Felicity Aston Embarks on Transantarctic Solo Expedition

British explorer Felicity Aston, carrier of WINGS flag #24,has just set out on her first solo ski expedition across Antarctica.  The 1,700km, 70 day trek will make her the first woman to ever complete this extraordinary feat alone.  

For Felicity, this is a personal challenge combining all that she has learned about polar travel over the past ten years. It is meant to instil a spirit of adventurer and to shed light on what motivates individuals to achieve. She has partnered with Dr. Stephen Pack, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, who studies the link between physical activity and psychological well-being.  Dr. Pack has helped Felicity prepare mentally for isolation and will be using her podcasts and journal entries during the expedition as part of his research. 

Kaspersky Lab will once again be supporting Felicity on her expedition.  Felicity has begun posting updates on the expedition website at http://www.kasperskyonetransantarcticexpedition.com. Here, you can follow her progress on an interactive map, which will include Facebook and Twitter updates. She will also be posting a daily podcast that you can listen to on the site.  

Latest from her Expedition Blog: 

Ross Ice Shelf: November 25, 2011

Hello from the Ross Ice Shelf! I finally got here. It took 2 planes today to manage to get me to the far side of Antarctica and the start of my expedition. A few hours ago they dropped me off on the ice-shelf after an amazing flight over the Trans-Antarctic Mountains – and here I am. I’ve set up my tent, I’m alone on the Ross Ice Shelf and looking at a big white horizon on the one side towards the North – and to the South, this wall of mountain, absolutely spectacular. I couldn’t ask for better weather. It’s really calm, it’s sunny, warm – so it’s been very kind to me for my first night on the ice. I can’t wait to get started in the morning – and start my journey to the South Pole and the opposite side of Antarctica. I’m currently at about 85 degrees South and tomorrow I’m going to be chipping away at that – so yeah. Here’s to a good nights sleep and a good start tomorrow. 

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Fellow Diana Beresford-Kroeger named a 2011 Utne Visionary

The Utne Reader recently named fellow Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a medical and argricultural researcher, as an Utne Visionary for her botanical work studying Aboriginal and Western healing in order to advocate for preserving forests.  She has concocted a bioplan in which trees could help reforest and heal the planet.  

Click here to watch WINGS produced videos of Diana for Discover!

 Image courtesy of Diana Beresford-Kroeger

“'If you speak for the trees, you speak for all of nature,'” says Beresford-Kroeger, who has the mind of a scientist and the heart of an artist. She has studied the environmental, medicinal, nutritional, and even spiritual aspects of trees, has written about them in books such as The Global Forest and Arboretum Borealis, and on her property she maintains gardens that burst with flora and are open often to the public."-The Utne Reader.  

Click here to read the article about Diana in the Utne Reader 

"WINGS Girls" Raise Money for Women Explorers

For the second year, Sigourney and Odessa Buell ran a lemonade stand during the Perry Street Fair.  Odessa, Sigourney and their close friend Georgia Wallace have attended the WINGS Women of Discovery Gala for the past several years and have been so inspired by the women they've met, that this year they decided to donate a portion of their proceeds to WINGS to support their work!

These remarkable young women, following in the pioneering footsteps of the WINGS Fellows, began efforts last year to establish "WINGS Girls," a junior explorers club for girls who dream about exploring the world and making it a better place through science and discovery. Thank you Odessa, Sigourney, Georgia and all of your friends for being such dedicated champions of WINGS and the WINGS Fellows!

 

The girls were helped by some special friends, Katrina Fisher who is a classmate of Sigourney's and Su Chermayoff.  They set up the stand at 8 AM and kept it open until 6 PM, when the fair closed.   A long day of work, but it paid off. They sold 600 cups of lemonade, well done! With each sale they gave the customer a WINGS card and explained what WINGS is about.  Since people often came in groups they were able to reach out to well in excess of 600 people.

 

The team at around 2 PM (Georgia, Odessa, Katrina, Sigourney and Rosa Shipley

Here are a few fun pictures of the action!

Odessa and Su making a sale!

Sigourney, Odessa and Rosa explaining to customers about Wings Worldquest.

