The report, presented to the NSF in June and publicly released last week, is based on more than 80 interviews with individuals and focus groups, along with a survey of 880 current and recent employees. Many of the report's interviewees are anonymous.

"It wasn't surprising to me to hear some of the stories that we heard," said Roberta Marinelli, the director of the NSF's Office of Polar Programs, in an interview with NPR. "It's certainly disappointing."

Many employees view sexual harassment as a problem

The NSF oversees all American operations in Antarctica. Each year, more than 3,000 scientists, contractors and military personnel are sent to the continent for programs under NSF's jurisdiction. About one in three of them are women.

In the report's survey, 72% of female respondents agreed that sexual harassment was a problem. Just under half agreed that sexual assault was a problem. (Among male employees responding to the survey, about half and a third agreed that harassment and assault were problems.)

"Every woman I knew down there had an assault or harassment experience that had occurred on ice," one interviewee told the report's authors. Although incidents involving female victims were "much more frequent and severe," the report stated, several men also recounted experiencing sexual harassment by men and women.

Officials at the NSF commissioned the report in April 2021 after years of individual reports of sexual harassment.

A remote and difficult workplace

Antarctica is an unusually challenging environment for these kinds of allegations. Its remoteness often means people cannot leave for weeks or months at a time.

You're so isolated and so detached from the normal roles in society that often it makes it, for lack of a better word, easier to get away with inappropriate behavior," said Meredith Nash, an Australian researcher who did not participate in the NSF report.

When people are out doing deep field work, not only do they not have the capacity to report, because you can't call someone or send an email or whatever – if you're working with your harasser, you literally can't get away from them," said Nash, who now serves as an associate dean of Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion and Equity at the Australian National University.

Up until now, incidents have been reported as one-offs. In 2018, the name of a seven-mile-long glacier was changed after its namesake, the geologist David Marchant, was accused of sexually harassing female graduate students. He was later fired from his job at Boston University. In a statement at the time, he denied the allegations.

In a separate incident, the NSF says it received a report of a rape at one of its facilities within the past five years. The agency says it "promptly" referred the allegation to the Department of Justice.

The problems go well beyond scientists. Of the thousands of people working in Antarctica under the NSF each year, about 800 are researchers. The rest are support staff, including cooks, janitors, and maintenance workers, many of them employed on seasonal contracts.

"I don't feel I have a choice but to do anything other than meet this challenge head on," said Marinelli. "We have an obligation to provide a safe work environment, to provide workplace safety and workplace development opportunities for anyone who wants to come to Antarctica."

date, with contractors hired by the Pentagon actually outnumbering troops on the ground at various points.

This might surprise many since events often overshadowed the sheer number of contractors used in Iraq. By 2008, the US Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare.

One of the most important lessons of the Iraq war is that this military privatization is likely to continue in future conflicts. This could be good, as contractors can enhance US military capacity. But any large-scale use of private military contractors also entails risks. Recent US experience with private security contractors holds several critical lessons for the future.

OPINION: 

Of course, private contractors are not new to war zones. They supported all the major US conflicts of the late 20th century, including Vietnam, the Balkans, and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. But in these cases, they mainly provided logistical and base support.

Now, the US military has developed a growing dependence on private contractors – and for a wide range of functions traditionally handled by military personnel. The Army spent roughly $815 million ($163 million per year, or about $200 million per year in 2012) to employ contractors under its Logistics Civil Augmentation Program between 1992 and 1997. But between 2001 and 2010, that expenditure grew to nearly $5 billion per year. Of course, this latter cost coincides with US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A more pertinent question – and what truly sets the Iraq war apart – concerns the role of these private civilian contractors. Most (61 percent) of contracted jobs throughout the war continued to be base-support functions. The next-largest group (18 percent) of Department of Defense contractors were security contractors. They provided security services, such as guarding installations, protecting convoys, or acting as bodyguards.

Moreover, this outsourcing trend continued in Afghanistan, where there were 94,413 contractors in 2010, compared with 91,600 US troops.

Military outsourcing developed due to an increased supply of private military services combined with increased demand. The boom in supply was borne out of larger privatization trends in both the US and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, which spread over into the military arena. The increased demand was due to the strains of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the US military.

Some have speculated that this degree of outsourcing will end with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that assumption is unrealistic. The private military and security industry is now incredibly large, powerful, and – perhaps most important – adaptable. Rather than scaling back, the industry is broadening its territory, expanding into maritime security, providing security to businesses and governments in Africa, and exploring other new markets.

To repeat the successes of private military contracting and avoid the mistakes of contractors in recent wars, the Department of Defense must consider several points specific to security contractors in particular.

First, security contractors can have a decisive impact on the perceptions of local citizens in the areas where they operate. This can be either useful or problematic for military forces on the ground, particularly when contractors are deployed alongside troops engaged in population-focused operations.

This was indeed a problem in Iraq. In a 2008 RAND survey, 35 percent of diplomatic personnel working with armed contractors in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 reported managing the consequences of actions by armed contractors against local citizens. And nearly 40 percent had witnessed armed contractors acting in ways that were unnecessarily threatening, arrogant, or belligerent while deployed, including throwing objects at local civilians to clear them off roadways.

A complicating factor is that security contractors currently operate in legal “limbo.” There are no clear-cut guidelines for their status under international law, and many US laws don’t apply to non-US citizen contractors. But any provocative behavior by contractors has the potential to hinder military efforts.

For this reason, the United States must protect its interests and ensure that its contractors are carefully vetted and well-trained. It should also continue to work toward a commonly accepted means of holding contractors accountable for their behavior. One promising mechanism in this regard is the International Code of Conduct, which is being finalized by an international consortium of national governments, civil society organizations, and 592 private security companies.

The US must also ensure that contractors and military forces can coordinate effectively when deployed. Civilian personnel operating on its behalf can easily be identified as friendly forces. At least 78 friendly-fire incidents in Iraq between November 2004 and August 2006 were reported to involve private security contractors; coalition forces fired at contractors in 49 of those incidents.