On Le Commandant Charcot polar expedition ship, you’ll cruise in luxury to the most remote reaches of the earth. While exploring these icy regions, you can participate in our Citizen Science workshops, supporting our onboard scientific research.
Ponant knows that sustainability is one of travel’s great challenges. We’re proud to meet that challenge during our scientific expeditions to the world’s most fragile places – the polar ice caps. During our Antarctica expeditions and Arctic expeditions, we take sustainable travel to its next logical step: We strive to understand and preserve the world’s most extreme ecosystems.
We believe it’s our moral and ethical responsibility to work toward a world where the places we explore tomorrow remain just as they are today. To that end, every journey to the poles presents an opportunity to collect data and disseminate knowledge to the scientific community—a community that is often underfunded and unable to launch its own excursions. That’s why we designed our luxury expedition icebreaker Le Commandant Charcot as a ship of scientific inquiry—one of the few of its kind—outfitting it with facilities that are wholly dedicated to analyzing environmental data about ice thickness, water, sound velocity, and the climate. Then we, of course, staffed the ship with resident scientists.
Most exciting of all? Our guests can be part of the discovery, thanks to our onboard Citizen Science program.
Get a Taste of the Life of an Onboard Researcher
If you’re traveling with us to the polar reaches of the globe, we’re willing to bet that you’re curious about ecosystems where ice takes center stage. How does life thrive here? What impact do these remote regions have on the rest of the planet? What threats do they face?
Ponant’s onboard team of naturalist guides are on hand to answer those questions—and to share their latest discoveries. Some of those discoveries emerge from samples that Ponant guests have collected as Citizen Scientists. During excursions in a Zodiac® inflatable boat, for instance, you might gather phytoplankton, which has proven to respond in very visible ways to climate variation. You might observe cloud formations that are passed on to NASA. Or you might spot a whale breaching at the surface that can be added to Happywhale, a tracking database that helps biologists understand the migratory patterns of these gentle giants.
Feel Part of a Working Lab at Sea
Meanwhile, on board, the research team is manning the facilities and carrying out their own inquiries. The modular wet lab gives them direct access to the sea. Through a side door that opens to the open air, they might be sending sensors, beacon-buoys, and salinometers into the water or collecting some of their own phytoplankton by casting nets out into the sea.
The dry lab—a kind of communications and data center—keeps the scientists and naturalist guides in touch with each other for reporting and consultation. This is also a “work room” of computers that monitor the ship’s built-in sonar, capture images from a drone, and support correspondence, documentation, and data analysis.
From the quarterdeck aft, scientists might drop sensors into the water so they can measure ice thickness. Larger equipment here can be lifted and lowered gently with the ship’s hoist, a fascinating process to observe.
Onboard lecture theaters provide a stage where scientists and naturalist guides can bring their findings to you. During their briefings, you’ll find that few experiences match the thrill of hearing how contributions like yours have helped advance our knowledge about the polar regions.
Once a Citizen Scientist, Always a Citizen Scientist
It’s been more than a century since the first polar explorers captured the public imagination. But unlike in the days when Amundsen and Shackleton first set foot on these ice caps, today’s more casual polar visitor can be directly involved in research during a Ponant polar expedition cruise. What guests experience onsite is immediate and even visceral—the sun low to the horizon casting ice sheets in a bright white blaze, the hushed slosh of sea water caressing a beryl-blue iceberg as a leopard seal calls out from a distance. What guests take home, however, is more lasting: the motivation of a Citizen Scientist to understand and protect a fragile world.
Become a Citizen Scientist on board Le Commandant Charcot during a luxury expedition cruise in Antarctica or the Arctic.