The power of solitude: why I spent 8 months alone in the ice | Tamara Klink | TEDxIE Madrid

0:22 – 4:32

The Moment the Ice Closed In

Picture a 26-year-old woman standing on the deck of a small sailboat, watching the sea freeze solid around her hull. She's just completed a two-month solo voyage from France to a remote Greenland fjord. The sun has set for what will be 100 days of darkness. Tamara Klink snaps a photo of herself in this moment, and something feels wrong. Her face muscles resist the smile. She realizes she hasn't used these muscles in so long there's been no one to smile at. The fears had piled up during her years of preparation. Well-meaning advisors asked: Can your boat handle the ice pressure? What if your arms are too weak? What about polar bears? Hostile hunters? Spirits that might claim you? What if you go crazy? She carried all these warnings with her. But now, with the boat locked in ice, no amount of doubt could break her free. The winter would run its course whether she was ready or not. She describes her transformed identity: no longer defined by name, origin, or appearance. In this place, she wasn't strong or weak, right or wrong. She was simply "the result of my gestures." Compared to the foxes and ravens, she was laughably unfit. A hairless biped covered in objects, the least adapted species in the Arctic. She survived only through radical dependence on others: the engineers who designed her gear, the writers whose books inspired her, the Inuit who taught her to read ice and weather, the activists who fought for her rights to be there. She was alone, yet had never been so dependent on her own species.