Polar Podcasts

Sometimes good things come from bad places.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I slipped on a gravelly surface while trekking in the mountains near Maniitsoq on the west coast of Greenland. I heard my fibula snap as I fell screaming and then I lay there on a rocky slab for six hours with a badly broken leg and ankle before I was rescued by helicopter. Two operations and almost a year later, I still had considerable pain and it was not clear when, or if, I was really going to get better. Nor was it clear if I would be able to do geological field work again – the one aspect of geology that I truly love. This was all rather depressing, to the point that I sought out help. And finally, accepting the prospect that field work might no longer be possible for me, I started casting around for other ways in which I could continue to enjoy my work. Writing, I decided, was the one other aspect of my work that I loved. So I decided to learn to write. I started this blog. And then I signed up for a part-time Masters in Science Communication and Public Engagement to learn how to better communicate science. Through my studies, I learned a swath of writing types and styles, started publishing popular science, and became fascinated by the way in which people view their our own experiences as connected threads of meaning, as stories they create themselves, as eloquently expressed by the late Oliver Sacks,

“Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us – through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations.” (Sacks, 1985).

Fascinated by the stories in my own Greenlandic environment, I embarked on a final year Masters project to compile some of the spoken narrations – life stories of the exploration and discovery of Greenland’s geology – from some of the career Greenland geologists I know, and sharing them as podcasts. That turned out to be an excellent decision, allowing me to spend many hours with six fascinating geologists, feeling privileged to listen to their alternately entertaining, inspirational, funny, and heart-breaking stories. The resulting podcast series – Polar Podcasts – launched yesterday.

It started with pain and sadness. It ended with something that I am very happy to now claim as part of my story.

*Polar Podcasts are available at https://polarpodcasts.buzzsprout.com/ or via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or a range of other podcasting apps. Tune in, subscribe, and enjoy.