The Unsung Heroes Beneath the Ice: Polar Ecologist Allison Fong on Will Smith, Arctic Microbes, and a Discovery Years in the Making

The Unsung Heroes Beneath the Ice: Polar Ecologist Allison Fong on Will Smith, Arctic Microbes, and a Discovery Years in the Making

When Allison Fong received an email from a production company in early 2023, she almost deleted it as spam. Weeks later, she learned it was an invitation to join Will Smith at the North Pole for Pole to Pole, a National Geographic docuseries traversing the globe from one pole to the other. What the production team wanted to film: her research on the invisible organisms that sustain life on Earth. Fong, a microbial oceanographer and National Geog…