Many who move to western Howard County see their rural homes as a refuge from the insanity of their urban work settings.
Not Antarctic researcher Ron Naveen.
He sees his workplace as the sanest on Earth, even if the Christmas season is considered summer break and getting to work on time means making your connecting ship in time to watch penguin eggs hatch.
On Jan. 6, the Cooksville resident will commute once more from his home to Antarctica, a continent with no borders where people from a multitude of nations live and work in harmony. It's a familiar journey -- he has visited there 12 of the past 13 southern summers, including a 4 1/2 -week trip that ended Dec. 20.
In August, Mr. Naveen's nonprofit environmental foundation, Oceanites, was awarded nearly $200,000 to conduct the world's first inventory of Antarctic sites where people and wildlife mingle. Other researchers will use the information he gathers on wildlife breeding and population to measure how the increasing human presence is affecting the Antarctic ecosystem, Mr. Naveen said.
The last thing Mr. Naveen wants to do, however, is find an excuse to keep people away from Antarctica.
Mr. Naveen, 49, wants to help people see how nations can cooperate and how people and wildlife can interact in an environment that hasn't been ravaged by humans.
He calls the 1959 treaty governing the continent a "Magna Carta of modern times," with 40 nations governing the continent by unanimous consent. He said that he hopes that the increasing number of visitors -- 8,000 last year -- will take that cooperative spirit to their home nations.
Under a treaty amendment, all visitors -- scientists and tourists alike -- "will have to consider whether their activities are having an environmental effect," he said.
To judge the impacts of those activities, the multinational governing body will need what Mr. Naveen is working on: a compendium of information about the basic biological and physical features of the Antarctic sites that people visit.
Among the phenomena he is charting is the relationship between penguins and the amount of ice in their environment.
"Adelie penguins like to spend a lot of time on the ice," he says, while "chinstraps [another penguin species] prefer open water. This spring, there's been more ice, and it's expected that Adelie penguins will do better."
To determine whether that theory is correct, Mr. Naveen and his assistant will carefully count nests of the two species. Then they must return to see how many eggs have been laid, how many chicks hatch and how many of them survive long enough to leave the nest.
Another mystery they hope to shed some light on is the life history of protein-rich krill -- a 2-inch crustacean Mr. Naveen calls "the power lunch of the Antarctic."
The shrimp-like creature is what keeps whales, penguins and so-called crab-eater seals alive. That seal species, which eats only krill, makes up 25 million of the 30 million seals in the world, he says.
Mr. Naveen said that there's always more to learn about the world's last unscathed ecosystem.
"The more I go there, the less I feel confident about understanding how it all works. There's so many variables."
Mr. Naveen has chronicled some of his favorite Antarctic stamping grounds in a 1990 book of photographs and reflections he co-authored called "Wild Ice."
He is working on a book of essays on his experiences from Alaska to the Antarctic, dealing with "wildlife and pastoral peoples," he says.
Mr. Naveen's interest in ecology is rooted in a childhood love of birds and was honed when he was working as a lawyer for the Carter administration in the late 1970s. Charged with enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, he had to learn the biology of whales, fur seals and dolphins to make a case for protecting them.
Deciding in 1980 that he wanted to see penguins and albatrosses first-hand, Mr. Naveen visited Antarctica for the first time. In 1983, he became a lecturer on one of the expedition ships that brings researchers and the curious to the frosty continent.
In the intervening years, the place became more than just a curiosity to him.
"Antarctica's clearly my spiritual home," said the northeastern Pennsylvania native.
And what about the cold?
Although it can be warmer in raw degrees on the Antarctic peninsula, "you may get a wind chill of 10 degrees."
"It's not really cold down there," he insisted. "It's generally
warmer down there than it is up here during the dead of winter."
"After all," he said, "it's still 1,500 miles away from the South Pole."