Documentary screening

Screening of the documentary POLARQUEST produced for Ushuaia TV (2019) with English subtitles. Followed by a discussion in French with members of the crew and the Director.

In the summer of 2018, an international team of explorers, scientists and science communicators board the Nanuq sailboat, trying to locate the wreck of the Umberto Nobile airship that drowned 90 years earlier. Just like the 1928 aerial laboratory, POLARQUEST2018 conducted scientific experiments onboard. Sampling micro-plastics, cosmic rays or water quality, the objective was to help measure the impact of global warming in a region that is far from being spared by human activities.

The expedition broke several records, notably by measuring for the first time cosmic rays and finding microplastics beyond 82 ° North latitude, and by producing the first 3D maps of islands and coasts north of the Svalbard archipelago.

The sailboat selected for the expedition was designed to travel in arctic regions in autarky and without recourse to non-renewable energies. The documentary, shot on board during the expedition, recounts this trip by restoring breathtaking images of these lands near the North Pole, where the polar bear is absolute dominator. 

Discussion moderated by Claudio Rsomino, scientific journalist at Euronews, with: 

• Dorothée Adam Mazard, Filmmaker
  Documentary filmmaker, arctic reporter, former official filmmaker of the french presidency.
• Peter Gallinelli, Expedition Leader
  An architect, environmental expert, lecturer and researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Geneva on the one hand, adventurer, skipper and naval architect on the other. 
• Ombretta Pinazza, Cosmic ray scientist
  With degrees in Physics and Engineering, Ombretta is a researcher at INFN Bologna and working at CERN as an expert in detector control systems. She is also an expert mountaineer and amateur sailor.
• Paola Catapano, Project Leader
  A science communicator at CERN, science journalist, arctic and antarctic reporter, Polarquest2018 project manager and much more.
• Mike Struik, Technical coordinator
  Aeronautical engineer, adventure photographer, arctic reporter, delta and drone pilot.
• Frédéric Gillet, Scientific coordinator
  During the Polarquest2018 expedition he got off the boat in Ny Alesund to place his passive sensors to assess the concentration of a persistent organic pollutant called PCB ( polychlorinated biphenyl), a very toxic chemical compound. He has been working on the microplastic seawater pollution since 2016. 

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