National Geographic Young Explorers Presentation

For more than a century, National Geographic has provided grants to some of the world’s top explorers, adventurers and scientists, and now they offer a program for people under the age of 25. We’ve invited four of these Young Explorers to discuss their far-reaching work.

Sarah McNair-Landry grew up on Baffin Island and has followed in her parent’s Arctic-exploring footsteps. At the age of 18, she became the youngest person to ski to the South Pole. She followed that feat with a 1,400-mile snowkite across the Greenland Ice Sheet and continues to push her limits.

Rebecca Skinner is a photographer who has spent time in post-Katrina Louisiana and in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, documenting how areas recover from devastating natural disasters. Her inspiration to go to Indonesia came partly from James Balog (the photographer featured in Chasing Ice) who was there after the tsunami hit in 2004.

Shannon Switzer is a writer, photographer and avid surfer who noticed that her friends were getting sick from swimming in the water near San Diego, California. Inspired by Sylvia Earle, she set out to show how the area’s watershed was being polluted and how it could be protected.

Anand Varma studied biology at U.C. Berkeley, but he realized that the most effective way for him to tell stories was with a camera. Over the past few years, he’s spent many months in Patagonia, photographing and documenting the wetland forests in that region.