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| Baltimore, 2009 (Antarctic Treaty 50th Anniversary) |
Lucia Sala Simion is a science journalist, an author and a nature photographer. She was born in Milan, Italy, and raised and educated in both Paris and Milan. After graduating Summa Cum Laude in Medicine, Lucia decided to follow her life's calling and pursue a career in science journalism and nature photography.
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| Palau, Jellyfish lake |
Her first stories were focused on marine ecology topics such as Posidonia oceanica in the Mediterranean, the amazing marine lakes of Palau in Micronesia, the mangrove ecosystem, and the Hawaiian archipelago biodiversity. During that period, Lucia worked at Giorgio Mondadori, a publishing house in Italy. She then moved to Paris, where she worked for Sygma, a world-renowned photojournalism agency.
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| L. Simion publications about Concordia and EPICA |
She have travelled extensively around the world for the last twenty-five years, including eight expeditions to Antarctica on behalf of the European media to cover the building of the French-Italian Concordia scientific research station at Dome C, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), daily life at the Italian and French stations, and the ANDRILL Southern McMurdo Sound Project (seabed coring) on Ross Island. She also covered the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project in Greenland.
Lucia have been fascinated by snow and ice ever since she was a child. This fascination stems from the fact her parents met thanks to a massive snowstorm. They were on their Christmas holidays at a ski resort in the Dolomite Mountains in Northern Italy. They had never met before, and the holidays were almost over when the snow started to fall. “It snowed for two days and two nights”, her father recalls. “The roads were blocked and nobody could get back to the city. When the storm ended, we couldn't ski: there was simply too much snow. So we went skating on the lake and it was there that I met your mother”. Two years later, her parents got married. Ever since hearing that story, she have loved snow and ice. But there is another reason too. Lucia grew up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, a stone’s throw from the house of Commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, a great polar explorer and physician.
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| At Windless Bight camp |
In 2004, she was selected to attend the Graduate Certificate in Antarctic Studies (GCAS, now PCAS) run by Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. The course included a fifteen-day expedition to a remote camp in Antarctica. In 2005, the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand asked her to write the text on Antarctica for the third edition of “Earth from Above”.
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| Kerguelen: the Arch. (c) Lucia Simion |
In November 2006, she went on assignment for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (Terres australes et antarctiques françaises, TAAF) to photograph Crozet, Kerguelen, Saint Paul and Amsterdam islands from the air. In 2007, the TAAF Philatelic Bureau issued a special booklet of her pictures containing sixteen stamps and eighteen photos. The stamps were valid for French postage. In October 2007, during the International Polar Year, Lucia Simion published the book “Antarctica, White Heart of our Planet” (IPY-UNEP Polar Books Collection: French, Italian and German editions). The book won the "2008 Beautiful Book Award".
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| Scattered islands photo exhibit at the French Senate |
In November 2007, Lucia went to Antarctica to cover the ANDRILL Southern McMurdo Sound (SMS) Project. In 2008, a photo exhibition on the ANDRILL project premiered in Paris at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. During April and May 2009, she was on assignment to the Scattered Islands (Îles Eparses), both in the Mozambique Channel and to the east of Madagascar, to photograph them for the TAAF. Later that year, the TAAF again issued a booklet of her pictures containing sixteen postage stamps and eighteen photographs. Since 2009, Lucia Simion have been a member of the TAAF Advisory Council.
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| US Air Force Herc'130 at NEEM camp (c) L. Simion |
In July 2010, she went on assignment to the Greenland ice sheet at 77.45°N, 51.06°W with the National Science Foundation to cover the NEEM project for the French and Italian media. NEEM, North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, is an international ice core research project aimed at retrieving an ice core from North-West Greenland. As a result, Lucia now have field experience in ice drilling projects in both polar regions, as well as in drilling into deep-sea sediments (ANDRILL) and névé (ITASE).
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| Atlantic Yellow-nosed albatross, Gough. (c) L. Simion |
In September and October 2010, she visited Gough Island (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Tristan da Cunha. In 2013, she published a new book for children: “The Animals of the Polar regions and Subantarctic wildlife”.
