The cold is a presence, not a temperature. Somewhere on Greenland’s inland ice, Susana Hancock drives her skis into ridges sharp as frozen waves, a −40° wind clawing at her goggles. Behind her, four teammates tug supply sledges that groan across the crust. Ahead, the horizon folds white into white. At each stop she kneels, buries a sensor in the snow, and moves on. They record how fast the ice is leaving.¹
Thirty-eight, from Freeport, Maine, she is known at home for dragging three truck tires around a supermarket lot; out here the same rhythm of pull and drag is her life. At the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, her work is to bend polar data into a language policymakers can no longer ignore. She calls the journey obligation: to live the ice before carrying its story into the rooms where policy is written.²
Her trek began in mid-August on Greenland’s east coast, near the same ice face where Fridtjof Nansen set off in 1888.³ His expedition of six men hauled reindeer-hide sledges over 260 miles of wasteland, reaching Godthaab (now Nuuk) and proving Greenland was not jagged peaks but one continuous shield of ice. His strategy was cruelly simple: burn the boats, cut off retreat. “Death or the west coast of Greenland,” he wrote later.⁴
Hancock isn’t out to prove continuity but collapse. Greenland has been losing 250 gigatons of ice each year.⁵ Enough to drown Maine beneath a meter of water. In 2021, rain fell on the summit of the ice sheet—3,200 meters high—for the first time in recorded history.⁶ In 2025, it happened again, the quiet of snow broken by a sound no one expected: rain tapping the Arctic.⁷
“The ice is no longer fortress—it has doors, and the rain knows how to open them.”
To Hancock, this is not abstract science. The Gulf of Maine—her own coastline—is one of the fastest-warming marine basins in the world.⁸ Lobster boats in Harpswell and clam diggers in Freeport are feeling heat fed partly by North Atlantic currents, themselves warped by Greenland’s melt. What she skis across today may dictate whether her neighbors can work the same waters tomorrow.