One set of allegations against Marchant came from a small expedition in Antarctica’s Beacon Valley, where people slept in unheated tents, traversed rugged terrain, and received supplies by helicopter, Science reported. For weeks, their only contact with others was a radio connection to a base station. Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, alleges that during this trip Marchant, then her thesis adviser, called her a “slut” and a “whore” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was with them. Willenbring said Marchant told her each day, “Today I’m going to make you cry.”

Another woman, whom Science does not name, alleges that during a different expedition in Antarctica, Marchant belittled her and called her a “bitch” repeatedly. “I began to believe the things he told me,” she wrote in a formal complaint.

In some cases, Marchant’s harassment was violent, Willenbring said. She alleges Marchant shoved her, threw rocks at her when she urinated in the field, and:

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

The details of these allegations are shocking in their vulgarity. But the fact that they exist isn’t surprising at all, said Julienne Rutherford, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the authors of the 2014 survey. Rutherford said the accounts of sexual harassment, in both the Weinstein and Marchant reports, read like a script, carefully constructed from similar stories over the years. She described it from the perspective of the alleged perpetrator.

“You identify the target as wanting something you control. You break them down to the point that they don’t trust themselves. You break them down to the point where their work suffers. And you isolate them to the point that they either don’t report, or when they do report, they’re told, wouldn’t it be better if you kept this to yourself?” Rutherford said. “It’s the same story over and over again, and it’s devastating every time.”

On a remote research expedition, there may be no option to report the harassment immediately. The person in charge might be the abuser. Witnesses to the abuse may feel powerless in the moment, perhaps fearful of making themselves targets.

The trauma of the harassment follows victims from the field to their homes and institutions. Avoiding their harassers may be difficult. According to a followup report from Rutherford and her 2014 coauthors on victims, published online Wednesday, “these interactions occurred on their university campuses, at conferences, or online, and a few targets of harassment received love letters even after repeatedly rebuffing the advances of their colleagues.”