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Content warning: This article features scenes of physical and sexual harassment and assault.
It was August 1999, and Jane Willenbring, a geologist at Stanford, was then a 22-year-old woman who described herself as “rude. “He had just arrived to begin his master’s degree in Earth sciences at Boston University. An undergraduate student on an oboe scholarship at North Dakota State University, he had studied beetle fossils discovered in Antarctica and learned how, millions of years ago, the now-frozen continent once clumped together in freshwater lakes. “It’s not that different from situations we might imagine. “We wanted to wait for the long haul,” he says. I wanted to explore this critical science. “It seemed vital to long-term global climate change,” he says.
Additional reporting via Meghan Herbst.
Of all geologists, few were more famous than the guy Willenbring had gone to study with in Boston: 37-year-old David Marchant. Marchant, a scruffy professor at BU, a rock star in rock studies. He was part of a research organization that rewrote Antarctic history by discovering evidence of volcanic ash, proving that Antarctica had been solid for millions of years and not as prone to warming and cooling cycles as Guyy thought. To honor his accomplishments, the U. S. Council on Geographic Names approved the convening of a glacier southwest of McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s main study base, in his honor.
Willenbring said Marchant insisted on picking her up at the airport, an offer she found attractive but odd. It became stranger when he began to make her feel bad about his gesture, which she hadn’t asked for. “I’m missing a Red Sox game,” he recalled, scolding her. “You really deserve to have picked a better time to fly. ” He asked her if she had a boyfriend, how she saw him, and if she knew anyone in Boston or if she would be alone. In a few months, she would be going with him on a study vacation to Antarctica and the region with its great chunk of ice of the same name. ” It was almost like a line for a pickup truck,” he recalls, “‘I have an ice cream parlor.
But it was what happened in the shadow of the glacier that led Willenbring to confront Marchant and become the first to speak out against the horrors faced by women at the back of the world. An August 2022 report through the National Science Foundation, the leading firm investment Antarctic research found that 59% of women at McMurdo and other box-type stations run by the U. S. Antarctic Program are not in the U. S. A number of U. S. citizens said they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. One central employer, Leidos, has a $2. 3 billion government contract to manage ice-painting sites. One woman alleged that a manager slammed her head against a steel cabinet and then sexually assaulted her. Britt Barquist, McMurdo’s former fuel foreman, says she was forced to paint next to a manager who had sexually harassed her. “What was traumatic: I would tell people, ‘I’m scared of this person,'” she says, “and no one cared. “
With a congressional investigation underway, Willenbring is sharing her full story for the first time in hopes of inspiring others to come forward and call for the justice they long deserve. But even now, decades after riding in Marchant’s car, he still can’t help. I wonder how and why the nightmare happened in the first place. “You never hear a panel of female scientists where other people talk about things like me,” she says, “because they’re wise enough to show up. “
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In November 1999, Willenbring flew to New Zealand and boarded the gigantic military plane arranged through the NSF for an eight-hour flight to McMurdo Station. He was spending time there with Marchant and another graduate student, Adam Lewis, on his first visit to the continent. “They would take samples from a plateau where glaciers had flowed through the ice. This would help them understand when glaciers eroded and provide them with information about climate update situations in the future. “I really wanted to travel to Antarctica, hike, dig holes, collect samples. That kind of thing,” he says.
It didn’t take long for Willenbring to realize that difficult and unforeseen situations could arise in the future. The plane did not have a personal bathroom. At the bottom there is necessarily a cube partially hidden behind a curtain that does not reach the floor. “It’s smart for the kids, because they just pee in the bucket,” Willenbring says. “On other occasions, women resorted to “peeing funnels,” as she later learned, but no one had asked for one for her. Marchant told her he had decided not to ask for any, she recalled, because he finds it “disgusting to see women get up while they’re peeing. “
After landing at the Ice Airfield, Willenbring felt “totally mesmerized,” with her boots gliding over the icy surface and the cold, crisp Antarctic air entering her lungs. He boarded a giant bus for a briefing, he said, at the Do’s and Don’ts of Life in the sensitive ecosystem he had come to study: how to sort it, what to put in bottles or bags. McMurdo Station itself didn’t have much to do with that: just a jumble of buildings and vehicle structures. At this time of year, the study station houses about 1,000 people, including scientists and team members. Many liked to spend the annual barrel in the helicopter hangar or meet at Gallagher, the station’s watering hole.
