One Ocean Expedition 2025-2026 

A 12-month global voyage with the Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl - a floating ambassador for the UN Ocean Decade. Combining sail training, ocean science, education and diplomacy to highlight the ocean’s vital role and inspire action for a sustainable ocean. Visiting ports on three continents.

2025 - 2026

One Ocean Expedition 

Statsraad Lehmkuhl departed Nuuk, Greenland, on August 11. The next port will  St. Johns on Newfoundland, Canada, arriving August 20.

Over the course of a year, the expedition will visit ports across three continents. Several legs are open to the public - no sailing experience needed! Welcome on board!

Sailing route

At sea en route to St. Johns, Canada

Follow our journey

Statsraad Lehmkuhl visits St. John's, Canada, August 20 2025.

St. John's, Canada

The ice that prevented Statsraad Lehmkuhl from sailing through the Northwest Passage was not the result of a cold climate, but of global warming.

Stopped by global warming

The students aboard the Statsraad Lehmkuhl have mixed feelings about the ship having to turn back and not being able to sail through the Northwest Passage.

– We have seen each other at our worst – seasick, tired, and hungry

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Following the success of the One Ocean Expedition 2021–2023, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is once again on an international voyage to promote ocean sustainability. Over the course of 12 months, the expedition will visit 27 ports across three continents, including a historic transit of the Northwest Passage. 

On The One Ocean Expedition, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is filled with students, researchers and voyage crew who all work together to sail the big ship and gather experience and knowledge about the ocean.

Life on board

Tromsø, Norway

Bergen, Norway - Lerwick, UK

Reykjavik, Iceland

Nice, France 

Ponta Delgada, the Azores (Portugal)

Nuuk, Greenland

Bermuda

Los Angeles, USA

Bermuda - Panama Canal 

Vancouver, Canada

Seattle, USA

San Fransisco, USA

San Diego, USA

La Paz, Mexico

Herradura, Costa Rica

Cartagena, Columbia

Herradura, Costa Rica - Panama Canal

Norfolk, USA

Cádiz, Spain

Brest, France 

Dublin, Ireland

Bergen, Norway

St. John’s is the provincial capital and the largest city on Newfoundland, located at the easternmost edge of Canada. Fishing was long the main industry, but has now been overtaken by oil and gas, along with trade and tourism.

The first people came to North America from Siberia when dry land covered the Bering Strait around 14,000 years ago, and humans have lived on Newfoundland for a very long time. The oldest traces of the Inuit, who hunted and fished on the ice and along the coasts here, date back 9,000 years.

The first Europeans to reach Newfoundland, and in fact the North American continent, were Norwegian Vikings. They sailed from Greenland in the 11th century and settled in what they called Vinland - “Meadowland” in English. 

The Vikings stayed only for a short time, and nearly 500 years passed before Europeans returned.

In 1497, Giovanni Caboto from Venice set out on an expedition for Henry VII of England, like Columbus also in search of a sea route to India. St. John’s is said to have been named because Caboto sailed into the bay where the city now lies on June 24 - the feast day of Saint John the Baptist.

From the 1500s onwards, fishermen from Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, and England came to Newfoundland. They stayed along the coast for extended periods, but it wasn’t until around 1630 that people settled permanently in St. John’s. 

By the 1700s, St. John’s had grown into a town, and today it has close to 240,000 inhabitants.

In 1583, Newfoundland became England’s first overseas colony. France also established colonies in what is now Canada, but after several conflicts, Great Britain took over all French colonies in this region in 1759.

When the United States became independent in 1776, the remaining British colonies in North America were united as British North America, and later as Canada in 1867, except for Newfoundland and Bermuda. 

Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949, after two close call referendums had been held.

Although St. John’s lies further south than Paris, it sits on a peninsula far out in the Atlantic Ocean, giving it a cooler climate than its latitude would suggest.

July is the warmest month, with average temperatures between 11.2°C and 20.9°C. January is the coldest, averaging between -0.7°C and -7.8°C. The city gets a lot of precipitation, 1,539 mm per year, mostly in the winter months. 

Much of it falls as snow, and it’s not unusual for the ground to be covered by a full meter of snow in winter.

