At the South Pole, the temperature on a pleasant summer day is 30 below zero.

In that kind of cold, skin cracks and, according to the journals of one old-time explorer, "tears turn to steam."

So imagine the challenge of staying healthy for the large number of UW-Madison researchers and engineers who make Antarctica their home for the summer.

Put it this way: The potential problems faced at the South Pole make our own worries about upcoming winter-time sniffles seem nearly inconsequential.

"Down there,'' pointed out Sue Olsen, a Madison medical trainer, "no ambulance is going to come.''

Olsen is a nurse and the coordinator of a new training program for UW-Madison employees who live and work in the extremes of Antarctica.

The program is offered by the UW Hospital's Emergency Education Center. Olsen and her trainers just completed instruction for 18 workers who will be departing for the South Pole in the next few weeks.

The center does emergency medical training for everybody from office workers who want to know how to use defibrillators in the workplace to arborists who work high in trees in the Arboretum.

But few of the training programs deal with circumstances as unique as those that will be faced by workers and scientists in Antarctica.

Capturing neutrinos

It's an important program, especially here in Madison. UW-Madison has a larger contingent at the South Pole than just about any other institution, largely because of the huge detector it is building in the ice beneath the pole to capture the passage of mysterious but important particles called neutrinos.

The particles, which pass through objects such as planets and stars nearly unchanged, carry raw information about the high-energy explosions that gave birth to them.

By studying that information, scientists hope to learn more about everything from black holes to supernovas and perhaps even answers to puzzling questions about matter and the earliest moments of our universe.

But to get to those studies, dozens of workers have to first build the detector, which includes drilling holes deep into the Antarctic ice into which the bowling-ball size detectors are lowered.

Terry Matt, an electrical engineer from Evansville, was out of work more than four years ago when he responded to a newspaper ad the size of a couple of postage stamps.

It offered jobs for engineers who wouldn't mind working in a "semi-remote'' location.

Matt went to an interview and was shocked when he found out that remote location was actually the South Pole.

He got the job and has worked in Antarctica for the past four seasons (winter for us but summer in the Southern Hemisphere).

"Semi-remote" proved to be an understatement.

For Matt, the incredible isolation of the South Pole and the realization that a serious health problem could easily turn to disaster hit home as he flew for the first time into the remote station four years ago. He remembers whiteness to the horizon, a meager cluster of structures far below, and little else.

"The feeling that first time,'' Matt recalled, "was, 'Man, I am way away from everything else.' "

A very dry place

The different nature of health issues at the South Pole becomes apparent immediately, Matt said.

And they are the same issues that Olsen's training program addresses.

The terrible cold is the most immediate problem.

But it is complicated by the high altitude — more than 10,000 feet — and the extremely dry air. Few understand that Antarctica is a very dry place, home to the largest desert on Earth.

Unless you take care of your skin, Matt said, fingers and lips crack and bleed. Nosebleeds erupt again and again.

"Your fingernails and the ends of your fingers split because of the dryness," Matt said. "One of our electricians, the ends of his fingers just popped open. They had to put them back together with Super Glue. Lots of people bring Super Glue so they can patch themselves back together."

The journals of the early Antarctic explorers are full of terrifying details about the harsh and unforgiving nature of the land.

One of them, Tom Crean, was a member of Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition and survived for months on the ice after the explorers became stranded.

Crean became what he called "an aficionado of physical misery'' and his notes were filled with 90-below-zero days, snow blindness, and a stomach-wrenching diet of seal flesh.

The cold was so bitter, he wrote, that "eyes lit like torch fire."

Even the famous explorer Robert F. Scott noted, "Great God. This is an awful place.''

Scott later died in Antarctica, starving to death in a frozen tent.

Diagnosing is crucial

Javier Font, a faculty instructor at the Emergency Education Center, said the six-hour Antarctica classes were both a challenge and a pleasure to teach, mostly because the students were so aware of the import of what they were learning.

Many questions from students, Font said, had to do with diagnosis. How, they wanted to know, can you tell if somebody has internal bleeding? Or a concussion from a fall? Or a serious spine injury?

The diagnosis is crucial down there, Font said, because, based on the seriousness of the injury, a flight out might be required. And a flight from the South Pole is no small matter.

"It's their life,'' said Olsen of the students' inquiries. "It may mean the difference between living and dying or one of their colleagues living and dying.''

While the trainers spent considerable time on the traditional training, such as CPR and using a defibrillator, Font said the difficulty of dealing with even seemingly minor injuries was also of interest to the students.

One engineer, for example, remembered another worker getting a smashed thumb that wouldn't heal in the cold.

With no urgent care center around the block, Font said a solution would have been to heat up a sewing needle and pierce the nail of the injured thumb to release fluids and relieve pressure.

Matt said many of the injuries dealt with over the working season at the pole have to do with falling.

The engineers are using an enormous hot water drill to create the deep holes into which the sensors are lowered.

Eventually, the entire work site becomes as slippery as an ice rink.

Matt won't be going to the pole this season. During the intense physical, doctors found Matt had prostate cancer.

He said it was caught in its very earliest stage and he'll be fine after treatment. But it was enough to disqualify him from the trip this time.

Matt, who will continue working on the project here this winter, was nonetheless dismayed. Even with all of the risk, he will miss the light and the ice, the comradeship of his friends, and the exhilaration of being truly at the end of the Earth.