Birgit Lutz has twice marched on skis from the Russian ice station Barneo to the North Pole and crossed Greenland. After a trip to the North Pole in August 2007, the trained journalist specialized in the Arctic.
A major impetus for her interest in the far north was originally the old stories of adventure and discovery, for example Fridtjof Nansen's Fram expedition, the discovery of Franz Josef Land by Carl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, or Roald Amundsen's expeditions. Her sportive-discovery interest in the polar region, nourished by these expeditions, has changed over the years towards education and preservation.
As an expedition leader, she lectures on the endangered ecosystem aboard small tourist vessels in the Arctic and is also a sought-after speaker on land. Birgit is working on a plastics project in Spitsbergen for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven.
Her reportages, which have appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the magazine of the Schweizer Tagesspiegel, among others, have won several awards. For "Heute gehen wir Wale fangen" (Today we go whaling) she spent three months in East Greenland, in her latest book "Nachruf auf die Arktis" (obituary for the Arctic) she gets to the bottom of the causes and consequences of climate change on and after a trip to Spitsbergen with experts.
Birgit Lutz lives at Schliersee in Upper Bavaria.