A 4000 km kite-ski research crossing of Antarctica with Matthieu Tordeur
Under Antarctica 2025-2026
INTRODUCTION
The longest journey
For 80 days and 4,000 kilometres, french adventurer Matthieu Tordeur and I crossed the interior of Antarctica on kite-skis, dragging everything we needed to survive behind us. Under Antarctica was, first and foremost, a research expedition: from the very beginning the aim was to bring back scientific data from one of the least-studied regions on the planet, not simply to cross it. It also came at a pivotal moment, as the world marks 2025 as the UNESCO International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and enters the UN Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences, which runs to 2034. Along the way we reached two of the most remote points on Earth, the Soviet Pole of Inaccessibility and the Geographic South Pole, and I am fortunate to be, as far as anyone knows, the first woman do have done this traverse on kite-skis and to have reached the Pole of Inaccessibility with kites. What follows is the short version of the story.
Discover the expedition
Under Antarctica 2025-2026
The real beginning was a phone call, about three years before we set off. I was on Svalbard at the time, at the very end of the field season, tired and not thinking about Antarctica at all, when Matthieu Tordeur rang me. Almost the first thing he asked was whether I knew how to kite. I said no. The only image I had in my head was of kitesurfing on a beach somewhere warm, and I didn't understand why he was asking.
Then he explained. He had been holding on to an idea for a long time, a dream really, of crossing Antarctica on kite-skis, a discipline he had been practising for several years. Matthieu has taken part in expeditions in the polar regions, and some years ago he became the first Frenchman, and the youngest person in the world, to reach the South Pole solo and unsupported. But he didn't want this crossing to be only a physical feat. He wanted it to mean something scientifically, to bring back real data, and that was the reason he was calling me.
For my part, this would be my seventh expedition to Antarctica, and somewhere close to my fiftieth expedition overall since 2010. Matthieu needed a scientist who could also perform in some of the worst conditions on the planet, for weeks on end, without the science becoming an afterthought. That phone call from Svalbard is where Under Antarctica really started.
People sometimes ask why some Antarctic expeditions begin in South Africa. The route we planned follows the dominant winds blowing across the continent from east to west, and only a handful of expeditions had ever travelled it: the N2i team, who in 2007 became the first to reach the Pole of Inaccessibility without machines, Frédéric Dion, who got there solo by kite in 2014, Geoff Wilson on his record-breaking 2019 journey, and Justin Packshaw and Jamie Facer-Childs in 2021. For all of them, as for us, Cape Town is the natural gateway.
We spent about a week there, and we weren't alone: three of our teammates worked alongside us through the unglamorous but essential jobs, weighing and packing three months of food, and preparing the sleds, the kites, the radars and the camera and education gear, because we were also filming a documentary and running a large education programme. After a final briefing with Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, an Ilyushin Il-76 flew us south to Novo Airbase.
Novo Airbase is a logistics platform, with a runway of blue ice, where scientists gather each austral summer before heading on to their own stations. That season is short, roughly from November to the end of January, so we wanted to arrive as early as possible to make the most of the weather. Matthieu had shouldered the enormous task of organising all the logistics, and here it finally came together. We spent a few days on the ice at Novo Airbase, repacking everything into our pulkas and, at last on real Antarctic snow and ice assembling and fine-tuning the radars in the conditions they would actually face, while our cameraman Pierre Petit gathered the first footage of the journey.
To reach the plateau at all, we had to make a decision we had long anticipated and quietly dreaded. The only way up from the coast under wind power alone is through rare, narrow weather windows, because the katabatic winds pour down off the plateau toward the sea, straight into your face. With our pulkas and radars as heavy as they were, fighting our way up would have cost us weeks of time and energy, when our real priority was to start doing science as soon as possible. So we let a convoy of two big polar 4x4s carry us up and drop us on the plateau, avoiding that first tricky, technical climb, and from there the real journey began.
The first days were a hard reintroduction to how little Antarctica cares about your plans. From the moment we were dropped off, the wind was either blowing from the wrong direction or not blowing at all, and the way we needed to travel, south to south-east, was exactly where it was coming from. Kiting was simply impossible. So instead we tried to move by brute force, hauling the pulkas by hand, one after the other, across snow so abrasive at that altitude that it felt like dragging them over sand.
My pulkas, even thought we never weighed them properly must have easily weighed around 250 kilos each, and the science was a big part of that from the very start: the batteries, the radars, everything I needed to keep the instruments running. We had even split one of the radars into two loads to spread the weight. When you are kiting as a pair, getting the weight distributed as even as possible matters enormously, because any imbalance is felt at once, one of you suddenly pulling ahead of the other. We spent much of the expedition adjusting for it, and I don't think we ever got it right.