As a beginner “on the ice,” as the locals say, Willenbring had to complete a survival camp before reaching the box. She excelled at lighting a fireplace in the snow, tying the proper knots to secure a tent, and building an igloo in which she would sleep one night. There was another newcomer to the Boston organization, even less experienced than Willenbring and, in fact, less qualified: Jeffrey Marchant. To his wonderful surprise, David Marchant had brought his older brother. Jeffrey was not a scientist; He was an assistant professor of studies at Tufts University School of Medicine and, Willenbring recalls, accompanied her for fun. She found it scandalous that Marchant would alter her paintings in that way. But he simply laughed when she questioned him and told him to call her brother by her nickname: Ken Tonka. The call arose when the organization was betting on the “porn star call” game of matching a team member’s middle call with her favorite toy from her formative years. But she remembers Marchant telling her that “Tonka” was too “because his penis was like a Tonka truck. “
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The four of them (the Marchant brothers, Willenbring and Adam Lewis) took a helicopter more than 70 miles to the desolate Dry Valleys, where they would spend weeks searching. Most box scientists flew from time to time, but Marchant had told Willenbring that he believed to endure the bitter cold: there are no showers, no toilets, and, as he learned, no privacy. “He sees himself as Ernest Shackleton’s Second Coming,” Lewis recalled, so much so that Marchant asked to be called Shack. .
Marchant seemed to have no patience with anyone who held him back, especially women. Lewis told Willenbring that on a previous expedition, Marchant had bullied a prominent schoolteacher, Hillary Tulley, who had joined them to participate in their work. of the band’s early days there, “he climbed the face of a mountain as fast as he could, with no explanation other than to tire Hillary out,” Lewis says (and Tulley confirms). “He would say things like, ‘You can’t do it. You’re holding us back, Hillary. Heh I don’t even know why you’re here. Tulley recalls, “It’s big shit from the jump. . . It’s just not good. “
When they stopped at the box to chat, “Marchant would stop where there was a big rock so he could stand on it and be the biggest,” Tulley says. “One day I stood first on the rock, and from the way it looked to me. . . I just thought it was too easy to provoke this guy. Identify domination.
Willenbring had to deal with his own struggles. Marchant had brought three tents for the four of them. He said he would share with his brother. ” Why don’t you stay with your brother?” he asked Marchant. “Because Jeff likes you,” she said suggestively. (Jeffrey Marchant declined to comment for this article. )
As they spent their days digging up volcanic ash and painstakingly collecting samples of sediment and rocks discovered in the glacial ice, Marchant told his brother about Willenbring. She said Jeffrey played the oboe, just like her, and asked him if he had ever noticed his brother’s sound. penis. She had. She was sleeping in her tent when she heard him wake up and then saw him there, urinating in a bottle with an erection.
As upset and nervous as Willenbring seemed, she was also afraid to challenge Marchant. Like any graduate student, he needed approval and that of his advisor to advance in his field: get a thesis approved, receive a recommendation, get referrals. to get a job. ” I definitely had the power,” he says. Willenbring held on.
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But as the days passed and the polar sun shone on them 24 hours a day, Willenbring’s search project grew darker and darker. On some days, Marchant would accompany them for thirteen hours while collecting samples. During the long journeys through the unforgiving rocks, Willenbring feared facing an ice typhoon or going so long without a snack that Lewis, who is diabetic, would suffer insulin shock (Lewis says he carries a large number of snacks with him to avoid the risk).
