Update: 2007 Freemasons Big Science Adventures Winners

The 2007 year’s winning team, from Otago Girls High School, have just completed their expedition to the UK and remote eastern Greenland.

The 2007 year’s winning team, from Otago Girls High School, have just completed their expedition to the UK and remote eastern Greenland.

All the flights for the expedition to Greenland were offset using the Landcare Research Carbon Zero scheme.

The theme of 2007’s competition was climate and energy, so Year 13 students Peggy Russell, Annika Metua, and Susan Smirk - along with their film mentor Jinty MacTavish and teacher Wendy Dunn - first spent a week in the UK investigating some of the initiatives there to respond to climate change, such as a housing project in South East London which provides a unique climate friendly model for urban development.

Once in Greenland, the group set up camp north of the remote town of Kulusuk, where the dramatic site of icebergs calving from the glacier can be seen. In the larger coastal town of Tasiilaq the group farewelled veteran New Zealand adventurer Graham Charles and his Adventure Philosophy team on a 900km journey – by kayak and kite – across the country’s wilderness of snow and ice.
A boat trip then took the Freemasons Big Science Adventures team to Ikateq, a small abandoned hunting village that is a stark illustration of the effects of climate change on the local communities in Greenland.

The Otago team won the 2007 Freemasons Big Science Adventures competition after wowing the judges with their quirky and original film on sex determination in fish - “Spottie: the difference”. At a week-long film school, run by the University of Otago’s Natural History filmmaking unit, the finalist students and teachers received special tuition to improve their skills. The teams were paired with a local scientist, and with help from a graduate from the Natural History Filmmaking course and in only four days, each made a film about the scientist’s research.

The other finalist teams who attended the film school were from Pakuranga College, Burnside High School in Christchurch, Tauranga Girls College, Craighead Diocesan School in Timaru, and Nelson College.

For more information, please see the Royal Society of New Zealand web site:
http://www.rsnz.org