Ice across its eye as if
The ice age had begun its heave.
Ted Hughes,
‘October Dawn’
BEYOND THE WINDOW, rain fell more heavily, puddling on the paths and whipping the fjord into millions of minuscule peaks. Geir Wing Gabrielsen took a swallow of instant coffee and watched water pearl off the feathers of a barnacle goose. A boyish fifty-four-year-old with Hollywood teeth, Gabrielsen has worked twenty-eight Svalbard summers, a decade of them testing birds for contaminants; colleagues carry out similar work on bears. Their findings lay at the heart of the agonising confusion over the Inuit diet I had heard so much about in Canada. Sitting out the rain at a research station in Spitsbergen, Gabrielsen had been reflecting on damage still being done by chemicals banned for a generation. The villainous molecules simply refused to go away, flourishing in the marine food chain as if they had never been outlawed at all, another poisonous legacy of well-intentioned technological innovation.
With no indigenous population and no permanent settlers, Spitsbergen and the other islands of the Svalbard archipelago present the biologist with unique opportunities. So remote that migrant Palaeo-Eskimo stopped before they reached it, the Norwegian-owned group lies off the western flank of the Barents Sea, a brisk 500 miles from the tip of Norway proper. Gabrielsen, an animal physiologist at the Norsk Polarinstitutt in Tromsø, was working out of the Ny-Ålesund station in the north-west of Spitsbergen, and we were talking in its mess hall. I had just returned from a hike up a glacier in the course of which I had got so wet and cold that my many garments, exposed now to central heating, were emitting jets of steam. ‘Fat’, Gabrielsen explained above the quiet sound of a person hissing, ‘is more important to Arctic animals than to those of lower latitudes, as they need more energy and insulation. That’s why a ringed seal pup is 50 per cent fat at the time of weaning. But pollutants passed up the marine food chain tend to be stored in fat – they are often lipid soluble, but not water soluble. Polar animals are therefore especially exposed to pollutants. We are finding that Svalbard bear cubs absorb high levels of industrial pollutants from fatty maternal milk. The marine food chain passes some of the deadliest of these upwards, so species near or at the top, like bears or glaucous gulls, are the most affected.’ Elsewhere in the Arctic, human beings top the food chain. ‘Bioaccumulation’, Gabrielsen continued, ‘occurs when an organism begins to build up contaminants from its environment. And a process of biomagnification happens as chemicals move up the food chain. Here in Svalbard we are seeing the effects of both.’
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) head a freakish catalogue of marine-borne contaminants. First manufactured in 1929, the nearly indestructible PCBs made ideal coolants, insulators and hydraulic fluids. Although the majority of countries blacklisted them in the seventies, their most baleful components are still hard at work. Researchers list PCBs in a Dirty Dozen, along with DDT (the synthetic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and chlordane. Other scientists go further, identifying a Dirty Sixteen. All these legacy contaminants (known as POPs – persistent organic pollutants) are bio-accumulative, toxic and susceptible to long-range transport. In some human populations of the Arctic, POP levels are the highest anywhere on earth, and it is POP toxins that are attacking Inuit infant immune systems in Canada. In addition, new contaminants are constantly joining the squad, and as concentrations of some PCBs decrease, others are increasing. ‘We are finding flame retardants in glaucous gulls’ eggs,’ Gabrielsen went on. Some investigators consider the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in flame retardants the most troubling toxic chemical in use in the world today. First detected in Arctic wildlife in the mid-1990s, traces of flame retardant have been found in every species tested, including whales, seals and seabirds. A toxicologist at the Norsk Polarinstitutt recently concluded that concentrations in the environment are doubling every five years. Flame retardants have saved lives, like our old friend the X-ray machine. Who knew the cost?
Above the oceans, wind transports many of the same chemicals north (along with plenty of others). The Arctic has become a sink for globally migrating airborne mercury, a heavy-metal neurotoxin released by coal-burning power plants and chemical factories. Unlike many toxic particles, mercury remains in the atmosphere long enough to travel thousands of kilometres, and as a result of high emissions in lower latitudes, wind-driven acid rain currently circulates freely through the Arctic. Acid rain deriving from sulphur and nitrogen oxides is or has been the main issue in transboundary pollution. Outside the window, an arrow of male eider headed towards the eastern mountains through invisible clouds of heavy metals. We both watched them until their outlines dissolved against the snow. ‘The Arctic is supposed to be pristine,’ Gabrielsen observed ruefully. ‘But it’s becoming a drain.’ Marla Cone, the American environmental writer, recently investigated the effects, sources and pathways of toxic chemicals in the Arctic. ‘Never before’, she wrote in the conclusion of her revelatory book, Silent Snow (the title pays homage to Rachel Carson), ‘has the Arctic had to weather so many concurrent pressures from outside forces – contaminants and climate change and modernisation . . . The stresses of the Arctic are supposed to come from the harshness of nature, the brutality of its weather and terrain, not from the careless hand of man.’
