BREST, France: Fancy a job at the North or South Pole? A French research institute is looking for you.
The Paul-Emile Victor Polar Institute in northwest France has launched a public appeal to recruit around 40 French-speaking people for a wide variety of jobs at its six bases in the Arctic and Antarctica.
From chemists and carpenters to bakers and pastry chefs, the institute is stepping up its efforts to reach potential candidates for 12- to 14-month stints at its bases with endless summer days and winter nights.
“We get lots of interest from the biology fields but not enough mechanics or tool operators, because these people don’t know about us,” said Laurence Andre Le Marec, hiring director at the institute named for a French polar explorer and pioneer.
It operates at the Spitzberg base in the Arctic and the Dumont d’Urville and Concordia bases in Antarctica, as well as three bases on France’s sub-Antarctic islands of Amsterdam, Crozet and Kerguelen.
Women in particular are being sought in this year’s recruitment drive, which includes six testimonial videos from female alumni.
At the Dumont d’Urville station there are just six women compared to 24 men. “I haven’t been able to get balance” among the sexes, Andre Le Marec admitted.
The 40 successful candidates — 30 of whom are reserved for France’s corps of Civic Service volunteers — will have to pass a medical exam that includes psychological evaluations.
“We make sure they are physically apt for this type of mission, and psychologically ready to live in a small group on an isolated site under conditions that can at times be extreme,” Andre Le Marec said.
The mechanic being sought for the Concordia station, for example, will have to mesh with a group of about 60 people in summer and just 14 in winter — when temperatures can plunge to minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit).
“There’s no going back over winter,” the job posting on the institute’s website warns.
Concordia, which houses a French-Italian team, is one of three permanent bases maintained in the interior of Antarctica, one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on the planet.
“Not all the bases have temperatures this extreme,” Andre Le Marec assured, adding that a biologist sought on the island of Amsterdam, in the southern Indian Ocean, would be able to work “in a T-shirt.”
“It was incredible,” said Claire Le Calvez, who spent a tour at Dumont d’Urville as a chemist and glaciologist in 2003 and eventually joined the roughly 50 permanent employees at the institute.
What one discovers in the natural world of Antarctica is amazing, she added.
“These are memories that last a lifetime.”
Work among the penguins? France is looking for candidates
Work among the penguins? France is looking for candidates
This handout photograph released on Jan. 21, 2026, shows a view of prehistoric cave paintings in the Sulawesi island of Indonesia, which includes faded hand stencils dated to at least 67,800 years ago. (AFP Photo/Maxime Aubert/Griffith University)
- Newly dated artworks are believed to have been created by ancestors of indigenous Australians
- Discovery shows Sulawesi as one of world’s oldest centers of artistic culture, researcher says
JAKARTA: Hand stencils found in a cave in Indonesia’s Sulawesi are the world’s oldest known artworks, Indonesian and Australian archeologists have said in a new study that dates the drawings back to at least 67,800 years ago.
Sulawesi hosts some of the world’s earliest cave art, including the oldest known example of visual storytelling — a cave painting depicting human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. Found in 2019, it dates back at least 51,200 years.
On Muna, an island off the province’s southeast, researchers have discovered new artworks which are faint and partially obscured by a more recent motif on the wall. They used a new dating technique to determine their age.
The cave art is of two faded hand stencils, one at least 60,900 years old and another dating back at least 67,800 years. This makes it the oldest art to be found on cave walls, authors of the study, which was published this week, said in the journal Nature.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, or BRIN, and co-author, said this hand stencil was 16,600 years older than the rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi, and about 1,100 years older than stencils found in Spain believed to have been drawn by Neanderthals.
The discovery “places Indonesia as one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human seafaring. This discovery is the oldest reliably dated rock art and provides direct evidence that humans have been intentionally crossing the ocean since almost 70,000 years ago,” Oktaviana said on Wednesday.
The stencils are located in Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna that has been a tourist destination known for cave paintings that are about 4,000 years old.
“This discovery demonstrates that Sulawesi is one of the oldest and most continuous centers of artistic culture in the world, with roots dating back to the earliest phases of human habitation in the region,” said Prof. Maxime Aubert of Australia, another of the study’s co-authors.
To figure out the stencils’ ages, researchers used a technique called laser-ablation uranium-series dating, which allows for the accurate dating of ocher-based rock art. The method uses a laser to collect and analyze a tiny amount of mineral crusts that had formed on top of the art.
The study also explored how and when Australia first became settled, with the researchers saying the stencil was most likely created by the ancestors of indigenous Australians.
