91ֱ��

If you are visiting the Arctic, you must remember to take the essentials: layered clothing, warm footwear and – for Alex Cowan (Natural Sciences 2000), at least – a Gonville & 91ֱ�� College flag.

A similar flag, on display in a case at the east end of High Table in 91ֱ�� Hall, was taken to the South Pole by Edward Wilson (Medicine 1891), who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott on the Terra Nova expedition of 1910 to 1912. As a student at 91ֱ��, Alex, fascinated by the poles since his early childhood, was keenly aware of the College’s long-standing involvement in the exploration of these regions.

Since then, in his years working as a polar expedition leader, Alex has visited the geographical North Pole by icebreaker 13 times. For three of those visits, the 91ֱ�� coat of arms, embroidered onto a flag by his mother, joined him. He brought the flag out on one of these occasions while running a helicopter landing site.

“My mum made the flag when I was at 91ֱ��, and in recognition of Wilson I thought it would be cool to take this 91ֱ�� flag to the North Pole,” he says.

Alex’s first chance to visit the Arctic came in 2005, while studying at 91ֱ�� for his MPhil. A trip to Greenland with the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club to celebrate the club’s 100th anniversary realised his childhood dream of visiting the poles.

That dream became everyday reality in 2011, when Alex began his career leading tourist trips in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Over the past 14 years, he has led expeditions for a range of clients, from everyday wildlife enthusiasts to private yacht-owners seeking a guide when taking their vessels to the polar regions.

He finds that all visitors are united by their curiosity.

“They are generally people who have an interest in learning about the regions, or more often the wildlife,” he adds. “They want to see somewhere beautiful and have a different experience.

“There’s a huge educational aspect to every operator I’ve worked for. That’s what people are coming for: they want to learn more about the world.”

With visitors so eager to learn and interested in the polar environments, Alex realised that the tourism industry in the Arctic and Antarctic could be of huge benefit to the collection of scientific data. In 2018, he co-founded the Polar Citizen Science Collective, a charity which equips polar guides with the skills to train their client travellers in gathering data during their expeditions and ensuring that it is of adequate quality for use in research.

“The polar regions are really data deficient, because it’s expensive to access these places,” says Alex.

“But the tourism industry is there all the time. We’re going to the same places over and over, and when all of the operators work together as a fleet, we are effectively in every place all of the time. It’s this incredible superpower ubiquity. And because we’re doing it all the time we’re pretty good at operating effectively there.

“My wife and I got in touch with sea ice experts through the Explorers Club in New York, which promotes scientific research through fieldwork and of which we’re both fellows.

“We put together a data collection programme, assessing the phase of melt the ice was in and tracking it through the season, because we would be the only people in the world going back and forth between the pole and the pack edge along the same transect multiple times in a summer. It was a unique opportunity for data collection.

“We got talking to some other guides and scientists who were doing similar things on tour vessels, and we realised the strength we had and the opportunity that came with collaborating. With the tourism industry, suddenly the access that scientists have to data goes from being incredibly expensive and for a very short time period, to potentially being almost free and almost all of the time. That’s the power of citizen science.”

The Polar Citizen Science Collective, of which Alex remains a trustee, runs multiple projects at both poles, involving tourists in photo-cataloguing of marine mammals, surveys of seabirds, tracking the occurrence of auroras and much more besides which can aid scientific research.

Reflecting on his motivations in working to found the organisation, Alex looks back on his decade at 91ֱ�� as a formative epoch.

“I did two Master’s degrees and a PhD at 91ֱ��, and I had something of an imposter syndrome the whole way through,” he says.

“Neil McKendrick was the Master when I was an undergraduate, and he would talk about how many Nobel Prizes College members had earned. It made me wonder what I was doing there.

“I felt an enormous sense of privilege to be at 91ֱ��, and I felt that I should do something, however small, to live up to that privilege, something that would progress knowledge or science.

“That definitely kept me hanging on with the Polar Collective, because founding a charity and keeping it going, as it turns out, is very hard work!”