Exploration has never felt so right – bringing together science, adventure, and a shared dream to better understand our changing world”
By: Belén G. Ovide
The Way We Choose to Explore
For years, we had been questioning whether we wanted our future to revolve around doing the same things – sailing to the same places, year after year…
We wanted the freedom to do something else.
A Floating Home for Science
This summer, we ventured into new territory within the Northeast Greenland National Park — the largest national park on Earth, larger than France and Spain combined. A place of isolation, glaciers, wildlife and vast landscapes that seem to have no end.
Getting there is not exactly straightforward. Permits need to be arranged months in advance. Local knowledge matters. There are no flight schedules to follow, no easy way in. Just us, our boat, and a mission that, when we first heard about it, sounded slightly crazy. Perhaps even a little too ambitious.
But some ideas are worth following before you know exactly where they will lead.
1,200 kg of Science and a Boat Full of Climate Change pioneers
After all these years exploring East Greenland, it was only the second time we had crossed into the park — and the first with Tilvera. Reaching it felt like a privilege in itself. Not only because of the excitement of the “unexplored”, but due to the reason to be there.
Our mission was to host an intensive scientific campaign organised by Aarhus University in Denmark, carrying more than 1,200 kg of scientific equipment all the way from Húsavík, and a boat full of young scientists from very different backgrounds.
Their ambition was huge: to study the physical and biological processes taking place as ice melts, to collect data, and to better understand the changing relationship between ice and water before some of these systems disappear or transform beyond recognition.
What a mission!
And somehow, we clicked immediately.
Our role was simple, but we took it seriously: to provide them with a home in one of the most remote places on Earth, feed them, support their fieldwork, help with observations and data collection, and become part of their much larger effort to understand these changing environments.
The atmosphere was beautiful, the experience amazing and the whole mission was a real success!
Together for change
These are the kind of journeys that fuel us and continue to shape the Tilvera project, adding purpose to what we are building.
Because exploration, for us, has never really been about how far we can travel or how many places we can tick off a map. It is about what we learn along the way. The people we meet. The questions we bring home. And the new reasons we find to care about the places we are fortunate enough to visit.
Once more, we proof that exploration and conservation are not two separate journeys. They can be part of the same one.