After four months of navigating three of the world’s oceans and journeying through six climate tipping points found across the 15,800km that span the Arctic, a team of ocean explorers and scientists last week announced their mission to cross the Northwest Passage complete.

The “journey like no other” got underway in June this year, when the crew of 12 embarked on 115 days and nights at sea as part of a mission from Norway to Canada where, finally, they made port in Homer this month. Their aim was to not only capture data and scientific samples from the environments they explored but to draw the world’s attention to the impacts of climate change upon even its most remote wilderness.

A route that “was once impossible to cross”, the Northwest Passage is now becoming “increasingly navigable” thanks to the rapid decline in Arctic summer sea ice driven by the heating waters and rising temperatures associated with climate change; the very message the team set out to deliver back home by “bearing witness to the extreme and catastrophic changes being wrought on this critical region.”

Led by an Australian city banker-turned-polar explorer, Keith Tuffley, the Northwest Passage Ocean Science Expedition and its ship – the S/V Abel Tasman – brought along with it some of the highest regarded climate scientists and storytellers working in the field today. Among the cohort were the accomplished sailors, university students, and brothers Isak and Alex Rockstöm whose father, Johan Rockstöm is the revered Swedish climate scientist credited with the development of climate tipping point theory.

Part of the aim of the expedition was to highlight how climate change is increasing the risk of reaching these tipping points – points at which particular large-scale environmental changes are thought to become self-perpetuating and irreversible beyond a certain threshold. The Arctic Circle is particularly susceptible to such tipping points, harbouring six of the 16 global climate tipping points over all.

Multiple studies have previously suggested that parts of the Greenland ice sheet, for example, would become much more vulnerable to runaway melting if global warming reached 1.5 to 2-degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, the precise positions of such tipping points remain undetermined for now. What is understood is that the rapid melting of sea ice will have a profound impact on the some four million people and some 40 different Indigenous Peoples to which the Arctic is home.

“Unique wildlife has adapted to thrive in these extreme conditions, such as majestic polar bears, narwhals, and beluga whales,” said the Expedition team via its online log book. “Arctic sea ice decline – amongst other impacts of climate change – have profound consequences for the people and animals that rely on the ice.

“Scientists predict we only have less than six years to limit global warming to below 1.5-degrees Celsius. It’s vital we act now.”

The infamous Northwest Passage and the journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic has – over hundreds of years of human history – been the focus of many endeavours. The lost expedition of Sir Jonathan Franklin and his 129 men on The Terror in 1845 continues to fascinate us today. The quest through the passage itself was not fulfilled until 1905 when Ronald Amundsen succeeded with just six men in a 70ft herring boat on a journey that took him three years.

Sailed with the colours of the climate stripes to raise awareness of the warming planet, the Abel Tasman – a 75ft steel-hulled Bermuda Schooner – now adds the Northwest Passage to her catalogue of successful voyages that include Antarctica, Greenland, and Norway.

“It was very quiet and peaceful arrival for S/V Abel Tasman into the beautiful Port Homer, at the northern end of the Aleutian Islands,” said expedition leader, Tuffley in a post on social media. “The crew enjoyed a well deserved night’s rest. But we have been busy ever since, preparing the yacht for winter, and starting on the next phase of our work – the analysis of science samples and data, with the help of our partners at NatureMetrics and The Ocean Race, and documenting our experiences with the six Arctic Tipping Points.”

Starting in Norway, the crew of the S/V Abel Tasman voyaged to Iceland, Greenland, to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and finally Alaska, passing through three oceans and meeting with “countless sea life along the way”, including polar bears, orca, dolphins, walruses, humpbacks, sperm and pilot whales, and “birds galore.”

Logging new data every day of its expedition, the crew collected samples including eDNA and microplastics, acoustics recordings, water salinity, and CO2 concentration to create a clear picture of the ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change back home.

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