WHO IS ARCTICARE'S FOUNDER?

A DEDICATION TO A MISSION REQUIRES A DEDICATED TEAM

The Founder and Executive Director of ARCTICare

ALEXANDER MARTINEZ PETERSEN

Alexander Martinez Petersen has a passion for social justice and the indigenour circumpolar and Arctic people.  His Danish heritage served as a catalyst for learning about Greenland and in the process he became aware of the profound changes global warming has inflicted upon the culture and survival of the Inuit and Kalaallit people.  In 2015, at the age of 13, he set a goal for himself to learn all he could about the challenges they faced as their lives shift from an historically hunting society to one focused on an agrarian economy.  Alexander created ARCTICare in 2017 and has  actively sought political change and public support for Greenlands Arctic people.

Apart from his philanthropic work with the ARCTICare foundation, Alexander has many other interests.  At age seven, he participated in a people-to-people cultural mission to Namibia, Africa.  The next year, he underwent training in paragliding in Rio Negro, Colombia.  

At age nine, he participated in an Egyptian Educational Expedition that coincided with the 'Arab Spring' and he elected to visit Tahrir Square to meet with the protesters and bear witness to the birth of a democracy in the Middle East and Africa.  He also accompanied an official with the Ministry of Antiquities into the depths of the Great Pyramid, Khufu, and climbed up to the royal burial chamber.  The following year he returned to Africa to participate in a pan-ethnic people-to-people program that extended from South Africa to the Namib Desert.

Alexander was certified at the age of 10 as an Open Water SCUBA Diver with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, becoming one of the youngest certified divers in the United States.  The following year he completed a 24-hour SCUBA saturation dive on the 'PRINUL' underwater research habitat, gaining further certification as a PADI Habitat SCUBA Diver.  An accomplished offshore sailor, he participated in a reef and nurse shark study when he was 11 years old while crewing on the expeditionary trawler Tropic Explorer in the waters off Exuma, The Bahamas.

With a love of winter sports, including downhill skiing, Alexander first began technical ice climbing in Ouray, Colorado when he was nine years old.  At age 11, he returned to the mountains of Colorado and became the youngest person to successfully climb the Upper Bridge Route, a 150-foot vertical climb.

Alexander is also a successful entrepreneur, having created the outdoor equipment retailer JaegerGear.com when he was 13 years old.  As a result of his early business success, he is scheduled to attend the Business and Enterprise Program at the University of Oxford Summer School in Oxford, England in 2017.

Alexander is a student at St. Mark's Episcopal School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and hopes to study STEM and international business at FAU High School in the Fall of 2017.