Tarascon-sur-Ariege, France:
A year following France entered uncharted territory with its initially coronavirus lockdown, a smaller group of volunteers has embarked on a more intense confinement: almost six weeks underground, with no notion of time, to study the effects of acute isolation.
Since Sunday evening, 15 males and females are living in the vast Lombrives cave in the Pyrenees mountains south of Toulouse for an experiment dubbed “Deep Time,” led by the French-Swiss explorer Christian Clot.
For 40 days their house is a cavernous complicated under the Earth’s surface, deprived of phones, watches or organic light. But they do have their personal tents for a minimum of privacy.
“Three separate living spaces have been set up: one for sleeping, one for living, and one for carrying out topography studies, in particular for fauna and flora,” Clot told journalists a handful of hours prior to getting into the cave.
The major topic of study, even so, will be the seven males and seven females, aged 27 to 50, as properly as Clot, who should adapt to a continuous temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (54 Fahrenheit) and 95 % humidity.
They have been fitted out with sensors to let monitoring by about a dozen scientists hoping to study how humans respond without having the usual spatio-temporal frames of reference.
“This experiment is the first of its kind,” stated Etienne Koechlin, director of the cognitive neurosciences division at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, who is element of the monitoring group.
“Until now, these types of missions aimed to study the body’s physiological rhythms, but never the impact of this type of disconnection from time on a human being’s cognitive and emotional functions,” he stated.
‘Not easy’
The volunteers, who are not getting any compensation, are from all across France and include things like a jeweller, an anaesthesiologist, a safety guard and a steeplejack.
Four tons of provisions and other gear have been loaded into the cave so that the group can live in full autonomy — water will come from a properly on website, and a bike-powered generator will provide electrical energy.
The bulk of the financing for the 1.2 million euro ($1.4 million) project came from Clot’s Human Adaptation Institute, with the aid of some private and public partnerships.
Arnaud Burel, a 29-year-old biologist, stated he signed up “to experience this life removed from time, something that’s impossible to do on the outside with our computers and cellphones that are constantly reminding us of our appointments and obligations.”
“Forty days in your life, it’s just a drop in the ocean, isn’t it?” he stated.
He nonetheless admitted that becoming cooped up with a smaller group may prove tricky.
“It’s not easy to live with 14 people you don’t know, in a closed space — communication is going to be the key,” he predicted.
Fortunately, the volunteers can leave at any time if the encounter proves also significantly.