Travel writer, historian and journalist Justin Marozzi has published an article in the Telegraph about the never-ending desire for discovery. Starting with recognition of the successful French expedition across the Darwin Cordillera in southern Chile, the author continues by noticing that with all the digital mapping in the universe, field research still remains crucial to our understanding of the world and ultimately, to our survival.

“As Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop, director of Digital Explorer, an educational programme that brings expeditions into the classroom, puts it: “The notion that there’s no longer a need to go out into the field and explore because of modern marvels like Google Earth is a misapprehension. We have wonderful images of swaths of rainforest canopy, but we still need people to find out what’s underneath. We have satellite images of the great expanses of ocean ice, but we still send explorers out there with old-fashioned technologies like ice-core samplers. And in terms of the rapid changes occurring to habitats across the world, you simply can’t investigate what’s going on from outer space.”

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08 October 2011