Welcome to the Planet Beyond podcast. Brought to you by Fugro, the leading partner in uncovering geo-data from the greatest subsea depths right to outer space and hosted by Jon Baston-Pitt. Planet Beyond is about doing business better in our fast changing, and acutely delicate, yet exquisite, world. Together we will explore issues beyond the day-to-day challenges; listen to those who should be listened to; seek out what needs to be done and get aligned around the new tomorrow our children deserve and that we have a responsibility to deliver.
Episode 31: The changing role of the CFO
We live in a fast changing world, with impacts on how we all work. That’s as true for those in finance and leadership, as it is for anyone. In this episode we sit down with Fugro CFO Barbara Geelen to explore how changes in society, and the evolving crisis of climate change, are reshaping leadership...
1/24/2024 • 35 minutes, 31 seconds
Short: Jeff Richardson on the UK’s HM Coastguard
Jeff Richardson is an experienced Remote Operations Centre Manager however, we spoke to him for this episode not about his job but what it is he does in his spare time: he is a dedicated volunteer Coast Guard rescue officer. He shares with us his experiences, and explains what drives him to take on two...
1/18/2024 • 15 minutes, 23 seconds
Short: Katherine Scrimgeour on thinking differently
Earlier this year, Katherine Scrimgeour posted on LinkedIn about her own experiences of dealing with dyslexia. It’s a condition that can undermine confidence at work, but that doesn’t mean it should hold anyone back. It struck a chord with Planet Beyond host Jon Baston-Pitt, who also experiences dyslexia. In this short, Jon and Katherine talk...
12/13/2023 • 12 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode 30: Cutting Carbon at sea
As we travel through the energy transition, we must rapidly develop new forms of propulsion that reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. This has been a key driver of research and development at vessel builder SEA-KIT International. Jon Baston-Pitt first spoke to SEA-KIT CEO Ben Simpson almost two years ago, for Episode 16 of the Planet...
11/30/2023 • 35 minutes, 45 seconds
Short: David Tindall – From rocks to innovation
How does experience in the field inform product innovation? David Tindall trained as a geologist, before working as a cone penetration testing (CPT) truck operator. After years travelling the world, he took up a role as Global Product Owner, Geotechnical Equipment, at Fugro. In this role, he leads innovation in many of the key land-based...
11/15/2023 • 10 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode 29: Women inspiring girls, in sport and business
How can we help the next generation of girls set and achieve their goals? Often, by showing them what other women have achieved, and sharing the expertise they developed on the way. This autumn, championship winning golfer Kylie Henry shared her expertise with young golfers at a Girls Golf Day at Castle Buchanan, near Glasgow....
10/26/2023 • 48 minutes, 10 seconds
Short: Paul Lawrie – Learning and Mentoring
Paul Lawrie has had an impressive career as a golf pro, with 19 professional wins to his name. But he was a latecomer to the game. He only focussed on golf once he had accepted he wasn’t going to make it as a professional footballer. The secret to his success was the hard work of...
10/11/2023 • 20 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode 28: Why Men Win at Work
Over twenty years at Procter & Gamble, Gill Whitty-Collins rose to become SVP Europe, India, Middle East & Africa. In this role, she led the turnaround of global leading brands such as Always, Pantene, and Olay. But when she reached the top, she found herself in an overwhelmingly male environment. She was one of the...
9/27/2023 • 0
Short: Jon Baston-Pitt – Doing Business Better
The Planet Beyond podcast turned two this summer. In its first two years it has been joined by guests from the worlds of politics, of exploration, of science and of engineering. Each guest has been interviewed with the aim of understanding how to do business better. At the heart of this journey has been its...
9/13/2023 • 15 minutes, 27 seconds
Episode 27: Managing Earthquake Risk
In February 2023 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit near the Turkish Syrian border. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives and millions have been left homeless. It is one of the most devastating earthquakes to ever hit the region impacting an area the size of Germany. Earthquakes have always been near impossible to predict,...
9/5/2023 • 42 minutes, 14 seconds
Short: Helen Stewart – Soft Skills for Science
Helen Stewart is a hydrographer in the coastal resilience and ocean science division at Fugro. In this shortcast we talk about her recent keynote for the International Hydrographic Review which focuses on the importance of soft skills when working in a scientific field. Developing these skills isn’t something that always came easily to Helen but...