Marchant tried to run them as an educational camp. ” He forced us all to do push-ups. You know, “Give me 50!” says Lewis of at least one chance. The few times Lewis had the courage to speak up: caution Marchant who is crossing a line; he says Marchant laughed at him.
Although Willenbring had found the courage to ask for help, there was only one way to do it. The organization had a radio that they used to call the base and broadcast a daily recorded message, alerting McMurdo’s staff that they were safe. But according to Willenbring, Marchant never let the situation get out of hand. Every morning he called McMurdo: “Four souls in the camp and all is well. “
Willenbring’s sense of isolation grew. Then one day, while digging alone among gravel sediments, among sandstones and dolerite, she discovered a giant chunk of granite. “It’s a coincidence,” he says. It’s something new. ” The presence of granite suggests an unforeseen shift in the ancient record and in hypotheses about when ice deposited sediments at this location. But when she showed Marchant the dark, irregular samples, he called her a “fucking idiot. “”I like, ‘I just can’t win,'” he recalls.
As repulsed and angry as she felt, Willenbring knew that her discoveries were valuable, no matter what Marchant said. It had become apparent that belittling her was a game for him, no matter the circumstances. He berated her for using heavy braces and “He hated it when I cried,” she recalls. “He would laugh and then get mad at me because I had cried. It was just the best with my head.
One day, Marchant asked him to read painstakingly about a sediment pattern he held on a small, curved spoon, and then blew the crystalline fragments into his eyes. On another occasion, she said, he grabbed her through his backpack and carried her up a gravel hill she was suffering to climb. He made the decision to retaliate if necessary. She had already told him that she was a black belt in taekwondo. “I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t make me sound like ‘He’s absolutely psychopath,’ he tells me, “but if it had gone wrong, I would have just hit him with my hands or smashed him in the face with a shovel. “
Marchant didn’t give up. He pushed her down and taunted her. She dreamed of punching him in the nose. In the middle of the boxing season, he started throwing rocks at her every time he poked her while she was urinating, which was easy for him, since there were no trees or trees. Willenbring started drinking less water so he wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. I had a bladder infection. It was so bad that he started urinating blood. When she told Marchant, he told her to drink cranberry juice. Throughout the process, Marchant radioed daily and transmitted the OK message to the base. “Four souls in the field,” he said, “and all is well. “
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After the team returned to Boston, Willenbring was asked by a member of the university to write a letter of advice to Marchant. She felt she had no choice, so she did. She remembers that he made it transparent for her to communicate about her time on the ice. that if she did, they would call her a liar. In other words, she thought he would ruin her career.
When he tried to recruit Willenbring to harass a younger student and belittle his work, she refused. But the tension took its toll. ” I would try to take it far, far away,” he tells me. Think about it, it’s there. Otherwise, it will drive you crazy. After more than two years at BU, Willenbring left with his master’s degree.
He moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to pursue a PhD in Earth Sciences at Dalhousie University. After graduation, she landed a coveted position as an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a joyful moment, the wonderful praise after many difficult years. But Willenbring says the bad habit is back. She says her male colleagues made degrading comments about her clothes, about her nipples, about the fact that she was too fat to endure seminar desks (she was pregnant).
One day, when her daughter was 3 years old, Willenbring didn’t have daycare and took her daughter to the lab. He set it up in a room with a window so the little woman could look in. Willenbring entered the next room and waved to her. She put on a white blouse and glasses. For the first time, her daughter seemed to perceive that her mother was a true scientist. “I need to be a scientist like you!” She exclaimed.
Willenbring responded by breaking down in tears. I imagined him going through what I had done,” she tells me. When her daughter asked her why she was crying, she reassured her, even though it sounded like a lie. “Sometimes mothers cry tears of joy,” he says, “because it makes me feel very satisfied that you need to be a scientist. “
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That night, Willenbring returned home on a mission. He decided it was time to speak after all. He opened his computer and drafted his complaint against David Marchant. But then he got scared. She didn’t have the title. His educational career still didn’t seem secure. He put the draft aside.
