Rolex and explorer Felicity Aston’s efforts to save the Arctic

That initial field assignment marked the beginning of more than two decades of polar exploration. Aston has since journeyed through the North and South Poles, Greenland, Iceland and Canada—what she affectionately describes as “all the cold places in the world.” She has led an all-female team across Greenland’s vast ice sheet, become the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica, and was awarded an MBE in 2015 for her contributions to polar research.

Her latest chapter began that same year, aboard a towering Russian nuclear icebreaker navigating the Siberian coast. As part of a citizen science programme, Aston was collecting sea ice data, which would later be entered into an open-source database at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Denver, Colorado. Aston’s submission turned out to be the only one that year from the central Arctic basin—a stark finding, given that in 2018 the region lost an estimated 85 percent of its multi-year sea ice. The conclusion was unequivocal: more data was needed, and time was of the essence.

“We can collect data from space, but there is certain information that we can only get from being on the ground, and I am surprised that we have run out of time to access this geographic information,” said Felicity Aston.

This stark realisation led to the creation of BIG—an expedition in which Aston brought together an all-female team of scientists to ski to the Geographic North Pole, gathering sea ice data along the way, at a time when access by road was still possible. Without this type of data, the computer models used to interpret environmental shifts in the Arctic, and to forecast what lies ahead, remain incomplete.

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Over the past three years, the BIG Expedition—supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative—has carried out three journeys into the Arctic. Each time, departures had to be rerouted at the last moment due to the very environmental disruptions Aston sought to investigate. The team instead ventured into other Arctic regions, such as Svalbard and Iceland, transporting substantial quantities of snow and ice samples via human-pulled sleds. These samples are now being analysed for traces of black carbon and microplastics, offering valuable insight into why the Arctic is experiencing the effects of climate change at a pace three times faster than the global average.

Alongside the scientific data, the expeditions also tell a more visceral story: rain falling through sub-zero air in Svalbard, grassy valleys replacing deep snowfields in the north of Iceland. For Aston, the collaboration with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative links BIG Expedition to a network of Rolex Awards Laureates and environmental partners—an energising constellation of voices, and a solid foundation from which to press forward in an uncertain terrain.

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