The Big Interview
Felicity Aston, MBE, Arctic scientist, author and expedition leader. Pippa Neill talks to Felicity Aston, MBE, Arctic scientist, author and expedition leader.
Early next year Felicity will be leading the B.I.G North Pole expedition, where an all female-team will be skiing the last degree of latitude to the North Pole to collect data on black carbon and microplastic pollution. Spacehouse, the publishers of Air Quality News and Environment Journal are sponsoring this expedition. Felicity’s polar career began in early 2000 when she was straight out of University and got her first job with the British Antarctic Survey as a meteorologist. ‘My role was to maintain the climate and ozone monitoring,’ explains Felicity. ‘It was a long contract, I was there for two and a half years and when I returned back to the UK my first instinct was that I needed to visit the other polar regions.’ It was then that Felicity started organising her own expeditions. ‘I realised that no British women’s team had ever crossed the Greenland Ice Sheet before. I have always wanted to challenge the stereotypical view of what a polar explorer is so I set out to do just that.’ Felicity continues to challenge the status quo and in the upcoming B.I.G North Pole expedition she will be leading five women who have never stepped foot in the polar regions before. ‘When I look back on some of those early expeditions it leaves me breathless to think about how naive I was. But rather than seeing my mistakes as failures and finding them demoralising, they had the opposite effect. I found them to be a real motivator and it pushed me to do more expeditions and put these lessons into practice.’ 28
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"You don’t have to be a scientist to see these changes, you don’t even need to go to the polar regions, you can just as clearly see the impact of climate change outside your own front door." Since her first expedition over 20 years ago, a lot has changed in the polar regions. According to the latest IPCC Report, Arctic surface air temperature has increased by more than double the global average, with feedback loops from loss of sea ice and snow cover contributing to amplified warning. ‘I was recently in Greenland and we were taking photographs in an area that I’d visited exactly 24 years before. It was amazing to have this quarter of a century view but it was no surprise to anyone to see that the amount of snow and ice was shockingly different. ‘You don’t have to be a scientist to see these changes, you don’t even need to go to the polar regions, you can just as clearly see the impact of climate change outside your own front door.’ It was this realisation that motivated Felicity to undertake the B.I.G North Pole Expedition, one of her toughest challenges yet. ‘Training is pretty much a full time job,’ says Felicity. ‘There’s the physical training where we need to build up intrinsic strength. There’s the skills training, learning how to use the stove, how to load the sledge and how to put up a tent when you’re really tired. But most importantly there is also the mental training. We are a team that is a product of the pandemic and so developing cohesion as a team as