8/16/2023 • 14 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode 26: Energy Transition – No Miracles Needed
In 2023 the world entered its El Niño cycle of warmer oceanic currents. Without the moderating effect of the cooler La Niña effects, climate records have been tumbling – in many cases smashed by several standard deviations. Sea ice is at record lows, and North Atlantic surface temperatures are, in places, up to 5°C warmer...
7/26/2023 • 41 minutes, 6 seconds
Short: Myrna Staring – Understanding Each Other
Myrna Staring is innovation lead at Fugro, leading a team of innovation engineers working on active and passive seismic technologies for near-surface characterisation. Her work contributes to the development of tools for infrastructure and renewables developments. In this episode, she talks about the value of different kinds of empathy in building a diverse workforce. Myrna...
7/12/2023 • 16 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode 25: Women in Hydrography
Hydrography as an industry emanated from the wellspring of naval research, and ever since it has been a male dominated field. The field studies and describes the physical features of oceans, seas and other bodies of water and often requires work offshore. Attitudes surrounding women working offshore have historically restricted opportunities for women to gain...
6/28/2023 • 48 minutes, 31 seconds
Short: Daniela Taliana – Spreading the art bug
Daniela Taliana is geoscience manager at Fugro in Italy. Like our host, Jon, she has a passion for rocks. But in this episode she tells us about another passion: for art. Daniela is president of the volunteer arts association, Spazi all’Arte, or ‘Spaces for Art’, which seeks to foster collaborative and inclusive public art in...
6/7/2023 • 18 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode 24: The resilience mindset
We live in a world of unparalleled complexity and risk. The structure of our societies rests upon a stack of services—utilities, communications, banking, transport, among others—that themselves rely on a mix of public services and private businesses, both large and small. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. All face threats from bad actors, and...
5/24/2023 • 42 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode 23: Data and insurance emergency response
When catastrophe strikes, the top priority is to get those affected to safety. But almost as urgent is the need to get businesses and utilities up and running again. A rapid response to claims can make the difference between people getting on with their lives, and suffering harm that ripples through their community. Hurricane Ian...
4/26/2023 • 39 minutes, 18 seconds
Short: Yvan Petillot – Looking to nature, and beyond
Yvan Petillot is joint academic lead at the National Robotarium, in Edinburgh. In this shortcast, he talks to Jon Baston-Pitt about some of the key challenges faced in controlling remotely operated vehicles (ROV) underwater. The core problem is data transfer speeds. And that’s why researchers have turned to nature and creatures like dolphins, to understand...
4/12/2023 • 12 minutes, 59 seconds
Episode 22: Adding autonomy with the National Robotarium
Offshore inspections require arduous and hazardous sea travel. The coming boom in offshore wind will see tens of thousands of assets needing inspection in the North Sea alone. Building fleets of crewed vessels to perform these inspections would have significant carbon impacts. In an earlier Planet Beyond Short, Mark Bruce explained how Fugro is deploying...
3/29/2023 • 35 minutes, 11 seconds
Short: Denise Swanborn – Exploring oceans in a submersible
Denise Swanborn is an expedition manager with Nekton. She recently completed her PhD in marine science, at Oxford. In this episode, recorded on International Women’s Day, she talks to Jon Baston-Pitt about her own path to marine exploration, and describes the excitement and wonder of a career spent exploring the depths. Denise’s work has taken...
3/15/2023 • 23 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode 21: China, the Innovation Powerhouse
Many in the West view China as a threat. The country is both a supply chain partner, and an economic and political rival. And it has, for forty years, been a key exemplar of globalisation. In this episode we look beyond the fear and rivalry to better understand China’s journey to being one of the...
2/22/2023 • 35 minutes, 36 seconds
Short: Louis Demargne, Sharing data to save oceans
The world’s oceans are vital to maintaining the health of our planet, but are also one of its last unmapped territories. UNESCO and the Ocean Decade programme team have reached an important milestone. They have kicked-off the Ocean Decade Corporate Data Group to develop a framework for privately-collected ocean data to be made publicly available...
2/14/2023 • 14 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode 20: Total immersion, Telling stories beneath the waves
Ryan Chatfield and his mates have spent their lives exploring, and filming, the world below the waves. When they turned their skills to documentary making, a new connection, film-maker Brendan Hutchins, helped them pitch a series to Disney+, Shipwreck Hunters Australia. Together, they tell the stories of shipwrecks, their victims and survivors, making a human...
1/25/2023 • 32 minutes, 26 seconds
Short: Deploying remote operated vehicles from uncrewed vessels
Remotely operated vehicles can perform inspections efficiently and effectively without risk to humans. However, they can require time-consuming returns to port for reconfiguration. Mark Bruce has been working to develop electric ROVs that can be deployed from uncrewed surface vessels and pack more sensors in a way that allows them to operate without interruption or...
