David Sinclair

It’s so hard to choose among so many extraordinary experiences and memories, but it’s hard to beat being part of a team that was the first to visit the Astrid emperor penguin colony in 2023 and the Lazarev emperor penguin colony in 2024. Other memorable experiences include being surrounded by the aurora borealis, bioluminescence, and hundreds of northern fulmars in Davis Strait, after encountering orcas, northern bottlenose whales, and a polar bear eating another bear… all on the same day.

Nansen is my favourite. He’s the complete package: polar explorer, humanitarian, and so much more. I have an affinity for the explorers that learned from the Inuit, such as Amundsen and John Rae – explorers that understood they could learn from people with hard-won experience, people who had survived year after year through the polar night.

I look forward to returning to deep-field Antarctica to photograph the emperor penguins and to the South Pole to run a lap around the earth, where you can pass across all the lines of longitude in under ten seconds and marvel at the extraordinary change that has occurred since Amundsen set foot at the South Pole on 14th December 1911.