A few months later, in 2016, Willenbring moved with her daughter across the country to become a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. It had been nearly two decades since she had escaped her time on the ice with Marchant, yet his reports left her psychologically and physically damaged. (He has battled bladder disorders since his infection in the field. )He also carried an intense sense of shame for not having spoken up, in some way, despite his concern at the time. He felt ill as he imagined Marchant harassing other academics with impunity. But now, in his new job, he was still a starter.
In October of that year, Willenbring filed a Title IX lawsuit against Marchant. When Boston University officials confided in her that they would look into the matter, she was hopeful. “I thought they’d be glad to know that,” he says, “because what a terrible disadvantage to have this guy as a teacher!”
Marchant responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
Following Willenbring’s complaint, two other women joined the action: “Deborah Doe,” who alleged that Marchant called her a “pussy” and a “whore” and threatened her doctoral investment (she had become so traumatized that she dropped out of high school). and Hillary Tulley, the school’s top instructor of the past with Marchant. “His taunts, his demeaning comments about my body, my brain, and my general inadequacies never ended,” as Tulley put it.
At the time, the Me Too movement was gaining momentum. Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse scandal blew up and the monstrous habit in Antarctica went viral. Samantha Bee joked about this on her show Full Frontal, saying, “You can’t even go to the max. “remote component of the planet without a man moving his cold, small cock at you. “This seemed cathartic to Willenbring, but it also brought new challenges, starting with the risk of death he discovered written on his workplace door.
In November 2017, the university concluded its investigation and concluded that Marchant had sexually harassed Willenbring and that the matter warranted the opening of dismissal proceedings. Marchant appealed, and a teachers’ organization advised that he be suspended for three years. No pay. After that, he was free to return. It seemed that despite Willenbring’s efforts, much remained to be done to bring justice and gentleness to the horrors unfolding in the depths of the earth. Three months later, that’s precisely what happened.
In February 2018, the environmental news site Grist published the account of five women alleging sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and intimidation at the first Homeward Bound, a leadership advancement vacation in Antarctica for women in science and technology. One of them said she woke up next. to a simple team member with “no memory of what happened. “
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Founded by Australian leader and expert Fabian Dattner, the motto of the trip was: “Mother Nature desires her daughters. “Seventy-six women had paid about $15,000 for the three-week trip, which included shipping workshops and clinical visits to Antarctica, where the travelers focused their research. Meredith Nash, a sociologist at the University of Tasmania, embarked on the ship as a researcher reading leadership programs for women in science and technology. What she discovered on the expedition surprised her.
One night on the ship, Nash, a Chicago local with tattooed arms and a mohawk of blonde hair on his clean-shaven head, attended an organizing party that temporarily turned into a binge party, with the captain dressed in a robe and some other gear. (Nash says there is “a long Antarctic culture in which men dress. “)A representative for Homeward Bound noted, “On each and every trip, halfway through the trip, we have a costume party that is a celebratory delight where all the women come together and participate. “)
Nash, as part of her study, had collected video diaries of women during her trip. He was sailing through them in Tasmania when he discovered a video of a woman crying in the ship’s dining room because a crew member, she said, had just followed her to her room and tried to hold the door open and enter without her permission. Nash, horrified, emailed and then called the woman to see if she was okay. “He said he had already spoken to the university about what had happened. ” he says, “and that’s it. “
The woman in the video was Nicole Hellellesey, a PhD student at the University of Tasmania who had joined the Homeward Bound program to connect with other female scientists. Recalling the incident, Hellellesey says she alerted members of the university while she was still on board. however, no one tracked or recorded her before or after Nash’s phone call. “I dealt with this trauma on my own,” she says. (Homeward Bound says that “if participants expressed concerns. . . this data has been shared with the Homeward Bound control team. “)
“It was an adventure for the women to go to Antarctica and break borders. Instead, the few men on board made this delight a microcosm of the genuine world,” Helellesey adds. “I didn’t feel it and what happened to me brought me back. “to authenticity. “
According to Dattner, two team members lost their jobs as a result of the trip. After the trip, many of the women sent Homeward Bound organizers a list of recommendations, adding a code of ethics and the final ban until midnight. A quarter of the women thought the list didn’t go far enough and sent a second letter urging the program, among other things, to hire an independent clinical psychologist and foster an environment free of offensive and intimidating language.