1/12/2023 • 9 minutes, 8 seconds
Short: Tim Crain and New Space
Looking back at the kings of France or the Pharaohs of Egypt, we marvel at their wealth. But not one of them could place a call across a planet, or drive hundreds of miles in a day down a superhighway. The story of humanity has been to take things that were challenging and make them...
12/14/2022 • 12 minutes, 24 seconds
Episode 19: Returning to the Moon
The commercial space sector doubled in size over the last decade and is expected to triple in size over the next 20 years. Exactly 50 years since man last walked on the moon, the recent launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 heralds a new era of lunar space travel. A lot has changed in the space...
11/24/2022 • 46 minutes, 35 seconds
Short: Sami Raines, astronaut candidate
You cannot just aim to be an astronaut. To be considered, you have to be good at something first. You need to excel in a career on Earth before pursuing a second in space. One candidate’s journey began as a child looking up at the stars in a small town in rural Australia. A love...
11/16/2022 • 16 minutes
Episode 18: The Award Winning Episode
The UK’s Ground Engineering Awards have recognised Fugro as the Ground Investigation Specialist of the Year 2022. We explore the importance of articulating progress on projects with the award winning team, who faced the almost impossible task of demonstrating Fugro’s full capability and achievements in just 20 minutes! It required dedication, connection, passion and purpose,...
10/26/2022 • 32 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode 17: Fair Winds and Following Seas
The best preparation is often to make ourselves as adaptable as possible, to be resilient to changes in circumstance. That is a mantra to Mark Sinclair, better known as Captain Coconut, who we last spoke to in Episode 4: Learning from Adventure. The intrepid Coconut thought he had failed to traverse the globe in his...
9/28/2022 • 53 minutes, 31 seconds
Short: Julie Angus – from Rowboats to Robot Boats
It began with a five-month expedition in a small rowboat crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Twin realisations struck the younger Julie Angus: the vastness and lack of information available on our oceans as well as the vulnerability of the marine environment. The worst hurricane season in recorded history also hit home the challenges of navigating such...
9/14/2022 • 12 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode 16: Net Zero Vessels – Progress on Future Fuels
As the world transitions to a low carbon economy, the way we use the seas will also change. Vessels are in a state of flux as new communications technology and advances in automation mean that the requirements for a crew are rapidly disappearing for many operations. This brings amazing benefits for sustainability, as well as...
8/25/2022 • 36 minutes, 1 second
Short: Ed Davey MP on Pancreatic Cancer
In May we told the story of Charles Czajkowski, one of the few pancreatic cancer patients to have survived beyond six months of diagnosis. Fewer than 7% of patients survive beyond five years of diagnosis. Challenges face healthcare providers, including a lack of alarm symptoms, but outcomes for this terrible disease have barely improved in...
8/10/2022 • 18 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode 15: The Future of Ocean Technology
Good intentions alone will not secure the future of our seas. More than 90% of trade moves across the ocean, and the global population eyes the marine environment as an increasing source of food. Added to this, a range of new activities are forecast to increase the ocean economy from $1.5 trillion in 2010 to...
7/27/2022 • 41 minutes, 9 seconds
Short: Understanding the Oceans
In some ways more is known about the surface of Mars than our own planet. With over 70% of the Earth’s surface covered in ocean, more than 75% of this watery space has never been mapped. This daunting data hole prevents search and rescue teams from performing vital work, such as like searching for...
7/13/2022 • 17 minutes, 36 seconds
Episode 14: Ocean Science, Ten Years to Turn the Tide
For much of history the seas have loomed impossibly large and untouchable. This perception is at odds with the vulnerability of ocean environments. Now, following decades of abuse by a growing human society, a realisation has been reached. The degradation of the world’s oceans has led to several looming crises: plastic pollution, warmer waters and...
6/29/2022 • 51 minutes, 44 seconds
Short: How to Map the Ocean Floor
This is an episode about filling in the gaps. Gaps in our knowledge of the largest environment on the planet, the ocean. Although it is not quite true that we know less about the ocean floor than outer space, it is still the closest thing we have to an alien environment on Earth. And that...
6/14/2022 • 13 minutes, 8 seconds
Episode 13: Beating Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer in the world. In the UK 50% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will die within three months of their diagnosis. Only 7% will survive for five years, the lowest of any common cancer type. We hear from Charles Czajkowski about his battle with pancreatic...
