Suzie Imber is a sustainability and environment expert, award-winning planetary scientist, high-altitude mountaineer, and inspirational speaker with The Sustainability Speakers Agency. Her career has taken her from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to remote peaks in the Andes, uniting innovative science with a passion for exploration.
Currently Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Leicester, Suzie specialises in space weather and is an active contributor to the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo Mission to Mercury.
Her curiosity and drive to push human limits saw her win the BBC Two series ‘Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes?,’ where she impressed former astronaut Chris Hadfield with her resilience and leadership.
Beyond her work in space, Suzie has dedicated years to climbing some of the world’s most challenging and undiscovered mountains, creating computer programmes to identify unclimbed peaks and then leading expeditions to summit them. She has also witnessed first-hand the dramatic retreat of glaciers, giving her a unique and urgent perspective on the climate crisis.
In this interview, Suzie reflects on overcoming physical challenges, the realities of global warming in the mountains, her motivation, and the unforgettable moment she was named winner of the BBC astronaut challenge.
Q: How did you approach this physical challenge and overcome it?
Suzie Imber: “The physical challenges that you face in the mountains depend very much on where you are. For example, I’ve climbed in the Himalayas, the Andes and Alaska. In Alaska, the main challenges are associated with the extreme cold up there, the fact that the ice starts so low, so you’re sleeping on ice right from the bottom of the mountain ranges.
So, if you want to go climbing, if you have to walk into a mountain, you’re going to be pulling a sledge. That sledge is likely to weigh close to the same weight as the person who’s pulling it, not far off.
To train for that, for example, I used to have a harness, and I would, when I was living in Leicester, I had three car tyres attached to the back of my harness. I would just drag these car tyres around the park in Leicester for hours, just practising what it would feel like and using the muscles that I would be using to pull that sledge along.
Other mountain ranges, like the Himalayas or in the Andes, the snow starts much higher, so there’s less pulling of sledges but there’s much more weight in a rucksack. For those, I wear my rucksack, fill it with bottles of water, and then just go for long hikes carrying bottles of water. I learned a really important lesson there.
The first time I did it, I filled it with a load of books, you know, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary, to make it heavy. But it turns out that I am attached to those books and when it got really hard, I couldn’t just ditch them. Whereas if you fill it with water, you can always pour the water out halfway if you find you’re struggling. Lesson learned on that front.
In general though, really high levels of fitness, so good routines of cardiovascular exercise. Your lung and heart health has to be one of the most important things, so trying to keep healthy.”
Q: Can you describe when you have seen the effects of global warming firsthand?
Suzie Imber: “Yeah, certainly. In the Andes we tend to go back to the same regions multiple times and use the same access routes. Over maybe 10 years, more, 15 years of going back to that same region and taking similar photographs, we can physically see in the images the glaciers retreating up towards the tops of the mountains.
In fact, a mountain that we climbed – we climbed the third highest waterfall in Chile a few years ago to gain access to a remote, brutal, technical mountain. When we got to the top of the waterfall, we found the remains of a glaciology station that had been set up decades earlier. They’d taken a helicopter, taken equipment, and been monitoring the glacier.
But from the point where they had left their equipment all those decades ago, we could no longer see the glacier. It had disappeared out of sight up the mountain. And so those kinds of things leave the sort of haunting feeling of something lost.”
Q: What keeps you motivated?
Suzie Imber: “I’m really goal-oriented, and so if you give me a task, then that’s it. That’s what I get my teeth into, and that’s what I want to achieve. Mountaineering is great for me in that sense because there’s a series of goals.
If I’m climbing multiple mountains in one expedition, there’s a series of goals that run one after the other. It’s easy to have a focus on the summit – that’s a dangerous thing, to be too focused on the summit though, because it means that you’re less likely to turn back in a situation where you need to. You have to be slightly careful with that.
But in terms of motivation, I don’t struggle too much with that, because I’m internally motivated. I think that people tend to be internally or externally motivated, and that really affects their reasons for their own behaviours.
For example, you might go and climb a particularly famous mountain that everyone’s heard of, and that’s great if you’re externally motivated because people have heard of it, and you sort of generate enthusiasm from people. And if you’re internally motivated, then you have a very different outlook on the way that you do things.
We go and climb mountains that no one’s ever heard of, and no one ever will hear of, and that’s fine. I don’t mind. I’m not doing it for the sake of anyone else’s opinion, praise, or thoughts. It’s all about goals that we set ourselves.
The other thing is that we have lists of mountains that we’re trying to climb that meet various criteria that we’ve set, just for the fun of it. As you head towards the end of a particularly challenging list, for example, I’ve done eleven of the twelve highest mountains in the Mendoza region of South America.
Only one person’s ever done all twelve, and I’ve done eleven. You know, when you get towards the end of a list like that, you’re thinking – although the list is meaningless, it’s just a list that we made up – but just the thought of maybe being able to climb all the 6000-metre mountains in that region is really motivating to keep going.”
Q: How did it feel when you won the BBC Two show Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes?
Suzie Imber: “I would say that my most overriding feeling when they announced my name was complete shock, because I was completely convinced – and if anyone’s seen the clip, they’ll see it on my face – I was completely convinced that I was not going to win.
I remember thinking to myself, at the very end, I was standing with my two colleagues either side of me and I just thought, well, do you know what, what will you do when they announce someone’s name? I’m going to turn and hug whichever person it is who’s just won, because it’s not going to be me, it’s going to be one of these two people.
I just remember thinking, you know, that’s going to be my response and it’s going to be lovely. And I didn’t know which of them it was going to be because they both had amazing qualities, but I was just sure it wasn’t me. When my name was read out, I did not even know how to react. I think there is a moment where I am just standing there a little bit in shock before I actually react and start smiling.
Also, just an overwhelming feeling as well because it had been such a long process. There had been forty-four tests that we did over six weeks, and it was so gruelling and so draining, that to finally be at the end of it was a really overwhelming feeling.”
This exclusive interview with Suzie Imber was conducted by Jack Hayes, Director at The Sustainability Speakers Agency.