It was bitterly cold in those early days, often around minus 25 to minus 30 degrees, and we were threading our way through a landscape of crevasses and megadunes that left very little room for error. We had to hold closely to the route we had built ourselves from Airbus satellite images, unable to drift too far east or west. Progress was painfully slow. But we had no choice other than to keep going, a little at a time, and to trust that the wind would eventually turn.
Our first job was, for me to learn to kite-ski. I started on the water at Saint-Pierre-la-Mer, near Narbonne in the south of France, then trained closer to home on Le Semnoz, the mountain above my village, before heading to Finse, in Norway, to train with the polar guide Michael Charavin. Finse has been a training ground for explorers since Scott's day, and from there we put in the real distances: over two summers we made two kite traverses of Greenland, from Ilulissat to Qaanaaq and from Qaqortoq to Kangerlussuaq. Both stories are on this website
Each trip let us test something more, the clothing, then the camp, the sleds, the kites, and finally the science itself, because we wanted to find out whether we could do something no one had done before: run a genuine research expedition on kite-skis.
Those trips proved it could work, and that the two of us worked well together. From the start it mattered to us not to take public money, which is already so scarce for science, so we built the expedition on private sponsors and foundations, with many equipment partners. And after many conversations with the scientific community, it became clear that the most useful thing we could do while kiting was to collect ground-penetrating radar data. We had one radar built specially for the expedition and borrowed another from Hexagon / IDS GeoRadar, with a research programme co-developed with the British Antarctic Survey, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Tübingen. All of it took two to three years to bring together.
Eventually the wind did turn, the kites filled, and we finally began to move the way we had come to do. But the relief did not last long, because we soon ran into the sastrugi, ridges of hard, wind-carved snow that in places turned the surface into a frozen chaos. Crossing them at the speed of a kite was frightening. The kites would haul us straight into them and send us flying, and there were moments when my pulka jammed solid between two ridges and I was sure I would never work it free.
That is exactly why staying close to one another mattered so much. Whoever was in front, and most of the time that was Matthieu, who handled the navigation beautifully, simply could not turn back to reach the other. The wind only ever pushed us in one direction, and with the weight of a loaded pulka it was almost impossible to fight your way back against it. So from morning to evening we had to stay within reach of each other, all day, every day. It sounds like a small thing, but out there it was one of the rules that kept us alive.
The ice taught us something else early on. Deciding in the morning how many kilometres we wanted to cover would never work. Antarctica was going to decide what kind of day it would be, not us, and our only job was to adjust to it, step by step and hour by hour, taking whatever the wind and the surface gave us.
Through all of it we kept working, because Under Antarctica was a research expedition: a very small team with very big ambitions. All the way across, we dragged a compact ground-penetrating radar from Hexagon, nested in one of my pulkas alongside the batteries, the charging gear and a rugged Panasonic Toughbook, scanning the top forty metres of the ice beneath our skis. We were lucky to have Fabio Giannino and Davide Morandi with us from afar, day in and day out. Every few days we uploaded our data to the cloud through our communication devices, so they had direct access to it and could help us fine-tune the collection and fix anything that needed fixing.
Gathering radar data in those conditions was some of the hardest science I have ever done, because everything becomes far more difficult below minus thirty, and yet the radar, a Chaser XR, held up remarkably well, surviving the sastrugi along with the rest of us. I think the dozens of expeditions I had led or joined in the polar regions before this one were what let me stay focused on the task, but it would have been far harder without Fabio and Davide, who were the real architects of the science and, when they weren't talking data, were forever sending us messages to stay safe and keep going. For all that people picture two tiny figures utterly alone on the ice, one of the reasons we managed to pull it off is that we were never truly cut off. We had this direct line to the outside world the whole way.
After 42 days and 1,800 kilometres, we reached one of the strangest places on the continent: the Soviet Pole of Inaccessibility, the point in Antarctica that lies furthest from any coastline in every direction, high on the plateau at an altitude of 3,724 metres. We arrived on the 14th of December 2025, a date Matthieu had been watching for. It was on the 14th of December, back in 1911, that Roald Amundsen first reached the geographic South Pole, and there was something moving about standing at our own remote pole on that same anniversary.
