Learning and experiencing the Arctic: a week in Tromsø with Finnish teenagers

There is a point on the walk up to Steindalsbreen glacier where the valley opens and the moraines stop being a landform and start being an argument. Long bare arcs of rubble, sitting well down-valley of the ice that built them. The Steindalen valley is not only a manifestation of the power of ice and time, but a powerful reminder of quickly disappearing glaciers. Nobody needs to explain what is happening there; the distance of the retreating glacier can be paced out on foot.

A group of Finnish upper-secondary students did exactly that on 25 August, in the middle of a five-day field week in Tromsø. Before they arrived, they had already measured the glacier’s retreat from satellite imagery. The day was built to connect the two experiences back-to-back to make thawing glaciers real. Identifying and inspecting the glacier’s terminus in a satellite scene is a pixel-level work made at a desk. Standing on the moraine the same glacier abandoned is not.

“The Arctic and how climate change affects it are not familiar nor concrete for a teenager in southern Finland. I know, I have been one. Therefore, for them to understand the urgency of climate action, it is essential that they see the changing Arctic themselves,” said Jan Viljanen from iC3.

Picture: Steindalsbreen and the group of Finnish students. Credit: Jan Viljanen (UiT, iC3).

A module, not a school trip

The week was the second phase of a year-long climate change module run by Heinola upper secondary school in southern Finland. The module consists of three phases: a preparatory phase through spring 2026, five days in the field, and a guided reflection phase this autumn. 

By the time they arrived in Tromsø, the groundwork on understanding climate change in the High North has been done in the classroom: first the physics, then guest lectures on mitigation, local adaptation, and on what six decades of observations at the Arctic Kilpisjärvi Biological Station show about a change within a human lifetime.

Biogeochemistry and cultural exchange

iC3 researchers Laura Rasmussen and Jan Viljanen guided the group up to Steindalsbreen glacier, alongside students from a local school in Tromsø. Layered clothing, sturdy boots, packed lunches, and every piece of rubbish carried back down again. The students maintained astonishing hiking pace between the science-packed drink and snack pauses. During the pauses, Laura took the group deep into the wonders of the geological formations, evolution of ecosystems, and chemical interactions between ice, water, soil and atmosphere.

The students were given series of questions related to the valley they were hiking through to ponder in international groups. Thanks to the “extroverted” local students (in comparison to the shy Finns; the author is a Finn, so he is allowed to say so), the discussion was lively and new cross-border friendships were made. As a result, the hike received raving feedback including statement that it was “the best nature experience” in a student’s life. This is exactly the standard our iC3 guides were aiming for.

Steindalsbreen is where the iC3 Polar Research Hub’s annual Field School takes PhD candidates and postdocs to learn about glacier-to-ocean connections. The school field trip operated on the same premise as the iC3 Field School: people understand a system better by hiking through it. 

Picture: Steindalen valley and the group of students. Credit: Jan Viljanen (UiT, iC3).

Geopolitics, nanophotonics, and student life

The Finnish student group also visited the campus of iC3’s host university to meet more researchers and to obtain more complete picture what the life in UiT The Arctic University of Norway looks like.

Professor Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv opened with the grey zone: Arctic geopolitics, how the region’s strategic picture has shifted as the climate has changed, and where the sharpest hybrid-influence risks now sit. This reframed the Arctic as a place where retreating ice opens routes, resources and disputes, and where climate change is a security question as much as a physical one.

Aleksandra Machowska followed with a talk on methane emissions from deglaciating forelands and impressive photos of the work of measuring them. She also talked honestly about life in the Arctic as an international master’s student. Seventeen-year-olds weighing what to study next are an unusually attentive audience for that.

After lunch on campus, Jan Viljanen took over the afternoon for a session on nanophotonics as a way of sensing the environment. Light at very small scales is being used in Tromsø to observe a changing Arctic. After the introduction in a classroom, Ragnar Seton and Jon-Richard Sommernes took the group into the nanophotonics and microscopy labs to see the instruments themselves.

Picture: Jan Viljanen teaching nanophotonics. Credit: Jan Viljanen (UiT, iC3).

Two museums, at either end of the week

The week opened and closed in a museum, and the two did different work. On the first afternoon the group went to the Polar Museum, whose permanent exhibitions deal with sealing, trapping and overwintering and what those livelihoods meant to North Norway. The last morning was at Polaria, where the seal training session and the panorama theatre gave way to a guided tour of the Arctic Wilderness exhibition and the aquarium. The guide worked through concrete examples of climate change affecting biodiversity from the sea surface all the way down to the seafloor. History at one end and living systems at the other — and between them the same coastline, seen first as somewhere people made a living, and then as a set of species being pushed around by the same changes the group had followed down-valley from a glacier terminus mid-week.

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A week that is also being studied

What makes this field trip unusual is that its effect on the students is being examined rather than assumed. A pilot study led by Pilvi Sihvonen (University of Helsinki, and Heinola Upper Secondary School) with colleagues in Helsinki and Tromsø, asks how experiential, place-based learning in an Arctic context shapes upper-secondary students’ climate-related agency: their capacity to think critically, to situate themselves in relation to climate change, and to engage with sustainability questions in an informed way.

The study draws on Biesta and Tedder’s ecological model, which treats agency not as something a person possesses but as something achieved through interaction with an environment. In that model a glacier is not a backdrop; it is a context-for-action, an active constituent of the learning, on the same footing as a research station or a conversation with a scientist. A baseline questionnaire was completed before departure, reflective learning diaries were written during the week, and interviews follow this autumn.

Whether five days in the Arctic shifts a seventeen-year-old’s sense of their own role is, for now, an open question with a research design attached to it. What can be said already is that a group of them spent a week talking about climate change out loud with each other, with Norwegian students their own age, and with the people who study it — while standing on the evidence.

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Partners and support

The module is run by Heinola upper secondary school in Finland. The module content is designed by Pilvi Sihvonen (University of Helsinki) with support from Jan Viljanen (iC3 and UiT). The preparatory phase drew on INAR and LUMA Science Helsinki at the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku and the City of Heinola. Teachers’ travel and preparation costs were supported by the OKKA Foundation, with student grants from Pohjola-Norden, the Jukka Kilpinen Foundation and the Otto A. Malm donation fund.

Jan Viljanen is an MSCA postdoc working at the iC3 Polar Research Hub, based in the Department of Geosciences at the UiT. To find out more about Jan Viljanen’s research, please check out his list of publications, or contact him by email or on LinkedIn.

Laura Rasmussen is an MSCA postdoc working at the iC3 Polar Research Hub, based in the Department of Geosciences at the UiT Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. To find out more about her work, please check out her list of publications, or contact her by email.