Daily Science Dose

O sure, there’s lots of fun things in the news today. There’s that Grim Reaper cat who lives at the nursing home, or the study suggesting you can catch being fat from your loved ones, but the thing that caught my eye? Polar madness.

Have you ever heard of polar madness? I sure hadn’t. According to this article, it is something which “grips many people working at poles.”

It seems straightforward enough - sort of a mix between cabin fever and a case of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) multiplied by…maybe a thousand. Stuck at the north or south pole with the same people, day after day, week after week. Cold. The days are all screwed up, the nights are all screwed up - eternal day, eternal night, what time is it?

Check it out:

“The Lancet paper detailed past cases of polar expeditions gone wrong, including an Arctic scientific expedition in the 1880s that descended into mutiny, lunacy, suicide and cannibalism, leaving only six survivors from a crew of 25 men.

[Lawrence] Palinkas cited more recent examples of ‘polar madness’ at research stations, including one staffer clubbing another with a claw hammer and another beating a co-worker with a pipe.

‘There was a saying at the station for the remainder of the winter that If you’ve got a gripe, use a pipe,’ he said.”

Wow. Yikes.

Of course I’m totally into learning more about people going insane and clubbing each other at the ends of the earth.

This article from The Age, “Madcap Icecaps,” tells some more fun stories:

“‘Polar madness’ can erupt without warning. You can get it when someone sits in your chair. You can get it while they are combing their hair. It can come at any time…It might be as trivial as the way you dress. It might be as provocative as being served a glass of chilled urine at dinner. It might just be the sound of your voice. All these vexations have caused conflict in Antarctic communities…”

Personally, my bet is on the chilled urine.

It’s not necessarily the whole “being cooped up with the same people in the middle of frozen nowhere and it’s always night” thing that gets ya’. Sometimes, it’s vitamin A toxicity. If you find yourself starving in, say, Antarctica, and your Huskies are looking sorta tasty, for God’s sake please - DO NOT EAT THEIR LIVERS. Really, don’t eat anyone’s liver, if you can avoid it. This page, “Man’s best friend?” will now tell you why:

“It is well known that Inuit [a/k/a Eskimo-types] will not eat the liver of polar bears or seals. This caution should be extended to the liver of the Greenland husky dog. Just 100 g of husky liver contains the toxic dose of vitamin A for an adult male.”

We’re told the story of Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz. Having lost their food supplies, here’s where they went wrong. “With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), the pair would have ingested around 60 toxic doses [of vitamin A]…”

Now, Mertz ate a lot more of the liver than Mawson, ’cause he couldn’t stand to chew on the tough parts of his sweet little doggies. So, Mertz went the craziest:

“Mertz began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. Mawson graphically describes how Mertz thrust his own little finger into his mouth, crunched on it, looking in disgust as he spat his severed digit onto the floor of the tent.”

Wow. Hard core. Here’s some more:

“Mawson battled on…At one point, he noticed a ‘lumpy, squishy feeling’ in his feet…Removing his shoes and two pairs of socks he discovered, to his despair, that the thick skin on the soles of his feet had come away, leaving raw tissue underneath. The fluid that was now soaking his socks had caused the squishy feeling. With no option other than to carry on, he smeared lanolin onto the exposed flesh and bandaged the separated soles back into place before resuming walking.”

I don’t know that I’ve ever discovered a better argument against eating liver.

And so ends my story of polar madness.

And so ends today’s blog, with one minute to spare.

Goodnight.

ps - someone on acne.com posits that the crazy some people experience while taking Accutane (a sorta synthetic vitamin A used to treat severe acne) might be the same crazy that Mertz and Mawson experienced while eating Husky livers. I took Accutane for three months. While my feet remained intact, my whole face peeled off daily. But, I think that’s the point, and I didn’t experience any extra crazy, not any more than I ever do.

polar madness, Mertz, Mawson, expedition, Accutane, vitamin A, liver, chilled urine, madness