“A lot of mistakes were made on the first trip and some of us fought very, very hard to correct them on long-duration expeditions,” says Sea Rotmann, who participated in the Homeward Bound trip. The program has implemented some of those concepts and dozens of others to improve safety. (In 2018, a New Zealand magazine reported allegations of abuse and harassment when lawyers representing Homeward Bound threatened to publish a conceivable lawsuit. Lacking the monetary resources to deal with the litigation, the magazine removed the article. )
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Shocked by what had happened on the Antarctic expedition, Nash dug deeper. She went on to interview and collect surveys from more than 150 female scientists about the remedy they faced during their remote fieldwork in Antarctica. Sixty-three percent said they had been harassed, and about one percent said they had never talked about what happened. Harassment ranged from physical assaults to microaggressions: “Supervisors hide facts,” Nash says, “or prefer male members of a study team to women. “
In 2020, it asked through the Australian Antarctic Division to lead a government-funded review on diversity, equity and inclusion in its programmes. “When I started,” he tells me, “one of the scariest moments I had when one of the other people I was running with said to me, ‘You see that guy over there?He raped that woman 10 years ago, at the station. ‘”
During the nearly two years she worked on this study, Nash became aware of widespread incidents of harassment and assault. The reign of male explorers in the region and the isolation of a hostile environment made the region even more insidious. “Women have to paint ‘They’re on the floor with their abusers for weeks at a time because they just can’t leave,'” she says. In the spring of 2021, he advised the director of Australia’s Antarctic Division, Kim Ellis, to launch a faster investigation without delay. sexual misconduct.
That didn’t happen, yet Ellis says she met with Nash monthly and implemented many of his other recommendations, adding hiring three women to positions on the previously all-male leadership team, offering menstrual conditioning products in all bathrooms in the Antarctic Division offices, and getting better education on sexual misconduct.
Nash says there’s more to do. And that starts with more women speaking out. “The only explanation we know David Marchant for is because Jane Willenbring had the courage to speak out about her experiences. “
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On April 12, 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexual harassment at Willenbring. (The university said it may not corroborate his allegations of physical and mental abuse. )Marchant issued a statement, quoted by the journal Science, in which he vowed that he had “never” sexually harassed anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarctica or at any other time. “”Since then. ” But thanks to Willenbring, word spread.
Shocked by this scandal, the National Science Foundation commissioned an outside study on sexual assault and sexual harassment at Antarctic survey facilities. The lengthy report, published in August 2022, contained shocking allegations of attack, stalking, and harassment. Britt Barquist, the former Foreguy fuel, under contract in McMurdo with a company now called Amentum. He supervised a team of about 20 other people who performed the dangerous work of handling and cleaning diesel and gasoline tanks. One day, in late November 2017, she tells me, sitting at a table next to a guy who manned a checkpoint at Leidos, the company that runs study stations in Antarctica. She was in the middle of a staff briefing when he groped her in plain sight.
