To enter Harpa during the Arctic Circle is to live in a temporary hallucination. For four remarkable days, brilliant, or at least above average, minds gathered to address the great crisis of our age, climate change. Entering this year’s event, I was almost overjoyed. Former president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who prefers to use the title President Grímsson, looking aristocratic with well-coiffed silver hair and silver suit, was holding court in the massive main hall, demanding scientists and politicians from around the world pay attention and keep to the schedule.
For me, this was a stark contrast. I have been involved in environmental coverage since 2004, when the Arctic Council met in a modest hotel in Reykjavík, and I was sent to cover the event by the Associated Press. That event opened my eyes. On the bright side, there was laughter. For example, I actually recorded the room laughing when Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja said, “It is the best possible declaration that could be adopted today.” Otherwise, there were tears, as the best possible declaration was that, essentially, the world was doomed. The Arctic nations realised that the Bush Administration would not assist in obviating climate change beyond its overall 5.2 billion USD budget for environmental policies.
More than 20 years later, Iceland was treating environmental policy like a Comic-Con. Harpa sparkled like a Nordic Las Vegas, and I joined a number of scientists as they sang along with, and took selfies in front of, Jón Jónsson, Icelandic troubadour.
If brains and turtleneck sweaters could solve the world’s problems, the Arctic Circle would make history.
A French adventure
“We have a friend since a long time, a friend of the foundation since a long, long time, that is doing organic wine,” Captain Yohann Mucherie tells me as my eyes lock on to an oak barrel of wine at the bottom of the TARA Polar Station. “And just for fun, every time he can, he wants to put a barrel of his wine, and then he tastes it, and he can say that this boat was in the Arctic, this wine was, so, yeah, nothing to do with science.”
We have been touring the TARA Polar Station, an almost circular orange-and-silver 36-metre boat meant to be lodged into ice floe and travel across the North Pole, or near it, solely by drifting with ice.
“We’re planning for eight months, which is what it took the first time,” the captain explains. He then clarifies, “Not actually me. I will not stay with the boat. I have other things.”
There will however be 15 people on board a relatively modest scientific vessel, trapped in ice, on purpose. And they have docked in Reykjavík for months, in part out of convenience, but in large part because of the Arctic Circle Conference.
Nobody on the boat is Icelandic, or Nordic. The crew is largely French, with a few scientists from neighbouring countries. When I point out that Iceland has more at stake over shifting currents and loss of sea ice than other countries, I get a polite shrug.
“A gentle mission with a crew of scientists ready to brave eight months in the Arctic, many in total darkness, to study ice floe, currents, and the Arctic, will be surrounded by the polar bears their study might somehow protect, if the polar bears don’t eat the scientists.”
“We’re hoping the people at Arctic assembly take an interest in the boat. We’ll have tours. The visibility of something like this is important.”
The captain and I, just a week before the Arctic Circle conference, are not encumbered by outside interest. As his entire mission is fascinating, I drag out every question. The boat has a liquid nitrogen maker, to allow it to chill ice core samples at -80 degrees en route. There is an almost science fiction-inspired moon pool, from which diving operations can be conducted in relative comfort, though surrounding the moon pool is an astounding amount of silver-coated insulation to protect the rest of the boat from what I presume will be profound, damp, bleak-ass cold.
There is a canteen area, which uses birch woods, but still has the seating arrangement from the original Alien movie. In this seating area there are four books on polar bears.
“Yes, yes, the polar bears. We learned on our trial mission,” the captain notes. “We only had two rifles on board, and two people allowed to wear and to use a rifle, okay, meaning that whoever wanted to go outside had to get one. And wow, far from being enough.”
“So you need more guns and shooters for the next trip?” I ask. The difficulty, of course, is that the TARA Polar Station trial run was in July near Svalbard. The actual mission will be midwinter. A shooter would be set up in total darkness.
“And dogs. You need dogs. I mean, the polar bears can be wherever when, especially when it will be dark, and you don’t see nothing outside. Imagine you’re going out of the boat. Nope. I don’t want to imagine they could be, they could be anywhere, yeah. So, so you have to go around the ship, looking by every window to make sure there’s no separate right away. So, yeah, we will have dogs.”
“The scientists didn’t want us to have dogs on board because they say the dogs, of course, there will poo everywhere, right? And so for their for their sample of the ice and everything, they said, it might pollute our sample, so we don’t want dogs. After the last trip, they don’t mind anymore. We’ll have dogs with us,” the captain gently continues.
