting to refreeze with uh new and young ice and then this great stuff is that multi-year you have to pick the location of the camp super carefully because the runway has to be younger ice since younger ice is smoother as part of this base we have a approximately 2000 five hundred foot long runway or aircraft land but that ice has to be attached to a large enough section of multi-year ice because you wanna put a camp on ice that's 9 to 12 feet thick so you know you don't fall through and as hector mentioned all of the locations where they originally planned to put the camp had broken up by the time they flew in their airplanes on site to do location scouting and they had to start all over in real time and in fact a crack opened up in previous years crumbling tents and the whole camp had to evacuate so the chances that the ground beneath our tents could break up at some point during the camp were not low that's why anne the scientist was there monitoring the ice and i heard shortly after we left the ice did start breaking up a giant crack started to form where the bathroom tent was and sent me this email describing the crack started small but quickly grew bigger at its largest it was probably five to eight meters wide it went through cycles of opening and closing when it was opening water would visibly flow through the crack forcing it open during rafting of the ice the weight of the overlying ice flow caused additional fracturing of the surrounding ice the two pieces of ice would also shear against each other so just you know living in your sheltered structure is like potentially experiencing kind of like the dynamics of plate tectonics in real time but fortunately miniature so did they fall in fortunately because of previous years experience all of the tents this year were a lot smaller and they were on portable tarp like things that could be pulled around and they moved the entire camp twice that's what these incredible photos and sent are of a fragile human camp next to a giant crack in some thin ice so no one in the bathroom tent fell in speaking of the bathroom the orange one right now is the bathroom oh i see we haven't used the bathroom yet oh it'll be quite the experience arctic conditions require very unique ways to do things so we have what we call a wag bag system so basically there's a powder inside that uh solidifies the plastic cover on here okay okay do your bids put this bag sealed into the barrel we got a tour to learn how to use the bathroom we needed a poo toriel thank you thank you i came up with that myself last night the heater went out in that so that toilet seat was you kind of gently go oh no and in the middle of the night i was very thankful for that tutorial and then i was like let's find a position where my pee doesn't hurt i didn't mind that position did you go i went that was and that was the first time i was actually scared i was like there could be a polar bear or i'll fall and hit my head on the ice and then no one's gonna notice what about getting water that wasn't trivial yep so this is our reverse osmosis unit every ounce of water we can make up here is announced less that we have to put on airplane and get up here they had a portable military-grade osmosis unit on site just to keep a bunch of humans from shriveling up drilled a hole and so one it's about 12 feet of ice pulling up seawater basically starts with your largest particulate this guy's just pulling oh yeah any biologic right that there was and then there's a high pressure side of this that's pushing the water through hopefully the water molecule is the only thing small enough to fit through the holes in the membrane and not the salt not the salt not all the any other contaminants and then there's a last stage on here adding ozone and even that was pushed to its limits we can't pull it up right around where you're staying is about 11 12 feet of ice so we're all the way down through oh you are yep but it's frozen down deep so we have the exhaust and then we also have this little pond heater in there but it's only melting the surface it's not melting deep down every cat this happens we fight it it's well the the sea water here is about 26 degrees so it doesn't need much it's kind of a catch-22 i'd love to pour some hot water down there but there's no guarantee that it's gonna do anything and if i use more water than we're making it's a fine balance so how are we gonna melt down deep enough to free the intake i don't know they're like no big deal but i was a little nervous that the thing making water for the whole camp was frozen but they did eventually get it unstuck but it wouldn't be the last time that it got frozen and stuck again you're not worried right of course not so getting water out there it's not like filling up from a faucet and neither is checking the weather you can't just use your weather app this is a micro weather station it's got solar panels that'll measure the sky visibility temperature dew point calculate wind chill it was amazing they had to constantly check for cloud cover and how high up the clouds were to advise the planes bringing supplies and personnel and some of the vips that came to the camp they got stuck on the ice camp because of weather and couldn't make it to the submarine so one of them apparently had davey the marine give them rides around the camp on the sled and so i asked davey how vip you had to be to get a ride on the sled um eating the food was kind of extreme it looks like a fruit roll-up that ate a bunch of other foods it kind of tastes like it too i do not recommend ever trying freeze dried eggs unless you absolutely hate yourself eight ounces and of course there was sleeping sleeping was extreme this is just made for you to have a place to sleep and get that human necessity over with it's not meant to be comfortable ann and the scientist was below me on this bunk she was a very good bunkmate barely moved i slept great this is where we slept last night with six other people laid down about 9 30 at night in below freezing temperatures and we were so hot i had a vent open next to here because this air system is just blowing incredibly hot air even knowing what to wear was extreme the thing that i was the most nervous about was not necessarily polar bears or crashing in a small propeller plane in the arctic or one of the other many ways you could die it was simply staying warm if you were to just walk out that way um i'd say with just what's on you you last maybe a day if somebody were to come out here and just street clothes a couple of hours probably before for sure minutes to maybe an hour before frostbite when we were preparing for this trip i'd spent months looking into it asking friends about what you should wear doing research on it i freaked out more and more because i googled what we needed and i was like okay we're gonna have to spend like five thousand dollars for getting the right gear just to not get frostbite and then finally we borrowed some clothes turns out scientists who live in alaska have extra gear lying around and if you remember amanda from the permafrost tunnel video she hooked it up for us with gear so good the guys that grew up in the north slope were envious of our our hoods the fur that was my most teenager moment of this whole trip i freaked out about what to wear and then i borrowed an outfit from a friend except that the outfit was basically equipment to not die and i still messed it up my toes are starting to go home i need to go inside for a little bit i think the on-site doc had to give me his silk socks yeah the medic gave me his socks i was trying to tell you off camera because it was embarrassing so that's how extreme it is to stay alive at an ice camp in the arctic a camp that's extreme to even get to the most profound thing that i wrote in my journal was sitting in the bathroom tent i didn't write it in here i wrote it on here it's 1 38 am and i've trekked across the camp i'm sitting in the bathroom giving it a go it's crazy how fast it feels like family with the people in this camp i'm going on a nice little nighttime job there's a bear baby i'm a ravenclaw so i'm gonna stay here in the tent you get your own inside jokes and learn to read each other well no one's gonna join you for cards tonight no it doesn't look like it come on oh well life of the cook yep tis a lonely life everyone takes what they want then they leave you you laugh at everyone's differences and similarities angry birds playing but it's ar so it's a 3d model that's on the table i just i'm just totally you feel close to these people who are so remotely isolated with you just trying to stay warm where it came just an outstanding job to get to this point so my hats off to the guys that came out here good job that's all i've got i just wanted to share what this was like because honestly this was the absolute craziest thing that i've ever done up until we went into the nuclear submarine which we'll put in subsequent videos i'm very excited to make those for you guys here's a little teaser maybe i'll leave that to my editor to decide if this is still in here then he decided to give you a teaser thanks so much for watching and happy physicsing done [Music] you

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 444,924

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern

Id: ap7-Wci2-8k

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022