Oxford University Exploration Club

Graham Dorrington: Dendronautics

The rainforest canopy remains one of the world’s most unreachable and understudied places. Dr Graham Dorrington builds helium airships that float silently over the treetops, allowing scientists to peer down at the complexity of life below. The testing of his spectral white airship above the forest of Guyana was the subject of a 2004 documentary by the film-maker Werner Herzog, from which we will show clips during the evening. Join us for an insight into one of the last great frontiers of exploration. See also BBC interview and Dendronautics.org

Expeditions Seminar

Come and get all the contacts and information you need to set up or join your own student expedition in 2008. You’ll get tips on choosing your team, medical issues and how to produce a successful application to the Expeditions Council. Advice on funding an expedition and how much money is available through the club will be available. You’ll also get a chance to hear from previous expedition leaders how they went about setting up their projects.

NOTE: Deadline for proposals this year is noon on Wednesday of 6th week (14th Nov).

Phil Wickens: North and South - Expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic

Mountaineer, photographer and Vice President of the Alpine Club, Phil Wickens led his first expedition to the Greater Ranges of Asia as an undergraduate in Pure Biology at Imperial College London. Since then he has travelled the far-flung areas of the world with expedition cruise-ships, undertaken remote location work as a field assistant for the British Antarctic Survey, and conducted a number of private expeditions. He will be joining us shortly after returning from the outer reaches of Tibet to regale us with stories and images from some of the most inaccessible places on earth.

Rosemarie and Pat Keough: Photographing the White Continent

Pat and Rosemarie Keough’s Antarctic photographs comprise one of the most stunning and diverse portfolios ever assembled about this great white continent. Their award-winning photography encompasses landscapes, seascapes, ice, snow, wildlife, ‘the hand of man’, abstracts and realism. All told, the Keoughs spent 24 months exploring and photographing the Antarctic from the windswept polar plateau of the interior to the majestic, mountainous coast, and from the multitude of off-lying islands to the icy seas and surrounding stormy Southern Ocean.

Joint event with Oxford University Canadian Society

John Vaillant: The Golden Spruce

John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America’s last great forest, where trees grow to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the chainsaws are always at work. He tells the mysterious story of logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin, who plunged naked into a river in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night’s work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 300 years old, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell. Vaillant tells the story of a glorious natural wonder and the man who destroyed it, and leaves us with troubling questions about our society’s self-contradictory approach to nature.

Joint event with Oxford University Canadian Society

Henry Nicholls: Lonesome George and Journeys of the Mind

Science journalist Henry Nicholls is best known for his tale of Lonesome George, the last remaining of the Pinta Island Tortoise, Geochelone nigra abingdonii, native to the Galápagos islands, whom scientists have been trying in vain since 1971 to pair up with an eligible female partner in order to save the species. His book tells George’s story, weaving together human drama, evolutionary biology and the history of our attitudes towards science and conservation. Building on his scientific background in the sexual behaviour of birds and a year spent researching meer kats in the Kalahari, Nicholls will describe his more recent journeys of the mind as a writer thriving on the intrepid travels of generations of explorers and scientists.

Screening of BBC’s Planet Earth

Join us for drinks and a free screening of an episode from the BBC’s epic Planet Earth on the big screen in Magdalen College Auditorium.

AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE… The makers of The Blue Planet present the epic story of life on Earth. Five years in production, over 2000 days in the field, using 40 cameramen filming across 200 locations, this is the ultimate portrait of our planet. A stunning television experience that combines rare action, unimaginable scale, impossible locations and intimate moments with our planet’s best-loved, wildest and most elusive creatures. Planet Earth takes you to places you have never seen before, to experience sights and sounds you may never experience again.

Hugh Thomsom: The Lost City of Cota Copa

Following a trail of rumours through some of the Andes’ remotest territory, explorer and writer Hugh Thomson led a team of experts and muleteers that in 2002 discovered the lost Inca city at Cota Copa, which had lain hidden for hundreds of years in a deep forested valley.

‘Thomson belongs to a rare species of explorer. He is a writer who explores and not an explorer who writes. And it’s Thomson’s extreme humility in the face of both danger and extraordinary success that places him in the same tradition as Eric Newby.’ Geographical Magazine