Austen Floyd (42) will be part of an 80-strong team who are set to spend four months in the Antarctic from November.

He will be driving the crane at three miles an hour with the doors open, wearing a life jacket, in case it crashes through the ice.

Earlier this year, he went to Atlanta to see the new 30 tonne Mantis crane which is to be transported to the Antarctic to be used for erecting a new research station.

The vehicle will be the biggest thing ever taken across the sea ice and Austin will be responsible for driving and operating the crane.

As head of technical lift operations and in charge of the steel fitting team he has responsibility for driving it across the ice.

Austen has been a self employed engineer for 22 years and runs his own company, AFFS.

Speaking to the Gazette before a trip to South Africa to help prepare for his Antartic adventure, Austen said: “The test build will take five or six weeks and then it will be the Antarctic for four months.

“It will be the second time I have been there and I will be working flat out.

“The trip is for scientific research and is quite a specialist field. The work is so tiring that I will be too exhausted to do anything else.”

It will be late November when Austen embarks on the voyage to the Antarctic on the British research ship RSS Shackleton.

He will be away from home for four months and will miss his family, especially his wife Sara and her four children.

The couple were married in March and he hopes to be back home for their first wedding anniversary.

His life has taken its more adventurous turn as a result of the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 - then his firm, Floyd Farm Services, was involved in steel erecting and lifting for farms.

Now he has a vast range of work - his last job was lifting a giant octopus figure to the top of a ride at Flamingo Land near Pickering.

But that is only after he returns from South Africa, where he is at the moment preparing for the challenging Antarctic project