Some Antarctic scientists train in British mud

There hasn't been a glacier in England since the Ice Age; so Antarctic scientists flock to a muddy field in Derbyshire to learn how to survive on the world's coldest continent.

Camped in tents and sometimes sharing a field with horses or geese from Yeld Farm, they learn skills such as lighting a frozen paraffin stove or escaping from a crevasse - taught dangling from ropes on nearby crags in the Peak District.

Since the 1970s, the British Antarctic Survey has trained hundreds of staff there - cooks, pilots, mechanics and plumbers as well as glaciologists.

Its three-day course in Derbyshire in the Midlands, where the average daytime temperature is about 15˚C, is the closest thing in England to life at the frozen South Pole.

"We try to prepare people for life in Antarctica and some of the dangers," said Rod Arnold, an organisder at the British Antarctic Survey. These might include rescuing an unconscious colleague from a crevasse or tackling carbon monoxide poisoning from a stove.

Exercises include wearing snow goggles covered with white tape and then stumbling blind through heather attached to a rope to try to find a person pretending to be "lost in a snowstorm".

About 40 people took a recent safety course, among them scientists from the US, Germany, France and Spain.

Antarctica is the world's most inhospitable continent, where Russia's Vostok station recorded a temperature of -89˚C the coldest documented on earth.

Scientists can spend weeks in remote locations with a lone assistant, so need to know how to survive.

"The climbing really helped," said Rebecca Rixon, a 22-year-old doctoral student at England's Exeter University, who learnt how to abseil down a rock face on Derbyshire's Baslow Edge and climb up the rope again, to mimic getting out of a crevasse.