Six scientists and six crew members are voluntarily heading to one of the most inhospitable places on Earth to live inside a floating lab frozen in Arctic ice. Because nothing says 'fun vacation' like temperatures hitting -50°C and months of total darkness.

Next month, the team will travel to Kirkenes, a remote Norwegian town near the Russian border, to board the French-built Tara polar station - a 26-metre-long, 16-metre-wide vessel designed to be locked in pack ice and drift slowly over the North Pole to Greenland over eight months. Their mission: gather data on climate breakdown and pollution in the central Arctic Ocean's fragile, largely unknown ecosystems. As Romain Troublé, microbiologist-turned-sailor and executive director of the Tara Ocean Foundation, puts it: 'We are losing species before we have time to discover them. In the next 20 years, everything will shift.'

Troublé, who just won the prestigious Shackleton medal for his work on the polar station, is continuing a family tradition - his aunt is fashion designer Agnès Troublé (better known as agnès b.), who co-designed the station along with Étienne Bourgois. Troublé raised €26 million (£22 million) and organized the mission, which involves scientists from 15 countries. The team will be so remote that rescue could take a week.

This expedition is the first leg of a planned 10-stage, 20-year continuous mission to drive policy changes protecting the Arctic, which is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet. Sea ice is melting fast, exposing the region to shipping, fishing, mining, and pollution. Dr Nina Schuback, a biological oceanographer from the Swiss Polar Institute, will sample microbes through the station's 'moon pool' - a central opening for divers, underwater drones, and remotely operated vessels. She admits being 'excited and scared' about polar winter: 'My biggest fear is the darkness. You get tired.' But she adds: 'How often do you get the chance to do something like this? I feel very privileged.'

Previous Tara expeditions include a 2006 transpolar drift - only the second since Fridtjof Nansen's 1893-96 voyage in the Fram - and a schooner expedition that Nature compared to Charles Darwin's HMS Beagle. Schuback's selection process was rigorous; one scientist likened it to evaluation for the International Space Station. But hey, at least the ISS has sunlight.