5/25/2022 • 44 minutes, 24 seconds
Episode 12: Skills to Save the Seas
Live from Oceanology International in London we discuss how to attract, develop and train the skills needed to handle the tsunami of new technology coming into the sector. Development of uncrewed vessels and improved digital communications are creating new opportunities for people at all levels of career progression. Guests Gordon Meadows, CEO, SeaBot XR Dan...
4/27/2022 • 36 minutes, 41 seconds
Episode 11: Alaska – North to the Future
One fifth the size of the continental US, Alaska stands as America’s only Arctic state. And when it was founded, Alaska was given a special deal. Too remote for full Federal infrastructure funding, Alaska would have to pay for its own needs from the wealth locked away below its frozen soil. For many years this...
3/30/2022 • 43 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode 10: Sporting Heroes
Belen Valdovinos and Rada Khadjinova are world leading sports people who push themselves to do better every single day. Their dedication and determination drives them in sport and in their work at Fugro. Listen now and be inspired! Host Jon Baston-Pitt Guests Belen Valdovinos, Business Development Manager America, Fugro Rada Khadjinova, Alaska Country Manager, Fugro
2/24/2022 • 34 minutes, 59 seconds
Episode 9: Veterans – Life After Service
What does it mean to serve? For most, a career in a military and what it is to be a soldier are complete unknowns. Deployment conjures up images of courage, of danger, and of endurance. Yet the resourcefulness and problem-solving skills that the military imparts to its personnel also makes them a resource to civilian...
1/26/2022 • 47 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode 8: Climbing Mountains with Mark Heine
Mark Heine has been with Fugro since 2000 and CEO since 2018 and although gathering data about our planet has been his passion since studying geodetic engineering at Delft University, mountaineering is his first love. At just 10 years old Mark conquered his first summit and after that he was hooked. His hobby has taken him to the top...
12/16/2021 • 40 minutes, 30 seconds
Episode 7: The Green Hydrogen Transition
We’re in a race against time when it comes to decarbonising energy. Hydrogen could play an important role in the transition but only if we can move to producing it from water instead of natural gas. In this episode we hear from a company that is already working on this with the world’s first pilot...
By 2050 it is forecast that 75% of global electricity will come from renewable generation making wind energy critical in fighting the climate crisis. In this episode we hear that by sitting out in deep waters floating wind could not only become a viable solution to the energy transition, it can also be a hub...
10/22/2021 • 25 minutes, 54 seconds
Episode 5: The rise of Floating Wind
From the US and Korea to Scotland and Portugal exciting things are happening in the world of wind energy. Instead of building offshore wind farms close to shore, the successful deployment of floating platforms for turbines is opening the vast ocean to renewable energy development. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) predicts commercial deployment of...
9/23/2021 • 0
Episode 4: Learning from Adventure
An adventurous spirit in people has made many successful organisations what they are today. To be truly great, we often find these people are guided by a moral compass, possessing core values that provide that relentless pointer to the right way, even when all plans have turned on their head. Fugro’s hydrographic director Mark Sinclair...
8/23/2021 • 35 minutes, 51 seconds
Episode 3: Ocean Science For Planetary Health
We have one planet and one ocean system but its health is in rapid decline. We bring together leading experts to discuss how science could save our oceans. The timing could not be more critical as 2021 saw the launch of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science. The initiative aims to improve our understanding...
7/29/2021 • 37 minutes, 37 seconds
Episode 2: Innovation for Transformation
In this episode, a panel of experts representing established, leading companies as well as new technology disruptors tackle one of the most difficult issues of our time: climate change. Specifically, how industry can innovate and transform to better overcome the emerging challenges. We discuss how to create a beehive of collaboration, not only within a...
6/18/2021 • 54 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode 1: Saving the South Pacific
Introducing Fugro’s Planet Beyond podcast. In this inaugural episode we look at the islands of the South Pacific, whose inhabitants are among the first to experience the hardships of climate change. Sea level rises, coupled with more frequent and more extreme weather events, are impacting the lives of these low-lying coastal communities. We are joined...
5/21/2021 • 32 minutes, 41 seconds
Coming soon…
Welcome to the Planet Beyond podcast. Brought to you by Fugro, the leading partner in uncovering geo-data from the greatest subsea depths right to outer space and hosted by Jon Baston-Pitt. Planet Beyond is about doing business better in our fast changing, and acutely delicate, yet exquisite, world. Together we will explore issues beyond the...
