TEDxScottBase videos are live! Visit http://www.tedxscottbase.com/

In 2017, New Zealand celebrated the 60th anniversary of Scott Base, one of the oldest research facilities located in the international territory of Antarctica. To mark the occasion, Antarctica New Zealand hosted a first-of-its-kind event on ice, broadcast around the world: TEDxScottBase.

TEDxScottBase was unique amongst the TEDx canon - a national celebration, held on international soil, with collaborators from around the world. Its aim was to bring the very best ‘ideas worth spreading’ not only to the Antarctic, but to the world.

Scott Base is mandated by the Government of New Zealand to engage in scientific research. Carrying out the TEDxScottBase programme required a significant number of non-scientific guests on site. Speakers were hand-picked by the team and required to pass a vigorous Government screening process.

Instead of bringing attendees to Antarctica, TEDxScottBase was relayed to the world in a unique and cutting edge fashion. Not only will the event be broadcast in its entirety around the globe, but more than 60 live viewing events led by TEDxScottBase Hosts were be held worldwide.

Hillary Field Centre
Scott Base
New Zealand, Antarctica, 0000
Antarctica

Anthony Powell

Photographer/filmmaker

Anthony Powell originally worked in Antarctica as a telecommunications engineer before becoming a full-time film maker. He has wintered over 10 times, and has now spent more time in Antarctica than anywhere other than the house he grew up in. He had to design and build a lot of his own camera equipment to withstand the harsh conditions of the deep Antarctic winters. His wife Christine, who he met and married in Antarctica, is from California. Anthony's critically praised feature film Antarctica: A Year On Ice took over 10 years to make. It has won more than 20 international awards. He has contributed material to numerous exhibitions, films and TV shows all over the world including the US Natural History Museum, National Geographic, and Discovery, and also featured in the Emmy award winning BBC series Frozen Planet.

Ashlan Cousteau

Journalist, adventurer, advocate

Veteran journalist, adventurer and advocate, Ashlan Gorse Cousteau travels the world in search of stories that entertain and inspire. From diving with great white sharks off Mexico, searching for tigers in the jungles of Nepal and running with the caribou in the Arctic, Cousteau engages viewers through incredible tales and experiences. Ashlan's debut documentary Nuclear Sharks, for Discovery Channel's Shark Week, premiered as the #1 rated show across all cable programming. Traveling to the Marshall Islands, she lead an expedition to film, tag and investigate the mysterious grey reef sharks who survived against all odds in the fall out of one of the world’s largest nuclear testing grounds. Ashlan also joined the eccentric crew of the "Desiree" for season two of The Aquatic World of Philippe Cousteau, the highly successful adventure spoof, on CNN's digital platform Great Big Story.

Christina Hulbe

Professor Hulbe is a geophysicist who studies how and why polar ice sheets change over time. While she got her start in a remote west Antarctic field camp, most of her research today is computational, using mathematical models and remote sensing to investigate modern systems and the recent past. She is Professor and Dean of Surveying at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and was previously Chair of the Geology Department at Portland State University in the United States. In 2015, she returned to Antarctica to work with an interdisciplinary team from around New Zealand investigating the vulnerability of the Ross Ice Shelf in a warming world.

Claudia Batten

Entrepreneur

Claudia Batten is the New Zealand Trade & Enterprise Regional Director for North America, supporting New Zealand businesses as they grow internationally into the market. She oversees key relationships across the US, Canada and Mexico, and is responsible for operations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, Vancouver and Mexico City. Claudia has spent over 15 years in the technology sector and was part of the founding team of Massive, a first of its kind network for advertising in video games which was sold to Microsoft in 2006. In 2009, she co-founded Victors & Spoils, the first advertising agency built on the principles of crowdsourcing. French company Havas bought a majority interest in the agency in 2012. In 2014 Claudia co-founded Broadli to redefine how we use digital connectivity to power networking.

Craig Cary

Microbiologist

Craig is a native Californian who lived most of his early life in San Diego. He received his PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, in 1989, where he began his long-standing interest in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. He conducted post-doctoral work with Steve Giovannoni at Oregon State University before taking his first academic position at the University of Delaware. Craig currently holds a joint professorial appointment between the University of Waikato, in New Zealand and the University of Delaware. He is a microbial ecologist with more than 25 years of research focused on two primary areas – studying microbial life in extreme environments – during which he has participated in over 29 deep-sea expeditions to the hydrothermal vents including many dives in research submersibles. His recent work on extreme environments now includes 13 seasons in Antarctica to study microbial life in the Dry Valleys, the coldest driest place on earth.

