June 14, 3 a.m. It’s a summer night but you wouldn’t know it sitting on this balcony, shivering inside a parka and trying to make sense of the vast frozen desert that stretches toward an indeterminate horizon. The Arctic fog has whited out the sun, which normally would be high and bright at this hour, and what remains is a strange light—Uranian, volatile, opaque. If Crayola made a crayon this color, its name would be Cold.
It seems like madness to sit out here, needled by a bitter chill, when two inches of down await on the other side of the sliding glass door. But there’s something bewitching about this icy wilderness off Greenland’s northeast coast, a part of our planet so remote that the only trace of human habitation is hundreds of miles away. To lay eyes on a place that so few have seen is a privilege I hesitate to squander by sleeping.
Near 74 degrees North, the pack ice forms a single white mass crisscrossed by pressure ridges formed when glacial ice floes collide. Everywhere there are hummocks, or ice mounds, that look like giant heaps of shaving cream—perfect camouflage for polar bears on the hunt. I scan the terrain through binoculars, but I don’t know how to read the ice, especially in fog. The icescape is so unknowable that it might as well be on another planet.
I listen for movement—a crack in the ice, the beating of a wing—but there is nothing. This far above the Arctic Circle, the stillness is profound. It presses against you, makes you uncomfortable. The tendency is to want to do something—to look for a polar bear, say—but you quickly learn that you have no authority here. Nature makes the rules. You trust. And when you do, this world opens up to you.
Three years ago, passenger travel to these icebound regions wasn’t even possible. The ice is too thick and complex to penetrate without a formidable icebreaking hull. Enter Le Commandant Charcot, an expedition ship launched in 2021 by French cruise company Ponant for travel deep into the polar regions, including to the geographical North Pole. Named after French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Ponant’s newest ship has a Polar Class 2 (PC2) ice rating, which means it is capable of routinely navigating through 10-foot-deep sea ice, though it packs power far beyond that. (In sea trials it pushed through a nearly 50-foot-deep ice ridge in Greenland.) To put it into perspective, the only other PC2 vessels out there are used for research or military operations.
Because it sails into some of the most sensitive environments on the planet, Charcot was built as the first luxury icebreaker ship running on a mix of battery and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to minimize emissions and environmental impact. Electricity produced by the LNG-powered engines is stored in batteries whose use reduces fuel consumption and allows the ship to run, for almost an hour at a time, so quietly that even the bears don’t hear it coming.
The ship is the epitome of sustainability at sea. Ponant’s protocols for Charcot go beyond what is necessary, to include 100 percent elimination of single-use plastic on board, 60 percent recycling rate (compared to an industry standard of 20 percent), and chemical-free wastewater treatment to allow for clean discharges. The idea is to balance luxury travel with eco-responsibility, so you can feel good that your meal at the ship’s Alain Ducasse restaurant came from a short supply chain (one night we had musk ox meat sourced from Inuit hunters at the village of Ittoqqortoormiit), or that the water in your refillable bottle was produced through reverse osmosis of seawater and microfiltration.
“We have made adaptations that are responsible, for the sake of these fragile environments,” says Navin Sawhney, Ponant’s CEO Americas. “Combine [this] with luxurious style and the ever-present science facilitated onboard to carry out research and conservation, and there isn’t another ship like it in the whole world.”
Le Commandant Charcot is unique in that it’s a platform for the scientific community. Researchers specializing in the polar regions are granted access to the onboard lab and transportation to the field to facilitate their studies, and the resident science officer conducts ongoing testing for ice quality and the effects of climate change, for which the Arctic is ground zero. According to the journal Nature, climate models show the Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most recent Arctic Report Card asserts that Summer 2023 was the Arctic’s warmest on record and sea ice continues to decline.
“All of humanity is sensitive to how the climate is changing, and its impact is powerfully felt in the Arctic,” says Sawhney. “We can’t wait to conduct these experiments [until] the ice has diminished or disappeared altogether. [Research] is not a choice; it’s a mandate.”
The net-net of the conversation: the time is now to bear witness to these wild places.
By morning the fog has lifted and the ship is pursuing an ideal spot for an ice landing. Under the pressure of Charcot’s massive hull, blocks of ice the size of an SUV break and flip, revealing their aquamarine undersides. The sea beneath is steel gray and, I imagine, spectacularly frigid. Still, a couple dozen passengers have signed up for the polar plunge and the bragging rights that come with a baptism into some of the coldest water on Earth.
The rest of us are content to explore on dry land. When Charcot “docks,” it’s a surreal sight. The ship pushes into a slab of fast ice (solid ice that is attached to land), stops, and drops down a gangway. The menu of activities includes polar hiking into snow-covered mountains, cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing for a more intimate connection to the ice. When conditions are clear and we find a polynya (open water between ice floes), there is also kayaking and zodiac cruising among icebergs, in seal and walrus territory.
Today it’s snowshoes. We go out as a small group accompanied by a naturalist who’s also a gunner, because you never know. To keep us safe, there are lookouts from the ship and along a perimeter manned by other naturalists trained in reading the nuances of ice. So we trudge on through a pristine ice field, aiming for an iceberg that could be 100 feet or a mile away. On the ice, you lose any sense of distance. And time. For an hour, or so it seems, we walk to a soundtrack of snow crunching beneath snowshoes and a chorus of labored breathing, transfixed by coins of light shimmering on the whiteness or by spots of melting ice like blue thumbprints.
By no means is this a leisurely sailing. “The intent is to engage you in every possible way,” says Sawhney. “Through native encounters, understanding the Inuits’ lifestyle or how they study and greet ice, scientific research, and wildlife and natural history encounters, you get transformed. [The Arctic] becomes a part of you.”
Out here, wildlife encounters are indelible. As the flagship species of the Arctic, the polar bear creates a powerful impression on those lucky enough to see it. This most charismatic of bears is often objectified for its cuteness, but in reality, the massive carnivore is a lonesome and vicious predator forever prowling the icy wilds in search of food.
Which is why, when the naturalist’s radio crackles with the news of a sighting, we double-time it back to the ship. From the safety of the promenade deck, we wait. The juvenile male approaches, stopping in front of the starboard side. He sniffs some now-faded tracks and makes his way to the edge of the ice. He studies the water, slides in with barely a splash. It’s going to be some seal’s unlucky day.
Before I set off on this journey, several people asked me “Why the Arctic?”, implying that there’s nothing there. But there is. At least a dozen polar bear encounters, a closeup with a walrus on the water, the gilded light of the midnight sun, citizen science, and ice fishing with Inuits are transformative experiences. Most important is the ice. To witness the living ice as it shifts, splinters, and breathes, and see firsthand how many species it supports, is to understand its importance to the health of our planet. If, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the Arctic could be ice-free by 2040, one day I will describe the frozen North to my future grandchildren’s wide-eyed wonder. It’s bragging rights I never care to have.
Take a look inside Le Commandant Charcot:
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