Spending more time around your teammates made matters worse rather than better.
That is the standout finding from research conducted during a ten-month overwintering rotation at Concordia Station in Antarctica, where an international team followed 12 crew members through the coldest and darkest part of the year. Crew who interacted with others more often were also the ones more likely to describe rising conflict, eroding trust, and diminished performance.
It runs against the usual assumption about isolated groups. Conventional wisdom holds that loneliness is the problem and companionship is the fix. The sensor readings suggest the equation is considerably more tangled.
Why Antarctica stands in for Mars
Concordia ranks among the most isolated locations on the planet. Temperatures during winter drop to as low as minus 80 °C (-112 °F), and no rescue is possible until the season changes.
Distance, confinement and the absence of any exit route combine to make it one of the closest terrestrial analogues for future long-duration missions to the Moon or Mars. Extended spaceflight can subject small crews to isolation, tight quarters, and severe psychological strain over many months. Concordia reproduces those conditions here on Earth, somewhere researchers can actually take measurements.
Leading the project were Jan Schmutz, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich, and Andrea Cantisani, a psychiatrist and research associate at the University of Bern.
Questionnaires alone wouldn’t have caught this
Across the ten months, the 12 crew members filled out questionnaires at four separate points. Nothing unusual there.
What set the study apart: the participants also carried sensors that logged automatically whenever they came into physical proximity with another team member, along with the duration of each encounter. The result is an objective record of who spent time near whom and for how long — not merely what individuals recalled and opted to report.
Pairing the two data sources allowed the researchers to trace how loneliness, trust, conflict, social relationships, team cohesion, and perceived performance shifted as the mission progressed.
"In small teams under extreme conditions, more contact doesn’t automatically equate to social support, but can actually increase tensions," said Schmutz.
The caveat the researchers put on their own result
What they have is a correlation. The researchers state this openly, and the distinction is important.
Individuals experiencing loneliness might have pursued additional interaction, even where those encounters failed to deliver the support they were after. Play that sequence out and the same pattern appears in the data without contact having caused any harm at all. The study cannot untangle the two possibilities.
What it does back is a milder but still valuable point: in confined settings, unrelenting closeness can turn into a stressor of its own. Isolation takes a toll. So does having nowhere to retreat to.
The crew split along language lines
The proximity sensors registered something the crew might never have articulated to themselves. Over the course of the mission, the group progressively broke into smaller clusters, with individuals spending more and more of their time near colleagues who shared a language or nationality.
Interpret that charitably and it looks like a coping strategy. Such bonds may give people a sense of support and stability through difficult stretches.
Interpret it the opposite way and it looks like a fault line. That same clustering could foster social divides and erode unity in culturally mixed teams — which describes the roster of nearly every crewed mission.
What this changes for mission planning
Crews on long missions may have almost no privacy and only restricted contact with anyone beyond the spacecraft or habitat. If piling on forced proximity doesn’t dependably deliver cohesion, then habitat layout and crew scheduling carry more psychological weight than any team-building session could.
"The results show how important it is to identify social dynamics early on and provide teams with targeted support," said Schmutz.
The conclusions could carry over to other punishing environments as well, such as submarines, offshore oil platforms, and remote research stations. Wherever a small group is sealed in together for an extended period, the same forces are at work.
The hardware held up, which is its own result
Getting wearable proximity sensors to function dependably at minus 80 °C is far from guaranteed, and the study demonstrated that they can operate in extreme environments. They allowed researchers to track shifts in day-to-day social behaviour without meaningfully interfering with the crew’s routines — which is the essential trick in observation of this kind.
Granularity remains the unanswered question. One contact is not equivalent to another, and the next phase of research will examine in finer detail which forms of social interaction ease stress and which compound it. Until that question is settled, any Mars crew plan that assumes time together is inherently beneficial rests on a premise this data does not support.