Dan Barry

Astronaut

Dr. Dan Barry is a former NASA astronaut and a veteran of three space flights, four spacewalks and two trips to the International Space Station. He retired from NASA in 2005 and started his own company, Denbar Robotics, that creates robotic assistants for home and commercial use, concentrating on assistive devices for people with disabilities. Dan has received numerous honours, including the 2000 and 2002 NASA Exceptional Service Medals, 2001 Top 10 in the world career spacewalk hours, 100 Most Notable Princeton Graduate School Alumni of the 20th Century, Harvard Medical School Paul J. Corcoran Award and honorary doctoral degrees from Beloit College and St. Louis University. Dan has seven patents, over 50 articles in scientific journals and has served on two scientific journal editorial boards. He has film and television experience as well, including roles in two documentary films and as a cast member in season 12 of CBS Survivor. He is a founding faculty member for Singularity U

Gary Wilson

Professor

Gary is the Director of the New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute, a Professor of Marine Science at the University of Otago and also holds an adjunct position in the Geology Department at Otago. He has lectured at the University of Oxford and held a research fellowship at Wolfson College. Gary has participated in and led more than 20 expeditions to the Antarctic and Subantarctic supported by the New Zealand and US Antarctic Programmes. His collaborative research programmes have attracted more than $20 million in research grants and resulted in more than 100 scientific papers in peer research journals. He has held the Byrd Fellowship at the Ohio State University, the Blaustein Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and in 2006 he received a Sir Peter Blake Leadership award for his role in bringing together the multinational team for the ANDRILL project, which he chaired between 2004 and 2009.

Gin Wigmore

Musician

Gin Wigmore is a New Zealand born singer-songwriter known for her emotional, intelligent, pop-rock style. Gin's big break in the music industry came when she became the youngest and first unsigned artist to win the Grand Prize in the US-based International Songwriting Competition in 2004. Besting 11,000 entries from 77 countries to take home the Grand Prize brought her a record deal with Universal Australia, and she has since gone on to release three full-length albums – Holy Smoke (2009), Gravel & Wine (2011), and Blood to Bone (2015) - all of which have topped the New Zealand Albums Chart. The distinctiveness of Gin's voice and her captivating songwriting (with influences ranging from Neil Young, David Gray and Jeff Buckley through Edith Piaf and de la Soul) have won her international acclaim. Additionally, in recent years Gin's music has been featured in such major television programs as Grey's Anatomy and ABC's Revenge, and in major television ads such as a James Bond Skyfall

Jane Ussher

Photographer

Jane Ussher is well known and respected for her documentary work as a photographer, and is regarded as one of New Zealand’s foremost portrait photographers. For 29 years she was the chief photographer at The New Zealand Listener after which she took up a career as a freelance photographer working with various magazines and producing several books. In January 2009 , at the invitation of Antarctic New Zealand and the Antarctic Heritage Trust, she traveled to the Antarctic and spent over four weeks on the ice photographing the historic huts of Scott and Shackleton. These images have since been published in her book Still Life and subsequently become the basis for this installation. Other published books include the award winning Coast –A New Zealand journey, Face to Face and Worship a history of New Zealand church design. This year she published a book on New Zealand Islands with writer Bruce Ansley which has been long listed for 2017 New Zealand book awards.

Jeremy Moon

Entrepreneur/environmentalist

In 1994, 24-year-old marketing graduate Jeremy Moon made a discovery that changed his life. A merino grower showed him a prototype fabric he'd developed from 100% merino wool. The discovery inspired him to quit his research job and mortgage his house to launch Icebreaker and pioneer a new retail category: merino outdoor clothing. Within a decade, Icebreaker had grown to become New Zealand's leading outdoor clothing producer and exporter with over 5,0000 stores across 50 countries. Jeremy holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Master of Commerce in Marketing from Otago University. A leading figure in the sustainable business movement, Jeremy was named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2008 for his services to business. Jeremy also chairs the New Zealand Government's Better by Design group which helps companies to become competitive internationally by integrating design principals across their business.