
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 27, 1995                   TAG: 9504270034
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HOW TO BE THE COOLEST SCOUT IN THE WORLD

FROM A CUB SCOUT who built Pinewood Derby cars as a kid, to an Eagle Scout who earned Scouting's highest conservation award, Radford's Kass Kastning is going places. Antarctica is at the top of his list.

Antarctica. It's the coldest place on Earth. It's twice the size of Australia. It's covered in mile-thick masses of ice, allowing little life to exist.

And 19-year-old Kass Kastning, a promising young scientist, will spend an entire summer there as winner of the Boy Scouts of America-National Science Foundation Antarctic Scientific Program.

"The judges made us do [an impromptu] five-minute speech on why we wanted to go," said Kastning, son of Radford University geologists Ernst and Karen Kastning. "That's when I got really nervous."

But when he was announced the winner - beating out two Scouts, one from Corpus Christi, Texas, and another who goes to school near Columbia, S.C. - "I was very excited," he said.

So was Ernst Kastning, who called his son's award the equivalent of winning the "Miss America" of Scouting.

Kastning applied for the prestigious Boy Scout award in February, but didn't learn until this month that he was a finalist, chosen from more than 150 applicants nationwide. He was selected as the winner Sunday in Dallas after more than three hours of interviews.

Kastning won't be alone in Antarctica, home to the South Pole and the world's coldest recorded temperature - minus 127 degrees Fahrenheit. He'll spend the summer with National Science Foundation scientists who are researching the ages of icecaps and the geological history of the continent and analyzing samples from the area.

The National Science Foundation also sponsors Girl Scouts for the Antarctica Program.

"It looks like [Kastning] is very interested in geology, so we'll try to find something that will fit in with his interest," said Lynn Simarski of the National Science Foundation public affairs office. "Hopefully, he'll be able to go out with the geology or glaciology scientists who are working out in the field."

Kastning, a sophomore at James Madison University's new College of Integrated Science and Technology, plans to take a semester and maybe a year off from school for the expedition. Antarctica is one of the places Kastning, an assistant Scout leader of Radford's Troop 46, says he has always wanted to see.

Antarctica "is a vast natural laboratory where research is producing clues about what has happened in the geologic and cosmic past," Kastning wrote in his 100-plus-page application. "Nowhere else on Earth can one pursue science under such demanding conditions and have so much potential to make discoveries about our planet."

Kastning's fascination with science isn't new. Beginning in his freshman year at Radford High School, he researched and wrote scientific papers on karst terrain, the cavernous landscape formed by dissolving limestone. He won science fairs on the local, regional, state, national and international level, gaining his highest honor in 1993 when he was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and got to shake hands with President Clinton.

Keywords:
ERNST KASTNING III

by CNB