Adventures & Pictures

Summary and pictures of some trips : adventure and science

The Brain in the Ice : A Scientific Adventure Across Svalbard :

In the spring of 2022, a small team, all professions, and one researcher, we set out to cross the frozen archipelago of Svalbard — not in search of glory, but of neurons. Like Shackleton’s legendary Endurance expedition in 1914, this mission was not about conquering the wild, but how the brain would adapt to it — and listening to what the brain whispers when the cold strips everything else away.

We dragged our pulkas across wind-scoured ice, 12 days without engines, alone but for the crunch of snow under skis and the pulse in our ears. With 10 liters of gasoline, enough to cook and melt snow for hydration, and tents that flapped like heartbeats in the Arctic wind, we entered a domain where the body must adapt.

Each day was a crucible.
Eight hours of relentless motion across glaciers and pack ice. Temperatures rarely rose above -20°C. Each evening, four hours to build camp — tents pitched into the frost-bitten earth, clothing peeled off in stages, ice melting slowly into food and warmth. Then, in the eerie stillness of the polar night, I applied electrodes to record EEG.The science began. Not forgetting that conduction is too high at -20degre, thus it was hard to recharge the battery with th solar panel that I has to carry. In the middle of the night for one hour, we had to check for Bears. This was the toughtest !

Inside a North Face tent, I turned a plastic crate into a neural observatory. A rugged EEG system flickered to life. Waveforms danced across the screen — delta, alpha, theta — as if the brain, too, was navigating the cold. WI recorded under sleep, under fatigue, under the raw alertness of exposure n=1. The mission : to understand whether such extremes can reset, rewire, or reprogram the human brain. We had no backup. No evacuation plan beyond skis and will. Later analysis reveal a change in the Non-rem Slow wave sleep, to be confirmed !

Like Shackleton’s men, we were sustained by discipline and collective trust. But unlike them, we were wired to machines, hoping that cold and isolation could reveal what comfort conceals : a brain in adaptive flux, struggling to balance the known with the unknown.

What we found remains under analysis. But already, in those data traces, in those frozen nights, we glimpsed something extraordinary : a brain stripped of noise, responsive to rhythm, reshaped by environment.

The question now is not just what cold does to the brain — but how long the brain remembers the cold.
Inspired by Shackleton. Guided by science.
D.H.

Here are some pictures