In 2017 Pen Hadow launched a programme of scientific research and public engagement, Arctic Mission, to explore the wildlife and floating ice-reef ecosystem of the high seas around the North Pole – the Central Arctic Ocean.
The key insight from the voyage was that the sea-ice cover is also a vast and complex habitat – not just a protective heat-shield against incoming solar energy. Sea-ice loss is therefore habitat loss.
Arctic Mission went on to suggest that future media reports about sea-ice loss could focus both on the enormous implications for regional climates and on the likely catastrophic loss in future decades of a unique floating ice-reef habitat and ecosystem involving some of the Arctic’s most iconic wildlife species.
