Alison Criscitiello is a National Geographic Explorer, ice core scientist and high-altitude mountaineer who explores the history of sea ice in polar and high-alpine regions using ice core chemistry. Her work also focuses on environmental contaminant histories in ice cores from the Canadian high Arctic and the water towers of the Canadian Rockies. She will discuss her work and experiences of long months living in tents — and the stories ice cores can tell us — as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series week with National Geographic on “Water: Crisis, Beauty and Necessity.”

Criscitiello is the founder and co-director of Girls on Ice Canada and assistant professor and director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at University of Alberta. In 2010, she led the first all-women’s ascent of Lingsarmo, a 22,818-foot peak in the Indian Himalaya. As part of Perpetual Planet Expeditions –– a partnership between National Geographic Society and Rolex to support science-based expeditions to explore, study and document change in the planet’s most unique regions –– Criscitiello led two expeditions to Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain. In 2021, Criscitiello anchored an all-female team of scientists to install the highest weather station in North America near the mountain’s peak. She returned to Mount Logan in 2022 to successfully retrieve a record-breaking 1,072-foot long ice core that could contain one of the most important climate records on the continent –– including past temperature, nearby sea surface conditions, volcanic ash fallout, and wildfire history –– and will shed light on how climate change impacts even the world’s highest peaks.

Criscitiello has received three American Alpine Club climbing awards, the John Lauchlan and Mugs Stump alpine climbing awards, and she earned the first PhD in glaciology ever conferred by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This program is made possible by The Louise Roblee McCarthy Memorial Lectureship.

Laurent Ballesta is a French photographer, National Geographic Explorer, trained marine biologist and photographer for National Geographic magazine. At Andromède Océanologie, which is dedicated to the study, restoration and valorization of marine ecosystems, Ballesta is co-director and leads the Gombessa Expeditions — underwater explorations that aim to discover the marine world and to unite a large audience around a triple challenge: solving a scientific mystery, carrying out extreme dives, and collecting new and unique images. To close the week on “Water: Crisis, Beauty and Necessity — A Week in Partnership with National Geographic,” Ballesta will discuss and share photographs from these explorations — from the first images of the elusive, ancient deep-sea coelacanth taken by a diver at a depth of 120 meters; to ones of unprecedented dives beneath pack ice and the very first naturalistic images of the Antarctica’s deep-sea ecosystems.

In July 2019, Ballesta achieved a world first by successfully combining the empirical means of off-shore saturation diving with the modern techniques of scuba diving. He and three other divers spent 28 days 100 meters underwater in a system of pressurized units called a bathyal station, exploring the zone between 60 meters and 140 meters underwater along the coast from Marseille to Monaco. Two years later, he repeated the experience for 20 days off the coast of Corsica to uncover the mystery of the giant rings of the Mediterranean, seeking to understand the origin of the unique formation 120 meters under the sea.

Ballesta is a six-time winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, awarded by the National Museum of London. In the past 40 years of the competition, he is the first photographer to receive the Grand Title twice, in 2021 and 2023.

This program is made possible by The Charles and Gail Gamble Lecture Endowment.