The clouds had moved off, exposing periwinkle sky. The tundra sparkled with the clarity that descends after rain. Sensing my gloomy mood, Gabrielsen salvaged a hopeful conclusion from his revelations. ‘When I tell my story it is pessimistic, but my government is using what I do – we in Ny-Ålesund are watchdogs and thermometers. I put evidence on the table, and the government takes decisions.’
Centuries before the developed world unleashed the first pesticide in order to develop it that little bit more, the Svalbard archipelago was once the most active whaling ground in the world. In the beginning only Basques knew how to catch big whales, and when they had ransacked their own Bay of Biscay from St Jean de Luz to Santander, they headed north-east. By the end of the sixteenth century others could also wield a handy harpoon and Basques lost the big-whale monopoly – especially after Frisian navigator Willem Barentsz sighted uncharted landfall while searching for a route to the east. Thinking he had found a hitherto unknown region of Greenland, Barentsz named the land Spits-Bergen, ‘sharp mountains’, and continued on his way. But it was not Greenland. Barentsz had made the first confirmed sighting of Svalbard, a 24,300 mi2 archipelago edging towards polar fast ice. After he had seen the spits bergen (until after the Second World War the name of the archipelago; now the name of its largest island), pack ice swallowed his ship, and Barentsz and his crew were obliged to winter on Novaya Zemlya at 76°N, further than any European before them. Barentsz died in an agony of scurvy on the open boat journey out of there, leaving his colleagues, who struggled down to the White Sea, and rescue, to report their new land to the Delft magistrates. Within two decades of Barentsz’ discovery, systematic whaling boomed in Svalbard. One captain said there were so many whales in the fjords that the waters were solid, and ships had to break through them.
In Magdalenefjord, close to the monumental tidewater glaciers on the Gravneset peninsula on the west coast of Albert I Land, the bowheads bled dry. Seventeenth-century Europe was hungry for lantern fuel, soap, and bone for corsets. When news reached the ports that the waters of Magdalenefjord were rich in living tankers agglutinated with blubber, ships raced north in pursuit. When I was there, the bay that had been alive with blood and whaleships was glassy calm, platelets of candled ice murmuring in the shallows. Deposited from the ship in which I was travelling into a zodiac and onto a beach, I was dive-bombed by squadrons of Arctic terns, tail streamers shooting skyward. (Terns migrate between polar summers: Arctic to Antarctic, and back.1) Fending them off, I walked over to the remains of brick try-works where whalers boiled blubber. On the mountainside beyond, a bear stood on its hind legs, bent croupier-style at the waist, peering into a gully.
Once a ship had anchored, its crew spent many hours harpooning before rowing ashore in shallops towing a floating corpse that might be 18 metres long. Bowheads, which swim slowly, are among the easiest whales to harpoon. They do everything slowly, even living: some carry on for two centuries, placing them among the longest-lived known species. In their relationship with ice they are, according to one biologist, ‘outliers on the curve of mammalian evolution’. The bowhead exemplifies the Arctic: pushing the boundaries of the biologically possible, it is an outlier on the curve of civilisation itself. Elusive, hyperborean, freighted with mystery, the bowhead, not the polar bear, is the Arctic made flesh. But they were floating gold mines. A medium sized bowhead yielded 20–30 tonnes of oil, as well as hundreds of the horny keratin strings called baleen that hang in its mouth to filter food (they made ideal corset stays). Such a glittering prize justified huge risk. A hundred graves hummocked the unvisited shingle at the back of the beach: no wonder that in the minds of the whalers, the Arctic was a satanic place. An advertisement in a Bristol newspaper recruiting for a voyage in 1757 noted optimistically, ‘Only one Man died a natural Death and but two accidental, of 90-odd Men on board our Ships, for Six Voyages running.’ Scurvy was so prevalent that a whole mythology grew up around it. Veterans used to say that the disease walked about in human form on Spitsbergen: that of an old woman who was the eldest daughter of King Herod. She and her eleven beautiful sisters appeared to whalers and trappers in foul weather, chanting through eddying snow. Those who survived scurvy might drown when tow ropes tangled round a shallop, or a thrashing bowhead struck out with its tail. In addition, flensing harpooners, according to master whaler William Scoresby, ‘not unfrequently fall into the fish’s mouth’, there to drown in briny saliva. Despite the perils, ships kept coming until whales vanished from the fjords, hunted without pity, like the walrus. Once the business moved out to the open sea, Svalbard lost its pre-eminence. The decline of whaling meant that nobody felt the urge to claim Svalbard – and this in an age when nations were fighting over every useless atoll in the Pacific.
Russian fox and bear trappers arrived on the tail of the whalers. Between about 1720 and 1740, a cottage industry arose round the coasts. Svalbard was perceived as an extension of the Russian Arctic, and the largest camps were permanent, men going up one year relieved by a fresh crew the next. The majority of Russians were Pomors, a seafaring people from the White Sea coast whose homeland straddled the Arctic Circle. Usually despatched under the auspices of a trading company or private individual, or, as demand declined, by the powerful Solovki monastery, each sailor was paid with a share of the bag – if he ever got home to claim it. Pomors were often tempted to winter, risking everything for richer pickings, as bears are easier to kill on land (in summer they prefer to hunt on retreating sea ice), and Arctic foxes more valuable in their cold-weather coats. Others were forced to winter after becoming separated from their ships. The chronicles of those years are rich in stories of winterers dying of scurvy or trichinosis or some other unspecified disease, the deep-frozen corpse of the last survivor discovered the following summer in the foetal position on the floor of his frigid hut, scratchy pages of a diary on the table and the graves of companions outside in the permafrost.
