Focus on Felicity Aston pictures on expedition.

Exploring winter

It’s the coldest season of the year, but what does winter mean to you?

That was the question that explorer Felicity Aston and her team sought to answer as they travelled almost 36,000km from the UK across Scandinavia and Siberia in a Land Rover Defender.

Using images, stories, film footage and sounds gathered during the expedition, Felicity describes the people and places the team experienced as they headed into some of the most extreme winter climates including the Pole of Cold, the coldest inhabited place on the planet where temperatures plummeted to almost -60C.

“The focus of the talk will be on some of the coldest winters in the world and the people that live through them,” said Felicity, who is planning another expedition to the North Pole in April.

“Perhaps one of the highlights will be when I play the audience the sound of my own breath freezing at Oymyakon, the Pole of Cold. It was -59C when I made the recording.

“The locals, the Yakut, have a word for this sound in their own language. I can’t pronounce it but it translates into English as ‘the whisper of the stars’.”

Another highlight for Felicity will be explaining who the ‘Lord Keeper of the Cold’ is.

“We met him at the Pole of Cold. He’s a figure from Yakut mythology and might possibly be King of the Santas,” she says.

Other issues Felicity will discuss include best forms of transport when it’s so cold that fuel becomes solid, and how cold it has to be before children stop going to school.

She also looks at how people live without the sun for half of the year.

A trained physicist and meteorologist, Felicity, 39, is an Antarctic scientist and record-breaking explorer, with 15 years leading teams in Siberia, Quebec, the Canadian Arctic and Antarctica.

She grew up in Kent and left the UK aged 23 to spend three years living and working in the Antarctic as a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey.

“Growing up in the south east of England, there wasn’t a lot of snow. So when it did snow, as a kid, it was a really exciting event,” she says. “It meant days off school, it was magical and was like stepping into a new world.

“In retrospect, I’m not sure whether this is where my first connection between adventure, excitement, snow and ice was formed.

The Kirkcaldy event, on Monday at 7.30pm, is part of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society “Inspiring People” Series. Although the event is billed as a lecture, Felicity sees herself as a storyteller and wants to engage people in her experiences.

Felicity Aston and some of the pictures she took on her epic expedition across the coldest areas of Scandinavia and Serbia. During her trip she experienced temperatures as low as -59C.