Nature's Top 40
Nature’s Top 40 counts down to the UK’s number one wildlife spectacle. Wildlife experts ranked suggestions from the public to compile the UK’s Top 40.
Wildlife adventurer
- Dr Janet Sumner has a huge passion for the natural world.
She says that one of the best things about filming Nature's Calendar was getting so close to the animals.Â
- Janet's most thrilling moment during the filming of Nature's Top 40 was swimming with seals in the waters around the Isles of Scilly.
- Other highlights included watching Foxes and going in search of a wide variety of wildlife including the return of Swallows to the British Isles following their winter migration.
Volcanoes and lava flows
- Janet is a Research Fellow at the Open University in Milton Keynes, and Project Leader for joint ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ-Open University Science Broadcast Projects. Â
- She is usually to be found scrambling about on, or inside, active volcanoes such as Stromboli or Etna, where she does her research, or even fire-walking on the lava flows of Hawaii.
- Born in Crewe, Cheshire, she did her degree in Geology at Sheffield University, and her PhD in Volcanology in Germany.
- For the last 10 years she has been travelling the world researching volcanoes. Janet's work is very much based on field research, but also encompasses laboratory experiments and computational fluid dynamics, which is not as dull as it sounds given that she works with buckets of golden syrup and even cream eggs!
- Janet's taste for adventure is not restricted to her work. She has tried most extreme sports from skydiving and paragliding to pot holing and scuba diving, but has settled on free climbing as her sport of choice, because the abseiling is useful for getting down into volcanoes.
- Janet is passionate about communicating science to the general public in an exciting and hands-on way. She has also presented on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ2's Science Shack and What the Industrial Revolution did for us together with Adam Hart-Davis, and The Natural History of Great Britain with Alan Titchmarsh.
- Her TV credits also include Nature's Calendar,'Hands on Nature and Nature of Britain.
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