When he spoke to his supervisor, he claimed that he had witnessed some of the incidents himself. Her boss reported it to Amentum’s human resources department. “I told HR that I never sought to be with him again. I’m scared of that person,” Barquist says, “and they said, ‘Okay. ‘
But in 2020, during another stint with contractor McMurdo, he was told he would attend weekly virtual meetings with that same top official. Barquist, who needed the job, shrugged it off. ” It was just disgusting and terrible to have to look him in the face. “He looks at him and pays attention to him when he talks,” she says, “only to see him treated like a general guy, while in my head I think, ‘This guy is a predator. ‘Why is everyone acting like they’re a general?”person?”
The following year, near the end of about three weeks of Covid quarantine with a team in New Zealand, he scanned the manifest of an upcoming flight to Antarctica and saw the call from the senior official. When she called her human resources department to complain about an abnormal relationship, she says she found the patience of two officials, one of whom had been introduced as an advocate for victims.
“I said I didn’t need to be with this guy yet,” she tells me, “but they said, ‘So how do you recommend we deal with this?'”Barquist becomes emotional as he recalls his verbal exchange with the two women. . from your employer. ” I thought they would be on my side,” he says. Instead, they kept making her sense how scared she was to be with him.
“I finally thought, ‘Yes,'” she says, “I don’t feel alone in a room with him!Then the signal disappeared, he says, and he never managed to reconnect with them. Barquist returned to Antarctica, where he tried to avoid the high-ranking official, but as the guy on his team depended on his communication with him almost daily, he eventually relented.
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Amentum responded to specific questions about Barquist’s case, but said the company has “zero tolerance for harassment” and, once it receives information about an allegation, “cooperates with requests for investigation and, where appropriate, conducts its own internal investigation. “, he said he had “zero tolerance for that kind of behavior. “
Jennifer Sorensen, a food stewardess and concierge at McMurdo, had the feeling from the start that she had arrived on an island of men. Women, he thought, “weren’t necessarily going to be noticed as huge beings. “Sorensen fell into what locals call an “ice relationship” with a boy while they were parked together. But on Boxing Day, she says, her “icy boyfriend” raped her. Two years later, she reported it to a communications specialist at Leidos, as well as to the Huguy Resources Branch and president of GHG, the company that hired the individual. She was stunned when, after four days of investigation, GHG told her that the attack was not an assault. Instead, a GHG executive told him, “We have come to the conclusion that a sexual assault incident has occurred that has made you feel humiliated and incredibly uncomfortable. “
The company informed her that it was sexual harassment, which meant that the most productive thing she could do was for GHG not to rehire her alleged rapist. ” It was like this weird game on the phone, where I was telling the truth,” he says, “and then they tried to repeat it to me and said, ‘No, it’s not that at all. ‘”(GHG ultimately did not see this incident as a violation of the NSF’s Polar Code of Conduct. )
After NSF released its August 2022 report on sexual harassment and assault at McMurdo and other U. S. stations in Antarctica, Leidos submitted a statement to the U. S. Congress saying he had not won “any allegations” of sexual assault in the past five years. They’re either lying outright,” Barquist says, “or they’re putting what happened to me in a weird category of ‘non-sexual assault. ‘In a 2023 investigation by the Associated Press, other women came forward and added a woman who claimed she was choked and attacked by a McMurdo colleague in November 2022 (the defendant was later found not to be at fault in a jury trial). The women at the station formed a group, Ice Allies, to help and teach one of them. .
In a communication to WIRED, the NSF says it “has been grappling with this challenge for many years” and that the report prompted the company “to take swift and planned action” to improve the protection and culture of Antarctic study bases. According to a spokesperson: “These are just our first steps in Antarctica. We will continue to make adjustments as part of an ongoing effort to meet the wishes of the community.
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Two months after the release of the NSF report, the Australian government finally made Nash’s study public, though it only published seven of its 42 pages and deleted some people’s accounts. Tanya Plibersek, Australia’s environment and water minister, whose office partly oversees the country’s Antarctic programs, said she was “surprised” by what she had read. “There is no such thing as a place for sexual harassment or an out-of-place habit in a job,” she said. Kim Ellis, director of the Antarctic Division, issued a statement saying she was “deeply concerned” and “accepted all recommendations. “
Nash’s report, however, hinted at a larger problem: a lack of trust. Women felt that program leaders lacked the “deep knowledge” needed to take meaningful action and doubted HR’s ability to adequately address formal complaints. Three months later, Ellis announced his resignation.
