SHACKLETON MEDAL 2026 // SHORTLIST NOMINEE: IN CONVERSATION WITH SUSANA HANCOCK
“I've met with plastic executives about pollution and the environment. One called his boss right after our discussion and resigned from his job.”
You started your first degree at the age of 14. Can you talk a bit about your background?
I fell in love with astrophysics when I was four years old. I was sleeping outside at my grandmother's house because we didn't have a room to stay there. So we spent a night in a tent. I had two uncles who were scientists. They were showing me the stars, and one of them saw a shooting star. I wanted to see it, and didn't understand why he could see it and I couldn't. He explained I had to persevere and stick with it, and maybe I could see my own. So I stayed up that night, after they went to bed, until I saw my own shooting star. From that moment, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I loved the idea that I could look at the stars closely through telescopes, but they were remote and I couldn't access them. The morning after, I went and told my grandmother that’s what I wanted to be. She said she didn’t understand why at four years old, I was so determined and she started giving me a list of why I shouldn't do this. One of them was that I’d have to learn Russian. Another was that I’d have to get a PhD. So I decided straight away that I’d have to achieve both of those things.
How did this lead to your interest in the poles?
When I was 14, I started at university [The University of Southern Maine]. I was in an astrophysics class at the university, and I was fascinated by the idea of ice on other planets. One person in my class said he was also fascinated by ice on other planets, because he saw ice as something that signalled life. That meant we could go to these planets when we could no longer live on earth. That phrase really resonated. It bothered me that we were looking at where we could go when we could no longer live on Earth. I flipped a switch and said, ok, I love ice. Ice on earth is still seen as something that's remote and intangible for so many of us, but it affects us all in ways that we don't necessarily understand. So I moved to Northern Norway and studied there. I spent a lot of time living with Indigenous communities and looking at the power struggles around environmentalism, the hunt for rare earth minerals, the mining, the effects that the climate is having on Indigenous livelihoods, the animals that are dying, the hunger and starvation rates, the suicide rates in the communities, and connecting that with climate change.
How did you start to develop this into a career?
I went to Oxford [which she attended on a Rhodes Scholarship]. I did three degrees there –two master's and a doctorate. I actually did my first one in linguistics, because I was fascinated after studying Russian. [She also speaks Czech and Norwegian, and is conversant in Slovak, Icelandic, Swedish, French and Hebrew] Then I got into diplomacy and policy that was focused on the Arctic. I’ve really stayed in that sphere since graduating in 2019. It’s central to what I do to try to get the world to care and love about the polar regions, because I think the basis of protecting anything has to be that we care and love about it absolutely.
But this is the challenge isn’t it? Most of us understand that we need ice to perpetuate at the polls yet it's quite an abstract thing to think about. So how do you bring that alive for people?
In a couple of ways. I've now done seven expeditions to the polar regions. [This has included being a team member for the Jubilee Expedition: Svalbard 2022, which followed a journey made by Finnish-Swedish explorer A E Nordenskiold, during his failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1872-73.] A lot of the time, I’ve been the only woman in the group. When we were retracing [Nordenskiold’s] expedition from 150 years earlier, I documented it in journals, comparing it with the journals from the original expedition when they were trying to be the first to get to the North Pole. I was also doing Zoom sessions with school groups - I could be talking on my phone to a school class and say, here's what it looks like. As far as we can tell, this is where this group of men 150 years ago was trying to cross the ice. And right now I'm pulling plastic out of the sea ice, where it's breaking apart and I want you to experience this with me. That trip was the spring of 2022, when the World Economic Forum had their annual meeting delayed because of Covid. So I also called into the World Economic Forum to talk to them about the expedition.
What other outreach work have you done?
Three years ago I took a group of school children with me on an expedition where we worked with a local snow observatory. The group was made up of 12-13-year-old girls, many of whom had never been away from home, and had never been camping. Suddenly they were spending a week out in the snow and were conducting real research working on some citizen science projects. When I was that age, I lived near a polar museum – Robert Peary's summer house. But at that point I didn't think of polar exploration as something I could do. As I said, on my all my major expeditions, I've been with men. So I was trying to inspire girls show them that this was something they could be doing.
On the other side of the coin I work with the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.
I started working with them because of the changes that I'm witnessing in the polar regions, not just myself, but through people I work with, and people who live in the Arctic. It’s still seen by politicians, policymakers, and decision makers as somewhere that's far and remote. So my task is to make the polar regions real to decision makers there, to understand what the global risks are. I have met with oil executives who are high, high, high polluters, and see nothing wrong with it, because they're making money. So I then try to show the impacts that they personally are having on the polar regions, and talk about what is happening to these places around the world that we can't see and we can experience. I've met with plastic executives about the same thing. One called his boss right after our discussion and resigned from his job.
What precisely are you showing them in terms of the impact?
To take one example, I talk about how we're destabilising the Greenland ice sheet. So I then ask, what are the impacts on coastal regions around the world from just how much we've destabilised? I work with about 45 countries in relation to the climate negotiations, many of which are glaciated or are in the polar regions, member of Antarctic Treaty, for example. But many of them also are coastal regions – Liberia, Senegal, Tanzania, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad, Colombia, Palau, where they don't necessarily have any more connection to a piece of ice than I would have to a planet. And it impacts them very tangibly, with sea level rise, for example, changing their economies.
What kind of solutions are you proposing?
My overarching goal is on decarbonisation. In some ways that's a lot easier said than done, which is why I like to have conversations with oil executives and some of the major polluters as well. Or I’ll look at the impacts of ice on local communities. In agricultural communities, for example, we're seeing the ice melt out of time with their growing season, so, for example, they're getting flooding when they're trying to plant, and then drought when they're trying to harvest. So we need to look at how to make them more resilient. People don’t necessarily connect the dots or consider how broad the issues are. There are aspects of human trafficking, for instance, that are connected to the loss of ice, or changes in fish species. All this needs to be considered.
It seems that you're somebody who has thought outside the box all your life. What initiative are you most proud of?
What I love most in what I'm doing is making communities – whether it's communities of children, or politicians and policymakers – understand and really fall in love with the frozen regions of the planet. I’ve invited Yo Yo Ma to do a concert in the Swiss Alps. I also went into schools in Dubai to talk to kids of oil executives about climate change and the impacts of the polar regions. What can we do to get to people's hearts? Do we use music, talk to young girls to show them what's possible, or take policymakers and decision makers into the polar regions so we can say, this isn't something that's far away that doesn't affect you?