Normal maximum temperature in August: 20.8°C
Normal rainfall in August: 100 mm

Statsraad Lehmkuhl had to turn back just days before reaching Port Inlet, the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. The ship is polar-certified to sail in Open Waters, meaning less than ten percent of the sea covered by ice. Forecasts indicated more ice than that in the western part of the passage, and Transport Canada withdrew the sailing permit.

Many who commented on this on social media take it as a sign that the ice in the Arctic Ocean is not disappearing as climate scientists warn. But they are wrong - sea ice extent is at a record low this year, and it is in fact the warming of the north that halted Statsraad Lehmkuhl's voyage.

There are two types of ice in the Arctic Ocean.

There is sea ice, formed when seawater freezes. And there are icebergs, from massive cliffs of ice to small chunks, formed where the glaciers in Greenland meet the sea and breaks apart. Sea ice forms on the ocean - glacier ice forms on land.

It was glacier ice that stopped Statsraad Lehmkuhl, the kind of conditions ice pilot Stèphan Guy calls “bergy waters.”

– The ship could not continue because there were too much bergy waters. What happens with global warming is that glaciers get weaker and weaker, and pieces of ice are falling into the water. And then these pieces of ice we call icebergs, or bergy bits, are drifting within the ocean. So it's not related to the cold climate, that we have more bergy waters, but it is related to global warming, Guy explains.

Researcher in climate dynamics, Rebekka Jastamin Steene at the Arctic University of Norway, agrees.

– The sea ice is melting because of climate change. There is less of it. But at the same time, the warming causes the glaciers to calve more, resulting in more icebergs floating around in the ocean.

Stèphan Guy began his career as a captain in the Canadian Coast Guard and has over 40 years of experience aboard icebreakers and other vessels in Arctic waters. He was involved in planning Statsraad Lehmkuhl’s voyage and was on board en route to the Northwest Passage. That the ice should stop the ship from sailing came as a surprise.

– A voyage through the passage seemed realistic based on the amount of ice we’ve seen over the last ten years. We were unfortunate, but in the end, nature decides here, not us.

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic varies with the season, largest in mid-March, smallest in mid-September.

Both winter and summer extents are declining dramatically. Since satellites began monitoring the ice in 1979, the extent has decreased by 13 percent per decade, according to the 

The winter of 2025 saw the lowest extent in the last 35 years, and this summer’s extent so far matches the record low of 2012.

At the same time, the ice is getting thinner. From being two to three meters thick - and up to five meters at its thickest, more and more of it is now only one to two meters thick.

Warmer air and warmer ocean water are the main reasons for melting Arctic ice, but the loss of ice at sea further accelerates warming.

Less white ice means less sunlight is reflected in summer. More heat is absorbed by the dark ocean, causing even more melting. In winter, the effect is reversed - the ice acts like a blanket, preventing heat from the ocean from warming the cold air above. 

Steene calls this mechanism “Arctic amplification.”

– It is the reason the Arctic warms even more than the rest of the planet. In fact, it is warming between two and five times faster than the global average.

The thickness of the inland ice covering most of Greenland also varies throughout the year. Glaciers gain mass from November through March and shrink in the summer months. 

Ice on land is also disappearing at a rapid pace.

For 28 consecutive years, more ice has melted in summer than has been added in winter, according to 

the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland

The losses are not small - an average of 150 million liters of water per minute, day and night, all year round. That equals the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool every single second.

The meltwater ends up in the ocean, and in 2024 it contributed to a sea level rise of 0.2 mm.

Stèphan Guy was young when he fell in love with the Arctic.

– Sailing here at the age of 19, discovering these very isolated areas, the Inuit community, the landscape, the remoteness, and the history - was an eye-opener. I was fascinated by the stories of the early sailors who came to these waters. I thought they were men of steel, and I liked the idea of following in their footsteps, he says.

– It made me feel good about being here. To this day, I’ve never lost the pleasure of coming back, feeling like a discoverer. I know I’m not, but I pretend I am, and I still enjoy sailing these waters and having that sense of being an explorer.

More than 40 years at sea in the Arctic means that Guy has seen the climate changes first-hand, and he is clear:

– What is happening is dramatic. We see a lot of change in the overall Arctic temperatures. 

More open water in the Arctic leads to more ships sailing through the Northwest Passage, and that worries Guy.

