MONACO - March 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ‘A Day of Exploration’. It is the title of the Environmental Symposium organised by the Yacht Club de Monaco in collaboration with The Explorers Club of New York. Thisconference took place under the aegis of its ‘Monaco Capital of Advanced Yachting’ approach and as part of Monaco Ocean Week, organised by the Prince Albert II Foundation and the Monaco Government, in partnership with the Monaco Oceanographic Institute & Scientific Centre of Monaco. Contributions from many famous scientists and explorers such as Nina Lanza, Kathryn Sullivan, Victor Vescovo, Mike Horn, Bertrand Piccard and many more were the highlight of the day. The event was attended by the Prince of Monaco Albert II who said: “The tradition of exploration is so deeply entrenched in the history of our Principality and inherited from my great-grandfather, Prince Albert the 1st, reminds us of the urgent need to safeguard our marine envinronment and give it all the respect and devotion it warrants”.
“Today is a very special day because for the first time we have gathered an exceptional fleet of seven explorer yachts in the YCM Marina and at the same time we received the New York Explorer Club. A large delegation of around 150 people came to visit us here at the Club and to us it’s important to have them here because we need to know more about the Planet, the ocean and their beauty. If you want to protect something, it is fundamental to have a deep knowledge of it”, said the Yacht Club de Monaco General Secretary Bernard d’Alessandri.
A multidisciplinary, professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration and resource conservation, the Explorers Club has its the headquarter in New York City with a community of chapters around the world. It has been supporting scientific expeditions of all disciplines, uniting the members in the bonds of good fellowship for more than a century. “The Explorers Club is the leading exploration society in the world. It was founded in 1904. Women joined the club in the 1980s and it’s a really place where people come together”, underlined Richard Wiese, president of the Explorers Club. Notable members include Jane Goodall, Kathryn Sullivan, Jeff Bezos, Walter Cronkite, James Cameron, Sylvia Earle, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, The Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins, The Mount Everest summit team of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the first team to descend to the Mariana Trench Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, the crews of the first expeditions to the North and South Poles.
Discovering as a way to build a better world it’s the common trait of the different experiences shared during the panels held through the day. Nina Lanza, planetary scientist, fulfilled her childhood dream of working on a spaceship. She’s the lead for the ChemCam instrument onboard the NASA Curiosity rover, she’s on the science team for the NASA Perseverance rover and working with a spacecraft which is going to the Moon as well. “I really think that exploration is a leap of imagination. We’re looking for the unknown so we really can’t plan. We do our best to hypothesize what we might discover and we always find new things which I think it’s the most exciting part of my job”, said Lanza.
The symposium was also the occasion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Bertrand Piccard historic Breitling Orbiter 3 expedition, the first non-stop global circum navigation in a balloon. Piccard has also circumnavigated the world on a solar powered plane, a 43,000 kilometer flight.“Today I’m not only celebrating an anniversary but also announcing a new project which is a hydrogen powered aeroplane to fly nonstop around the world”, said Piccard. He will be joined in the 2028 project, Climate Impulse, by French engineer and fellow adventurer Raphaël Dinelli, who is supervising design and construction of the aircraft and will navigate the nine-day, non-stop journey around the equator. Piccard has a message for new generations: “I would tell to young people: stop to rely on habits, certitudes, old beliefs. You have to know that you can achieve what other people think it’s impossible and the main job for an explorer right now is to find new solutions. Solutions exist, they need to be discovered”. The Yacht Club de Monaco continues its programme hosting the 2ndMonaco Smart Yacht Rendezvous to promote sustainable and adaptable solutions for large yachts (over 24 meters). This event organized in collaboration with the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, will bring together innovation experts, architects and yachting enthusiast from around the world. The Rendezvous is a unique platform for collaboration and discovery of the smart, sustainable sustainable technologies shaping the future of yachting.
