Jim McNeill and Felicity Aston are the latest polar explorers to join Speakers from the Edge.

It’s 100 years since Captain Scott left Great Britain on his heroic mission to reach the hitherto untouched South Pole. Back in the early 1900s, the "heroic age of Antartctic Exploration" saw an international focus on polar expeditions, with several expeditions mapping Antarctica for the first time and collecting the first scientific data from both the polar regions. 

Today, modern technology and equipment enable explorers to go further and spend longer in polar environments.  Expeditions to both poles continue to be high risk, ultra-endurance endeavours but they are now essential to help shed light on the complex issue of climate change, a topic both our new speakers are passionate about. 

Felicity Aston

Felicity is a polar explorer and Antarctic scientist. A trained physicist and meteorologist, her first polar saw her spending three years as a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, monitoring climate and ozone. In 2009, Felicity led a diverse, multicultural team of women on one of the most arduous journeys on Earth - a 38-day, 900 km journey to the South Pole. Marking the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth, Felicity trained and lead the team, many of whom were novices, reaching their goal on 2 days ahead of schedule.

Felicity is a passionate and experienced motivational speaker with great insights on teamwork, motivation, leadership and goal setting as well as environmental issues.

Read Felicity’s full profile...

Jim McNeill

Jim is an accomplished polar explorer and incident leadership expert with over 25 years experience of Arctic expeditions. Since 2001 Jim has focused full-time on being a professional explorer. Every year his Ice Warrior Project trains a group of volunteers to become competent polar travelers and carry out purposeful scientific explorations of the coldest and most remote regions of our planet.

Jim is an extremely versatile individual who is able to draw on his experiences in business, incident leadership and exploration to give fascinating insights into leadership, team dynamics, risk and performance as well as informative presentations on climate change.

Read Jim’s full profile....