– I’m a guy who’s been in the marine business all my life. I’m not against marine traffic, but the number of ships sailing these waters is increasing year after year. I believe there’s still a lot of work to be done to make these waters safer and to build better infrastructure to support the traffic - not only for search and rescue, but also to provide proper logistics for any ship. There are almost no docking facilities in the Arctic, no refueling stations, and no towns prepared to receive large numbers of tourists like we see with cruise ships, he says.

– Nature also suffers the burden of such traffic, look at the history of all major waterways around the world. The pressure we put on the marine environment speaks for itself, and we are about to repeat the same mistakes in the Arctic. That worries me greatly, and I hope our leaders will find a solution to prevent too much stress on this very special environment.

– This was a dream for me. I was looking forward to experiencing the Arctic and seeing the wildlife there. But nature decides. It’s a reminder that we can’t control everything, says Delphine Gilliard from Switzerland, who is pursuing a PhD in marine geochemistry at the University of Lausanne.

She stands on deck with the others from the blue watch team. It’s just past eight in the evening, and the team has just started their shift. Everyone on board is divided into three different watch teams, working four-hour shifts around the clock. During their shifts, they hoist sails, perform fire watch, stand lookout, steer the ship, or handle other tasks.

Earlier today, the students received the news that they would not be sailing through the Northwest Passage. Naturally, this has caused some disappointment.

– We were super excited about the whole package. This is a unique opportunity to learn about the Arctic and Indigenous communities and to gain an interdisciplinary perspective. It’s disappointing that we can’t complete this part of the journey, says Hannah Thommessen, who is pursuing a master’s degree in Arctic animal physiology.

She highlights, however, that the intense experience of being together on a ship—sharing meals, attending classes, sleeping in hammocks next to each other, and being seasick together—creates strong and valuable bonds.

– We have seen each other at our worst – seasick, tired, and hungry. It has really brought us together. Now that we’re starting to get to know each other, it feels like we can truly begin to share and learn from one another, says Thommessen.

And that is precisely the idea behind the course: that being aboard a sailing ship in Arctic surroundings will give the students an even greater opportunity to learn and reflect together.

– Through a physical and practical approach, the students have the chance to learn about the Arctic’s history, nature, and societies directly from local knowledge holders, including representatives from both Sámi and Inuit communities, says course leader Melania Borit.

Every day, the students have two hours of lectures covering topics ranging from politics, biology, health, and law to logistics, safety, and Arctic ice conditions. The course also focuses on long-term thinking, challenging students to imagine what the Arctic might look like in 25 years. The idea is that through teaching, exercises, and collaboration, they will develop solutions for a desired future for the region.

– Sleeping closely together in hammocks, collaborating with knowledge holders, and reflecting on the future of the Arctic provides a unique experience that cannot be replicated in a classroom, says Borit.

They also learn from each other in other ways. For instance, a sheet is hung up in the mess hall where those who want to can write the "word of the day" in their own language. Today, the word is "sailboat," or "Segelboot" in German, "purjelaev" in Estonian, and "borjjasfanas" in Northern Sami. And in several of the sessions, it's about sharing one's own experiences and reflections and listening to others'.

The fact that the planned journey through the Northwest Passage will not happen has also led to other reflections among the students:

– Ultimately, nature decides what we can do, and that’s how it should be. It reminds us to be humble and that we cannot conquer everything, says Laurien de Korte, who is pursuing a PhD at UiT on adapting to climate change.

Hannah Thommessen also emphasizes that she finds it very positive that several lectures include topics such as Indigenous storytelling and its significance as a flexible and artistic form of expression.

– I found it very interesting to learn about how storytelling is used as a way of expression and how it’s not set in stone. It’s a completely different way of thinking, says Thommessen.

Even though the Northwest Passage will not be part of the journey, the students still see the value in the course.

– The content of the course is just as relevant, no matter where it’s taught. Being in the Arctic would have been a bonus, but the learning can still happen, de Korte points out.

And the camaraderie on board remains a significant part of the journey. Clément Masse, who is pursuing a PhD at the University of Oulu, looks forward to delving deeper into the course content and learning more from each other:

– We’ve just started to get to know each other in a more trust-based way, and I really hope we have time to let this flourish, says Masse.