Felicity Aston MBE

British polar explorer Felicity Aston MBE is an author, speaker and research scientist. In 2012 she became the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica — a journey of 1744km that took 59 days to complete and which gave her a place in the book of Guinness World Records.

Felicity has been organising and leading expeditions for most of her adult life. As well as being the first woman in the world to ski across Antarctica alone, she has raced in the Canadian Arctic, led a team of women across the inland ice of Greenland, led record-making International teams to the North and South Poles, searched for meteorite craters in Quebec, skied along a frozen river in Siberia and traversed the winter ice of Lake Baikal.

She also worked on a nuclear-powered icebreaker at the North Pole, walked the Chadar to Zanskar, driven 35,000km across Eurasia to the coldest inhabited place in the world, searched for gold in the Yukon, driven 6,000km across Antarctica, flown in an airship across America, completed the infamous Marathon Des Sables across the Moroccan Sahara and spent three years living and working in the Antarctic.

Over the years, Felicity's projects have been granted the Captain Scott Society 'Spirit of Adventure Award', the Wilderness Award, a Timberland 'Make it Better' Scholarship and the annual Land Rover/RGS 'Go Beyond' Bursary as well as earning support from the National Geographic Expeditions Council in the US.

Felicity's Polar career began in the year 2000, when she travelled to Antarctica for the first time with the British Antarctic Survey as a Meteorologist. Aged 23, she spent a continuous period of two and a half years (including two consecutive winters) at Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula to monitor climate and ozone.

She went on to organise and lead numerous expeditions to remote places around the world, but particularly to the Polar Regions. Felicity continues to explore, specialising in new and exciting ways to communicate the expedition experience to the wider world. Her Kaspersky Lab Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition was the first to ‘Tweet to the Pole’ and material from her Pole of Cold expedition has been developed into a travelling art exhibition.

She has written four books (her first was a finalist in the Banff Mountain Festival Book Competition), contributed to several others and regularly produces articles for various publications in the UK and abroad.

In 2013 she spent a month flying across North America in an airship co-presenting a two part BBC Science documentary about the atmosphere called ‘Operation Cloud Lab: Secrets of the Skies’ for BBC Two and in 2016 retraced the route of the 1898 Klondike Goldrush across the Yukon, co-presenting a documentary mini-series for BBC History.

When not on expedition, Felicity Aston has worked closely with a number of expedition-related organisations, charities and projects as trustee, patron or ambassador: including The British Antarctic Monument Trust, Equal Adventure, First Women project and the Great Britain and Northern Island Chapter of The Explorers Club.

She has been elected Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society in London and The Explorers Club in New York. She is a 2008 Churchill Fellow, has received the Ginny Fiennes Award from the Transglobe Expedition Trust, the 2014 Women of Discovery Award from WINGS WorldQuest, the 2019 Special Contribution Award from National Geographic Traveller UK and an Honorary Doctorate from Canterbury Christ Church University. In 2015 she was awarded The Queen’s Polar Medal and was appointed MBE for services to polar exploration.

Felicity divides her time between her home in Iceland and her native UK.

Felicity Aston regularly shares her expedition experiences with a variety of audiences around the world, from corporate conferences and executive training, to theatre tours and after dinner talks.

Drawing on the trials and triumphs of her expeditions, Felicity uses her presentations to provide a fresh and insightful look at leadership, teamwork, resilience, adapting to change, risk management, virtual teams, motivation and diversity - as well as subjects around climate change and sustainability.

The measure of a good motivational speaker is the ability to completely engage the audience no matter whether it is a small group of executives, a conference of several hundred, or a public lecture in a theatre.

Felicity does just that, expertly blending memorable stories from her expeditions with though-provoking messages that prompt new thinking. She crafts each talk to accommodate any time frame and to ensure that her presentations are always poignantly relevant to everyone in the room.

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