It was already seven years ago. In 2017, aged just 27, Laura Jourdan, a young SVT teacher in a high school in the north of France, is bored. In search of wide open spaces, nature and adventure, the Dunkirk woman then decides, on a whim, to apply for a job offer completely off her path: that of a producer looking for journalists motivated to embark with him towards the Far North, and document the effects of climate change on these great icy plains. “I immediately thought of myself there,” she remembers.
But the opportunity was too good. After a few days, Laura and three other “collaborators” who, like her, wanted to taste the fresh snow of the North Pole, realized that the said producer was in fact a scammer. “He asked us to invest a little money in the production of his documentary,” she says, disillusioned. A few bills whose color she will obviously never see again.
On the roads of Svalbard
“I was frankly traumatized by this experience. I really wasn’t feeling well at the time. But I didn’t want to return to France,” she explains. Too many Epinal images had found their way into his imagination. “The glaciers, the orcas, the polar bears… I absolutely wanted to see what this fake producer had promised us! “.
Today a polar guide in the Far North, she has since traveled the Arctic, the great glaciers of the North Pole, and knows Svalbard like the back of her hand, a Norwegian archipelago of 2,000 inhabitants plunged into darkness for half the year. .
In the video at the top of this article, Laura Jourdan tells the story, in front of the camera 20 minutes, His experience. And tells us about the reality of climate change: “when you live in the polar regions, it’s depressing”.