Jennifer Castro, 17, left, and Shane McNamara, 18, both of Narragansett, and Rachel Sullivan-Lord, 17, of South Kingstown, left Tuesday for a 15-day scientific expedition to the Arctic Circle, sponsored by Students On Ice.

The Providence Journal John Freidah

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — If the global warnings come true and the polar ice caps melt and the ocean swallows coastal Rhode Island, the houses in Narragansett where Jennifer Castro, 17, and Shane McNamara, 18, grew up are likely to disappear.

They and Rachel Sullivan-Lord, 17, of Wakefield are three of only five students from the United States selected to join Students On Ice, an international polar expedition to the Arctic Circle.

Jennifer and Shane know each other from the Envirothon Club at Narragansett High School. They believe in recycling, composting and reducing their carbon footprint, so they carpooled to meet Rachel in South Kingstown on Tuesday evening, hours before they left.

Despite Tuesday’s heat, the three posed in some of their winter gear, then ate watermelon and talked about how their applications were due three days after they learned of the opportunity, in the last week of school.

Thanks to an anonymous donor who paid the $8,900 tuition for each, Jennifer, Shane and Rachel are part of the Canada-based program that is affiliated with an environmental group called International Polar Year.

By launching expeditions to the Arctic Circle in July-August and to Antarctica in February, Students On Ice organizers hope to build future environmental leaders and build respect for Earth.

The 2009 expedition assembling in Ottawa on Wednesday and getting oriented on Thursday consists of 65 students and 45 educators, not only scientists and environmentalists but also artists and journalists. They take a charter flight Friday to extreme northern Quebec for boarding their expedition ship, the Polar Ambassador. They will explore fjords by Zodiac inflatable, hike on ice, visit villages on Baffin Island, collect plankton, hear “throat singing” and interview Inuit elders about the effects of climate change on their way of life.

Along the way, they’ll see whaling stations, nesting areas for “penguins of the north,” a former Hudson Bay Company trading post and an area that alumni of previous expeditions are working to protect as a bowhead whale sanctuary.

They will experience daylight lasting 22½ hours, see walrus, polar bears, whales and migratory birds, collect data, and interpret their experience through music, photography, poetry, sketching, videography and journaling.

Entries from their journals will be posted daily at www.studentsonice.com/arctic2009/

On board are two other Americans, both from New York, about 60 Canadians, including 23 teens from aboriginal villages across northern Canada, and one student from Monaco.

“We selected the most keen and most passionate students,” said Niki Trudeau, Students On Ice participant coordinator. “The power of the place that we’re visiting … it’s transformative. What we strive to do is give them the tools and time to process their experience, to make sense of that.” Besides taking photos and posting entries on the expedition blog, most students will return to give presentations in their schools, organize initiatives, petition for changes and exhibit their creative works.

“We light the fire,” Trudeau said. “And then hopefully they run with it and share with others.”

Shane, who plans to study environmental engineering next year at the University of Connecticut, said on Tuesday that he wants to see first-hand what everybody is talking about.

“The poles are one of the biggest indicators of global warming,” he said.

Jennifer said she looked forward to meeting the other students, learning from the assembled experts, and “taking that into the global community.”

Rachel, who has loved orca whales all her life and hopes to see some in the wild and learn how to protect them, saw her role in the expedition as this:

“People have to know about something to want to fix it.”

dnaylor@projo.com