What started out as a project to raise awareness of Bermuda re/insurer Catlin Group as a global brand has ended up being a ground-breaking — or more literally ice-breaking — scientific project.

For Catlin's chief executive Stephen Catlin, the Catlin Arctic Survey has been more successful in meeting his aims than he could have imagined.

It all started about two years ago, when Mr. Catlin gave his marketing department a challenge.

"Catlin has become a global company and I wanted to do something to reflect that, but also to find something that was relevant to our business," Mr. Catlin said in an interview.

"When they showed me the Arctic Survey, it took me about 15 minutes to decide 'yes'."

After then winning over his board to the idea, the company last year sponsored an expedition by a team of explorers to the North Pole area to collect samples of ice from inhospitable places to help scientists to ascertain ice thickness.

The data, collected by manual drilling and observations on a 450-kilometre route across the northern part of the Beaufort Sea, suggested the survey area was comprised almost exclusively of first-year ice.

Scientists concluded from this that the Arctic Ocean will be largely ice-free by 2020.

The survey's findings, announced last October, made big scientific news and with the name of Catlin emblazoned on the explorers' sleds in all the photographs and video coverage, this gave Catlin some genuine global exposure.

"The interest has been extremely high," Mr. Catlin said. "After we announced the findings, the story appeared in more than 300 national newspapers around the globe and on 24 news wires.

"There were people in Australia saying they did not know we cared about climate change. Some of our employees told me their families were showing an interest in their jobs for the first time. The interest was far beyond what we thought it would be."

The information was also useful to the company and the insurance industry as a whole, since the melting ice is likely to contribute to climate change — and the weather constitutes a large part of insurers' risk.

Mr. Catlin said the ice cap was an effective reflector of sunlight. Less ice will mean more sunlight being absorbed by the ocean. Water expands as its temperature rises, so this will contribute to rising sea levels.

When the sea level is higher, tsunamis and storm surges from hurricanes will do more damage in coastal settlements. Mr. Catlin said the building of property in catastrophe-prone areas was a global issue and governments had to play a role in encouraging development elsewhere.

"For example, in California there is about $250 billion worth of residential property built below the flood plain," Mr. Catlin said.

Early this month the Catlin Arctic Survey sent another team to an ice base just 750 miles from the geographic North Pole to study the potential impact of rising levels of acidity in some of the coldest water on the planet.

Sea acidity is rising as the ocean absorbs a proportion of the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean pH could reach levels not seen for 20 million years by 2050, according to the projections of some scientists. The survey aims to examine the impact of rising acidity on marine life.

For more information on the Catlin Arctic Survey, go to www.catlinarcticsurvey.com on the web.