Odessa taking a break.

More talk about WINGS!

Katrina, Sigourney and Odessa celebrating at the end of the day after they sold the 600th cup!

Explaining borders to the birds...Kate Harris, April 10, 2011

Cycling Silk 2011 Trailer from Kate Harris on Vimeo.

In the world of strict plans and fixed agendas, detours are just distractions. But on the Cycling Silk expedition, detours often prove the destination – and not just because we frequently get lost. So when KuzeyDoğa, an award-winning Turkish NGO, invited us to explore their biodiversity conservation projects in the borderlands of eastern Turkey – wooing us with wild animals, wide open spaces, and a visit to a Turkish bath – we knew it would be worth diverting from our intended route for a visit. After all, we hadn’t showered in a week.

So we steered south, away from the Black Sea, and began climbing onto the Kars Plateau, swapping heavy rain for heavier snow along the way. The roads grew so slick with ice we had to work twice as hard to go half as fast. Sometimes we couldn’t bike at all. Climbing a pass during a blizzard, the snow not so much falling as firing, flakes sharp and aimed as arrows, the police stopped us and made us cross the pass in a truck (driven by Osman and Mustafa, of course.) At least the heated cab offered respite from the snot-crackling, lung-stiffening cold. Surviving on the bike in such conditions required cartwheel breaks to centrifugally force blood back into extremities. While I exulted in this suddenly polar world, cryophile that I am, Mel may never join me on another winter adventure again, even if she someday thaws out from this one.

Whether because of the cold or despite it, we fell in love with Kars. The Plateau is a territory of enchantment: foxes loping across plains wide as thought, owls patient as stone on signposts, mountains giving cold shoulders to the world. A place more sky than earth, no wonder it set us soaring. We had good company up there: slow-reeling vultures, skinhead buzzards, fang-billed falcons, and many other birds populate Kars skies. Since we visited in the cold heart of winter, though, most vagrants of the air were off sunning themselves at the equator. Birds of prey migrate by skipping like stones from thermal to thermal, rising on one column of hot air and gliding down to the next forming, back and forth to Africa, Europe, and India, stopping in the South Caucasus along the way. If only bikes could be physically powered by the same principle.

While territory is an instinctive concept for birds, the political divides we map onto their habitats are meaningless to them. There’s no explaining borders to the birds; they fly far above our fences. But even so, fences define boundaries, however arbitrary, that can fragment the habitats where birds stop to breed and feed during migration. This is especially true of the borderlands where KuzeyDoğa works, including the Aralık-Karasu marshes skirting the base of Mount Ararat, on the border of Turkey and Iran, with Armenia and Azerbaijan nearby.

Read the rest on the Cycling Silk Blog!

Anna's Blog, March 31, 2011...5Gyres South Pacific Expedition; Noon position: 32 41.54 South, 86 39.97 West

High times and clean seas...

Another glassy morning, water slick and still, with an almost oily sheen indicative of these ocean dynamics. We’re in a high pressure system, about 600 miles from the center of the accumulation zone. Light, variable winds force us to motor along, occasionally grabbing ahold of opportune gusts to shut off the engine. There’s nothing like the quiet peace of gliding along under sail only.

Today’s research was a repeat of yesterday – trawls mostly filled with tiny Portuguese Man O War, VelellaVelella, juvenile Myctophids, and translucent crabs. We’re running the high speed trawl continuously, stopping twice a day to deploy the manta trawl, and for Garen to conduct his research – more about that tomorrow.

Along with our barometer, spirits are also sky high. After tonight’s dinner – vegetable wraps with handmade tortillas, roasted onions and garlic, and a peach cobbler – we capped the evening with a round of recited poems, songs, a hilarious Scottish eulogy by Charlie (not a word of which was intelligible) and a sunset bagpipe serenade on the Sea Dragon’s bow. 6 or 7 cameras were immediately on hand to capture the moment. Its difficult to find words to describe how wonderfully incongruous both the sight and sound of this are….I’m fairly certain having a skilled bagpipe player on board a research expedition to the South Pacific Gyre is a first.

Read more on the 5GYRES Blog