Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Biogeochemist Katey Walter Anthony

Last week we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. For the next two weeks, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily, starting today with Katey Walter Anthony. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Arctic Sage

By the third day of drifting in the storm-tossed Arctic Ocean, with no engine and no real prospects of rescue, a question came to Katey Walter Anthony: “What’s a data point really worth?”

Others might have had other things on their minds, but to Walter Anthony, data is everything. As a biogeochemist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, she studies methane. The greenhouse gas is 25 times more potent than CO2 and is being rapidly released into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost. But this source of methane is not factored into most climate change models, something that does not sit well with Walter Anthony. Continue reading this story >>