Nash’s paintings also prompted Australian Antarctic leaders to commission a more comprehensive study. Published in the spring of 2023, it included a survey of nearly 250 other people and found that “a significant number of participants do not believe” that the Antarctic Division “is psychologically and that there are negative consequences to speaking out. “The department says it has since expanded its leadership education programs.
However, as in the United States, the challenge has not gone away. In late 2023, a leaked survey of women in Australia’s Antarctic Program showed that about a third of respondents said they had witnessed or experienced bullying or harassment in the past two years. months, but I was afraid to communicate it. ” “The explanation for why women don’t need to communicate,” Nash says, “is because they’ve been upset all this time, where everyone was like, ‘This didn’t happen. ‘You don’t need to listen to it.
The NSF has since announced adjustments to McMurdo, adding a ban on the sale of alcohol at Gallagher’s and the appointment of a woman as special assistant to the NSF director to prevent and respond to sexual assault and harassment. Leidos told a congressional committee that he would require more security clearances for those wielding master keys that open multiple bedrooms and that he would install peepholes so other inmates can see who’s at the door. The company also promised to provide the box teams with more satellite phones, the sort of thing Willenbring may have just used when she was stuck with Marchant. “We take allegations of sexual harassment and assault seriously,” a spokesperson for Leidos told WIRED in a statement. “We also strictly enforce our policies prohibiting retaliation against workers who raise concerns. At Leidos, we hope for a respectful environment for all. Until recently, however, the person Barquist said had harassed her was still employed through the company.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a ranking member of the U. S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which is leading the congressional investigation into Leidos and the NSF, says such slowness never happens. “Leidos intentionally ignored the scenery on the ice. “
Willenbring tells me he believes the reaction from the NSF and others has been slow at best. Six years passed from the time he filed his complaint with Boston University for the NSF to find solutions. Along with two dozen other countries, if you add Russia, the United Kingdom and Brazil, which have at least one base in Antarctica, it’s probably only a matter of time before more stories are published. Only two other countries have rules in place for reporting sexual assault and harassment in their programs. Many Antarctic countries do not have any legislation on harassment. As Nash puts it, some of those other countries “are going to have their own moment of judgment. “
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In November 2023, another Homeward Bound expedition departs for Antarctica with dozens of women on board. Fabian Dattner, the organizer, tells me that more than 60 new regulations have been put in place to ensure a safe and productive environment. Following a ban on the team interacting with scientists, there is now a psychologist and psychiatrist on board and the ship’s bar closes at 9:30 p. m.
Another result of the harassment of women scientists in Antarctica is the obstacle to paintings by women like Willenbring, who have compromised their lives and studies to better understand climate change. There will be a lot of paintings to be done. A report published online in October in the journal Nature Climate Change documented an alarming trend. Some waters around Antarctica’s glaciers are expected to warm at a rate three times faster than in the past century. This will lead to “a widespread accumulation of ice shelves. “”It is melting, which contributes to the stability of the ice sheet,” the study says. This could contribute to a devastating rise in sea level (between 1 and 3 feet) through 2100.
One glacier is no longer indexed on the map: the one named after David Marchant. Two years after Willenbring filed his complaint, the U. S. Council on Geographic Names voted unanimously to remove Marchant’s call from its coveted iceberg. Willenbring posted the news on Twitter with the hashtag #MeTooSTEM. The 7-mile-long glacier, which drains the slopes of Rampart Ridge, is now named Matataua, after the peak of a nearby mountain. It rises beyond McMurdo Station, a reminder of the men who claimed the ice and the women who retrieved it before it disappeared.
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