Why Ice Frontiers Exists

I'm Jean Peccoud. In 2025, I decided to leave a tenured faculty position and a research career in biotechnology to work on a question that had been nagging me. Over the years, I watched my students and my own children struggling to make sense of the world they are inheriting — the anxiety, the confusion, the gap between what science tells us and how to actually live with it. I realized that all we had to offer them were the same models they were already questioning. This project is my attempt to do better.

While Ice Frontiers begins with lived experience, it does not turn away from science or policy. Climate research has established with clarity the scale and urgency of the challenge, and thoughtful policy is essential to shaping collective responses. Our work starts at a different point: the human experience of living within that reality. We believe that when personal experience is acknowledged — when uncertainty, grief, responsibility, and ambivalence can be spoken openly — it becomes easier to connect scientific knowledge and policy goals to everyday life. Bridging that gap may be one of the conditions for durable, sustainable change.

Ice Frontiers is a platform to develop a new climate narrative — one that starts not from data or catastrophe, but from lived experience. Like I helped graduate students in my lab find their own research questions, I want to create a space where people who feel the gap between existing climate narratives and their own experience can imagine how to live honestly — and act responsibly — in a changing world.

→ Living with a Changing Climate

The Ice Frontiers Fellowship is the most direct expression of that. In 2027, a small group of fellows will join a sailing expedition from Boston to Bergen, developing creative projects on the theme of living with climate uncertainty.

→ Ice Frontiers 2027 Fellowships

What follows is my own contribution to that inquiry. I don't think I can invite others to examine their relationship with a changing world without doing that work myself first.

As a child, I dreamed of being a polar explorer—born a century too late, I turned instead to science, where every experiment offered a glimpse of discovery. The thrill of making something that had never existed felt like walking toward unexplored horizons.

Science brought me from France to the United States, where a one-year sabbatical became a thirty-year career in academia. Over time, the changing landscape of research forced me to confront a simple truth: the frontier that once inspired me in the lab was shifting elsewhere.

Leaving institutional science created space to return to my first dream—to explore the literal and inner frontiers of a changing world. Ice Frontiers began as an attempt to understand how we live with transformation: in the climate, in society, and in ourselves.

The dispatches on this site are my attempt to follow that thread honestly — not as a scientist presenting findings, but as someone trying to figure out how to live with what I know. I am following three parallel threads: Letters from the Dock, Letters from the Edge, and Logbook.