There you have it, I thought. A gentle mission with a crew of scientists ready to brave eight months in the Arctic, many in total darkness, to study ice floe, currents, and the Arctic, will be surrounded by the polar bears their study might somehow protect, if the polar bears don’t eat the scientists.
“The most complicated part of captaining this boat?” I ask, assuming the answer is avoiding polar bears.
“Definitely the jet fuel is the most difficult thing. There is so much jet fuel, and not nearly as much as I wish we could take, but managing jet fuel is the difficulty.”
Why jet fuel?
“The jet fuel is mandatory, and even if it were not, we would have it. If we need rescue, they come in a helicopter or a plane, they need fuel to get back. So you need jet fuel. And it’s negative 40, negative 45 degrees,” the captain says. He reads my eyes. “You cannot do any crew change before spring and summer arrives again, meaning that, yeah, the first team on board will stay more or less eight months, and then there will be a crew change, and the second team will stay probably four months. I mean this, we don’t know it depends on when we are free from the ice. But yeah, the first crew has to stay eight months. So the [TARA] foundation is planning to do some psychological tests for everybody.”
We eventually finish our discussion, and I look out and see tourists photographing the boat, casually. It’s astounding to me, the amount of effort these European scientists and sailors are about to invest in something so few onlookers understand.
Elephant in the room
“There were some people who thought about the new elephant in the Arctic room, meaning the President of the United States. So I noticed in your description, you didn’t mention the United States…How do you think we should deal with this new, it definitely is a new way, of the United States coming in?” Former president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson asks Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir.
“I don’t think we’ll see a military here, Icelandic military, in my lifetime.”
And with this, exactly 30 minutes into the conference, environmentalism is off the table. The prime minister’s answer includes the following: “Our security is based on a bilateral defence agreement with the US. And I see a lot of opportunities deepening that relationship. But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticise certain things. Iceland also has a very deep relationship with [Greenland], very personal relationship with Greenland. Even though we’re different in some ways, we share a lot of things, geography, we share history, we share not having been in full control of everything that’s happened in the country, and we understand fully what kind of feeling that could entail when you hear, you know, people from powerful countries making statements like the president of the US did. And we’ve said, I’ve said this, you know, the future of Greenland is in the hands of Greenlanders.”
She then fields three questions from the audience, all about national security. On the second, she demonstrates her excellent Danish. This is because, of course, there are two major threats to national security: the United States, with its threats against Greenland, and Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine. Denmark and Greenland get the lion’s share of attention.
Kristrún expounds that to build a military in Iceland would require dedicating “the entire economy of 400,000 people,” which would be unfeasible. “I don’t think we’ll see a military here, Icelandic military in my lifetime,” she concludes. This is immediately followed with another national security question.
Finally, the former president concludes the Q&A by stating, with a half-smile, “If you’re still prime minister next year, you’re invited to come again.”
At least Quixote had windmills
I spend the rest of the conference realising the dream of addressing climate change has dissolved. When I pop in to the business and innovation conference next door, I discover not a single vendor has signed up. I email the Arctic Circle’s PR team, asking if they really think it’s appropriate that a former president used his pulpit to undermine the sitting prime minister. They say they’re happy if I quote him, and they ask if I can also mention the Zayed Sustainability Prize, a monetary prize from the ruler of Dubai.
I wander outside and look at the three truck models by the festival’s key local sponsor, Arctic Trucks, amused at how on-brand the almost Mad Max-themed trucks feel.
Off-the-record discussions repeatedly refer to a meeting just before the Arctic Circle, the International Maritime Organisation meeting October 17, 2025. The goal of this meeting of more than 100 countries was to finally reduce global shipping emissions. Donald Trump declared the idea a “green scam” and, threatening tariffs and working with Saudi Arabia, destroyed the agreement. The BBC quoted Hon. Ralph Regenvanu, Minister for Climate Change for the Republic of Vanuatu, stating the failure to adopt regulations was “unacceptable given the urgency we face in light of accelerating climate change.”
The world is falling apart completely, and we have no control over this. This is the human experience. One of the first great works of fiction, Don Quixote, written while Iceland was in the throes of a little ice age, addressed this in the early 17th century. Quixote imagined windmills were giants and tossed himself at them as best he could. As I left the Arctic Circle, I realised Quixote’s flight of fancy was far more rational than my belief that reason and science would finally be allowed to take hold.