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About Ice Frontiers

I'm Jean Peccoud. As a child, I dreamed of being a polar explorer. Born a century too late for that, I turned to science instead — where every experiment offered its own glimpse of discovery, its own small frontier. That feeling of moving toward the unknown never left me.

Science brought me from France to the United States, where a one-year sabbatical became a thirty-year career in academia. I built a research laboratory, trained graduate students, and spent years at the edge of what was known in biotechnology. It was a good life. But over time, the landscape shifted — and I found myself confronting a quiet truth: the frontier that had once inspired me in the lab was moving elsewhere.

The question that wouldn't go away

In 2025, I left my tenured faculty position to work on something that had been nagging me for years. I had 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 climate science tells us and how to actually live with it. What I noticed is that all we had to offer them were the same narratives they were already questioning: data, projections, catastrophe.

This project is my attempt to do better.

Why Ice Frontiers Exists

Ice Frontiers is an experiment to create a conversation about what it means to live honestly in a changing world. Not a platform for climate solutions or policy debates — others do that well. It is a space for the experiences that rarely get spoken: the quiet grief when a glacier disappears, the unease of boarding a flight, the fatigue of caring without burning out.

Most of us carry those feelings alone. Ice Frontiers exists on the belief that we don't have to — and that sharing them openly may be a prerequisite to sustainable actions. The goal is to build a community of people who feel the gap between existing climate narratives and their own lives, and are willing to think together about how to close it.

If that resonates with you, you belong here.

What I'm writing

I don't think I can invite others to examine their relationship with a changing world without doing that work myself first. 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.