There is almost nothing to see. A Soviet research station, built here in the late 1950s, lies completely buried under metres and metres of snow. The only thing still visible is a bust of Lenin, fixed to the top of a chimney at the very top of the station, staring out across an emptiness that is hard to put into words.
I had decided to try to collect as much radar data as I could right there at the Soviet Pole of Inaccessibility, because as far as we knew it had never been done before. It was a side quest, and it turned out to be one of the most difficult data collections of my whole life. It was bitterly cold, minus 35 to minus 40, with a fierce wind that drove the windchill far lower still. I pulled the radar by hand, walking a slow grid around Lenin, trying to map the station we knew was hidden somewhere beneath our feet. I kept the Toughbook tucked against my base layer under everything else so it would stay alive, and I was endlessly grateful for my Helly Hansen Arctic down parka, which was the only reason I could keep working at all. The system was right at its limits, so I ended up creating dozens of separate radar files, but we managed it, and the data shows the buried station beautifully.
Then we didn't linger. We spent a single night there, packed everything up, and, as sailors would say, changed tack and pointed ourselves toward the next impossible-sounding destination, the geographic South Pole, still many hundreds of kilometres away.
The stretch from the Soviet Pole of Inaccessibility toward the South Pole became a long lesson in patience, which is not the part of an expedition that makes headlines but is often the part that decides whether it succeeds. Our kites took a constant beating from the wind and the cold, and just as often we had the opposite problem: no wind at all, sometimes for days on end. Strangely, those windless days were some of the busiest of the whole trip. I would wake early with a very long list of things to repair and check, because this was the stage when everything really began to break, the pulkas, the solar panels, the cables, seemingly all of it at once, and I would work my way down the list until five or six in the evening, when it grew too cold inside the tent to do anything more.
Christmas arrived while we were out on the ice. I tried to call all the people I love; some picked up and some did not, and it was hard, and emotional, to be so far from them on a day like that. What I will never forget is that my mum had prepared a card for me, signed by my whole family, so a little piece of home was out there on the ice with me. Celebrating Christmas in a tiny tent surrounded by an entire continent of snow was one of the strangest and most moving moments of the whole journey.
All the while, something remarkable was happening. Alongside the science we ran a large education programme, built with the NGO Témoins Polaires, that followed the expedition through weekly booklets fronted by our third teammate Paco the penguin, our cheeky companion on the ice. We were astonished by how it took off: some 300,000 children in 42 countries followed along. Knowing all those children were tracking our progress gave us a real lift on the hardest days.
After 61 days in the field and 2,700 kilometres, we reached the Geographic South Pole. That day was for me one of the hardest days of the whole expedition. We covered 150 kilometres in a single push, and Matthieu and I lost sight of each other early that morning. By this point I had changed pulkas and was pulling the ones that carried our deep ground-penetrating radar, which we were waiting to redeploy. These pulkas were never meant to carry such heavy equipment, so they had worn badly and now dragged hard on the snow, slowing me down terribly and hurting my hips deeply. To help balance the weight across the team I had also taken on a lot of extra gear, so I was effectively dragging three pulkas, two side by side and one trailing behind, and that last one kept tipping over, which meant stopping again and again to right it.
Worse still, the day was a total whiteout, and Matthieu and I came to lose each other. I was glad he was ahead of me, because I simply could not move at his speed with all the weight I had and damaged pulkas. The wind was ferocious and gusty and the kites were barely controllable, and each time I stopped to lift a fallen pulka it could take so much time get moving again, because every time I put the kite back up the wind knocked it straight down. We had agreed beforehand that I would carry both tents to help with the weight, so Matthieu was out there without a spare, but it was not too cold, we had rehearsed exactly this, and luckily he was fine. We finally reached the South Pole very late, at around ten at night, and I have rarely been so happy to arrive anywhere.
Getting there was a dream come true. It was the first time in two whole months that we had seen anything at all built by human hands, apart from our own tent, and after so long that is deeply disorienting: buildings, vehicles, an airstrip, other people, the american Amundsen-Scott station sitting right at the bottom of the world. There is a ceremonial marker there, ringed by the flags of the nations that signed the Antarctic Treaty, the agreement that keeps the whole continent for peace and science, and touching it after everything we had been through was overwhelming. It was also the first time in months that I saw myself in a mirror, and I was taken aback: I had become skin, bone and muscle, and it brought home just how much the expedition was taking out of us.
But the Geographic South Pole was never our finish line. We were, in fact, run off our feet there, preparing to redeploy the long radar, fixing what I could and recharging all the batteries, while the station leader told us to leave the moment the wind turned favourable. We stayed a couple of days and then we pushed back out into the white, because our line across Antarctica was longer than the pole, and the continent was not done with us yet.
