With the effects of climate change becoming more evident in recent years, researchers and scientists have heightened their efforts to seek solutions or provide valuable information to those who can make a difference. This includes Felicity Aston, a legendary British explorer, who has taken it upon herself and her team to gather sufficient data about the world’s extreme polar regions before they are gone.
A record-breaking, generation-defining polar explorer, Aston has trained and led all-female novice teams on data collection expeditions to locations across the North Pole, Iceland and Greenland. Her current project, the Before It’s Gone (B.I.G.) Arctic Research Expedition, supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, puts a spotlight on the instability of these Arctic regions. She hopes it will serve as an urgent call to reach and record sea ice data from these rapidly changing geographies so we can better understand, and ultimately protect, them.
At just 19 years of age, Aston first encountered the polar landscape during a job with the British Antarctic Survey and was awestruck by its vastness and seeming perfection. This was when her determination to protect the area began to take root. From that initial foray, Aston invested more than two decades in polar exploration, from the Arctic and Antarctic poles, to Greenland, Iceland and Canada: as Aston puts it, “All the cold places in the world.” She led an all-female team on an expedition across the Greenland ice sheet, became the first woman to cross Antarctica alone, and in 2015 was awarded an MBE for services to polar exploration.
Most recently, aboard a massive nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker off the North Siberian coast, Aston collected sea ice data as part of a citizen science programme. When the readings were added to an open database at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre based in Denver, Colorado, it was discovered that the project’s data was the only entry for the year from the central Arctic Basin; an area estimated to have lost 85 per cent of the thickest multiyear sea ice by 2018. It was then that Aston’s mission became clear: they needed more data, and fast, before everything was literally lost to sea.
“You can collect some data from space, but there’s certain information you can only get from being there on the ground, and it really struck me that we were running out of time to access this geography in order to collect information.”
With the B.I.G. Expedition, Aston gathered an all-female team of citizen scientists to ski to the Geographic North Pole, recording sea ice data as they went, while it was still accessible on foot. Without this information, the computer models we use to explain the environmental changes in the Arctic, and predict what is to come, will give us an incomplete picture.
In the past three years, the B.I.G. Expedition, with support from the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, has attempted three expeditions to the North Pole. Unfortunately, all three were diverted just before departure due to unpredictable environmental conditions. To ensure that their efforts were not in vain, the teams relocated to other Arctic regions, including Svalbard and Iceland, where they collected enormous quantities of snow and ice samples. These will be studied for evidence of microplastics and black carbon, the results of which could help to explain why we are seeing the impacts of climate change in the Arctic three times faster than anywhere else in the world.
For Aston, the support of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative offers the B.I.G. Expedition a connection to an extraordinary cast of Rolex Awards Laureates and Perpetual Planet Initiative partners, a spotlight for this urgent project, and a solid home base from which to launch into an ever-shifting landscape. “The Perpetual Planet Initiative with Rolex has championed people who are really pushing the envelope not only in understanding our planet, but how we make it better, how we provide those solutions. Being supported by the initiative is wonderful in terms of the credibility and community it brings.”
With the effects of climate change becoming more evident in recent years, researchers and scientists have heightened their efforts to seek solutions or provide valuable information to those who can make a difference. This includes Felicity Aston, a legendary British explorer, who has taken it upon herself and her team to gather sufficient data about the world’s extreme polar regions before they are gone.
A record-breaking, generation-defining polar explorer, Aston has trained and led all-female novice teams on data collection expeditions to locations across the North Pole, Iceland and Greenland. Her current project, the Before It’s Gone (B.I.G.) Arctic Research Expedition, supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, puts a spotlight on the instability of these Arctic regions. She hopes it will serve as an urgent call to reach and record sea ice data from these rapidly changing geographies so we can better understand, and ultimately protect, them.
At just 19 years of age, Aston first encountered the polar landscape during a job with the British Antarctic Survey and was awestruck by its vastness and seeming perfection. This was when her determination to protect the area began to take root. From that initial foray, Aston invested more than two decades in polar exploration, from the Arctic and Antarctic poles, to Greenland, Iceland and Canada: as Aston puts it, “All the cold places in the world.” She led an all-female team on an expedition across the Greenland ice sheet, became the first woman to cross Antarctica alone, and in 2015 was awarded an MBE for services to polar exploration.
