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Six scientists and six crew will travel next month to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town in Norway near the Russian border, to begin an odyssey to one of the most inhospitable, inaccessible and least-studied regions on Earth. There, they will climb onboard a futuristic, floating laboratory – the French-built Tara polar station.

They will enter a harsh and isolating environment: months of complete darkness and temperatures as low as -50C (-58F). Arriving in Norway on 14 August, they will await good conditions and an icebreaker to open a route for them before setting off on an eight-month voyage, overwintering through long, intense polar nights onboard a 26-metre-long, 16-metre-wide vessel built to be frozen into the pack ice, which will drift slowly over the north pole to Greenland.

Their mission is to gather data on the impact of climate breakdown and pollution on the central Arctic Ocean’s unique, complex and largely unknown ecosystems, one of the most fragile in the world, before it changes for ever.

“We are losing species before we have time to discover them,” says Romain Troublé, a microbiologist turned sailor and executive director of the Tara Ocean Foundation, a French philanthropic organisation. “So we’re there to document these. In the next 20 years, everything will shift.”

For his work on developing the polar station, Troublé was awarded the prestigious Shackleton medal this week.

In 2023, Nature magazine described him, and Étienne Bourgois, who is the co-founder of the Tara Ocean Foundation, as “visionary thinkers”. An editorial likened the continuous two-year expedition of the first Tara vessel, a schooner that traversed coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean and spawned research that has helped develop theories on reef formation and biodiversity, to expeditions such as Charles Darwin’s onboard HMS Beagle in 1831-36.

An earlier iteration of the Tara schooner travelled to the Arctic in 2006, to complete a transpolar drift, only the second such expedition in the central Arctic since the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen completed the first in his ship, the Fram, in 1893-96.

“We decided we wanted to do it again in the future, with more funding, with more means,” says Troublé, nephew of Agnès Troublé, co-founder of the Tara Ocean Foundation and better known as the fashion designer agnès b. “We know pretty well the depth, the physics of the Arctic. But we have no clue about the life, the biological aspect. It is a blank sheet to discover.”

The design of the station, came from Agnès Troublé and Bourgois, while Troublé raised the required €26m (£22m) funding and organised the mission. This presented several challenges, he says, not least how to put together scientists from 15 countries as well as the “human challenge” for the personnel onboard.

The scientists and crew will be very remote and while they can be rescued in an emergency, it could take a week to reach them. This will be the first stage in what is planned to be a continuous expedition over 10 legs and spanning 20 years, aimed at driving policy changes that would protect the Arctic.

It is a race against time: the Arctic is warming three to four times faster than anywhere else on the planet and the sea ice that once protected the region is melting fast, exposing the sea to threats from shipping, fishing, mining and pollution.

Dr Nina Schuback, a biological oceanographer who will take leave from the Swiss Polar Institute to join the expedition, says: “We know that the central Arctic Ocean is changing really, really rapidly. We can see the ice conditions changing, using satellite data, but if you want to talk about the effect this has on biology, it is very hard to get data.”

The Arctic Ocean and sea ice supports an interconnected web of life, from polar bears, walruses and beluga whales, to microbes such as ice algae, that form the foundation of the food chain.

Schuback and her colleagues will sample microbes in seawater, through the station’s “moon pool”, a central opening that will also be the launch point for divers, underwater drones and remotely operated vessels to descend into the icy depths. They hope to discover new species that have adapted to this unique region where, for almost half of the year, the sun does not rise.

Schuback, who was subjected to a rigorous selection process that one scientist likened to the evaluation for the International Space Station, admits she is both “excited and scared” at the prospect of going through a polar winter.

“I’ve never experienced polar night. My biggest fear is the darkness. You get tired,” she says, adding: “And I do a lot of exercise but it will be hard on such a small platform.

“But time will go very quickly. There’s exciting science – and how often do you get the chance to do something like this? I feel very privileged.”