From the South Pole, which sits at around 2,800 metres, the way home is one enormous descent toward the coast, close to 1,350 kilometres of it. You can feel Antarctica letting you down off the plateau in great steps: long stretches of downhill where the wind picks up and the sastrugi grow vicious, then a flat, sometimes even a climb, and then another long descent. Somewhere along the way the Thiel Mountains rose out of the horizon, dark rock after so much white, and it felt as though the world was slowly being handed back to us.
This was also the stretch where we finally deployed the long radar, and it proved every bit as hard as we had feared. It had spent two months strapped to our pulkas through brutal cold and constant shaking, so we were trying to bring back to life an instrument that had already taken a heavy beating. Together with the engineer who had built it, we had to work something close to miracles to coax usable data out of it, with endless adjustments.
Matthieu had been determined that he would be the one to pull the long radar, which, once fully unrolled, stretched a hundred metres behind him, an enormous amount of drag. I was grateful that it took on this mission. The transmitter and receiver seemed to do backflips constantly; even as the sastrugi shrank, the wrong wind direction would flip the whole array over. It demanded very fine navigation from Matthieu, and every so often I had to pick my way across to him to lift the sledges upright when they tipped or free them when they tangled. Once, when the radar snagged behind a ridge of sastrugi, Matthieu was thrown several metres into the air and luckily landed without harm.
That deep radar was built to send its signal kilometres down beneath our skis, to reach the ancient Antarctic ice that has responded to natural climate shifts across the ages. Together, the data from both radars, the shallow one and the deep one, will help us understand how Antarctica is responding to a warming climate, and how much the ice here may add to sea level rise in the years ahead.
And then, on day 80, after 4,000 kilometres, we reached the coastline and the crossing was complete. Not long afterwards we arrived at Union Glacier and found ourselves suddenly back among people, engines and voices, and after two months of near-total silence I could barely bear the noise of it all. Eighty days. Four thousand kilometres. Two of the most remote points on the planet. A full scientific programme carried from beginning to end.
Discover the other expeditions
Under Antarctica did not end the moment we stepped off the ice; in many ways the most important work began afterwards. I am now deep in processing the data, working out how much we can pull from everything the two radars recorded and what it can tell us about the ice. I am also writing a book about the journey, with HarperCollins and Isabelle Merrier, the full story that a website could never hold: the fear and the beauty, the science, and all the days I have barely touched on here.
Matthieu and I are just as eager to keep the education going. Together with Témoins Polaires we are already planning which schools to visit next, and we are making a documentary about the expedition with Gédéon and French television, which we hope will travel far beyond France. There is more still to come: a UNESCO campus next year, and work with Lumni, the education service of French public television, to keep bringing these subjects to young people. That so many children followed us across the ice is one of the things we are proudest of.
We were proud, too, to carry UNESCO's colours on our kit right across the ice. Coming back to the world after all of this has left me with a renewed determination to keep fighting for the cryosphere. My hope is to be as useful as I can throughout the Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences, and to help push for the most ambitious action we can manage to protect the ice, because in the end all of us depend on it. Antarctica gave me the hardest and most impactful months of my life, and if the data, the images and the story help people care about a place they will almost certainly never see, then the expedition will have done far more than carry two people and their kites across the ice.
I am so grateful for everyone who made this project possible. First our incredible team, who from Cape Town across Antarctica supported us every single day. Mathilde, Camil, Ingrid, thank you. Our amazing partners, sponsors, scientific and institutional partners, we could not have done it without you: AXA, Rothschild & Co, Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, La Couronne Argentière, IT Link Groupe, Fondation Etrillard, Val d'Isère, Fondation Alphonse Weicker, Grand Nord Grand Large, Fondation Eau Neige & Glace, Fondation Rothschild, Helly Hansen, British Antarctic Survey (NERC), The University of Edinburgh, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Airbus, Petzl, Ozone, Salomon, Garmin, IDS GeoRadar, Hexagon, DJI, Lenz, Nitecore, Izipizi Paris, Hilleberg The Tentmaker, Valandre, DSO, Mes Chaussettes Mongoles, Veja, Meyva, BE-KIND, Lyophilise & Co, Grain de Sail, Panasonic, Leica Geosystems, École des Pôles, Témoins Polaires, OCEANO – Institut Océanographique de Monaco, Édifice, Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères, Ministère chargé de la Mer et de la Pêche, UNESCO, France.tv.