A ship that went down in 1743 left four Pomors from Mezen stranded on Edgeøya, Svalbard’s third largest island (and the one the young Gino Watkins was to map). Starting off with little more than twenty pounds of flour, an axe, knife, tinderbox, musket and gunpowder, they established themselves in a hut abandoned by earlier trappers, lit clay lanterns and ate reindeer, fox and bear (lying on a major maritime migration route, Edgeøya has one of world’s densest populations of polar bears). One man died. The other three lived in the kippered hut for six years, until a rescue ship finally appeared. Their record has never been equalled in the Arctic. Perhaps stranger still, it turned out that those long years had not extinguished the lure of the wilderness. One of the three survivors returned to winter on Novaya Zemlya. But his luck had run out. That time he died, together with his two sons, who had gone with him.
In the nineteenth century, trippers glided by on pleasure yachts. Léonie d’Aunet almost fainted clean away in the Magdalenefjord graveyard, though at least she turned the experience to her advantage by publishing a book about the trip which made her famous in Paris. Called Voyage d’une jeune femme au Spitzberg (Travels of a Young Woman in Spitsbergen), it recounted, in whimsical prose, a sailing trip in 1853 that lasted almost a year. D’Aunet was travelling on a pre-marital honeymoon with her fiancé François-Auguste Biard, a painter of note twenty years her senior. She was enchanted by Magdalenefjord (‘cela halucine l’esprit’) but took fright when obliged to pick her way through a carpet of seal bones on the beach (‘long fleshless fingers like those of a human hand’). Continuing to the human graves, she found many in the process of disgorging semi-decayed contents. It was, she wrote, ‘une cimetière sans epitaphes, sans monuments, sans fleurs, sans souvenirs, sans larmes, sans regrets, sans prières . . . une solitude terrible’. The imagination that can wrest prose like that from a Svalbardian beach is primed for grand-scale romance. Léonie went home to a passionate affair with Victor Hugo, in 1843 regarded as the world’s greatest living writer.2
Deep in the sheltered waters of Kongsfjord, a posse of Norwegian sailors tossed cables onto the Ny-Ålesund jetty. Nick Cox was waiting for me on the wharf wearing brown galoshes and holding the long metal handle of a cargo cart. Nick spent every summer in the Arctic, like a tern. He was in charge of the British hut at the multinational Ny-Ålesund research station, and I had met him earlier in the year at his office in Cambridge. An intensely practical figure who started his polar career as an Antarctic boatman, Nick’s role was to facilitate science. His short Cumbrian physique was well adapted to trekking over glaciers to help a meteorologist who couldn’t fix the transformer on his weather station. One had the impression that there was no Arctic crisis he could not handle, and if other groups at Ny-Ålesund had concerns about personnel in the field when the weather turned foul, they invariably turned to Nick to coordinate the rescue. He was a martinet when it came to safety and procedure, but loved a laugh, and never stopped talking. I came to cherish Nick’s company. He was immensely considerate to his greenhorn charge and did everything he could to ensure I saw as much as possible while I was at Ny-Ålesund. Having spent all or part of the year in the Arctic or Antarctic for thirty-four years, he loved the polar regions with affecting intensity. In Cambridge he was like a fish thrown out of the water onto the muddy bank.
We pulled the cart loaded with my bags up from the wharf and over an incline. A man was cycling round the perimeter fence of a dog yard, pedalling furiously to keep up with a husky on a rope. Founded as a coal mine, since 1963 Ny-Ålesund has functioned as a scientific station owned and managed by the Norwegian King’s Bay Company. Ten nations maintain a permanent presence, the British one consisting of a stilted prefab with seven bedrooms, a suite of labs, a large storage facility and a communal lounge. Once we were inside it, Nick showed off the washing machine. It was a long way from bivouacs in a blizzard. Installed in my room, I watched a family of Arctic foxes outside the window. A vixen and six kits had set up home under the Dutch cabin. The vixen was watching out for the return of her food-bearing mate, while the stub-tailed kits rolled in a single furry ball. The tall Dutch scientists going in and out of the hut above the foxes stooped to vanish through the tiny door like characters in Alice in Arctic Wonderland, abandoning yellow clogs to the fox kits. Beyond the Dutch hut, the fjord narrowed towards a glacier blockade: Kongsbreen and Kongsvegen, with the distinctive Tre Kroner peaks, named after Norway, Denmark and Sweden, rising behind. Up in the northern edges of the settlement, a pair of stone lions flanked the entrance to Yellow River, the Chinese Base otherwise distinguished by a plastic azalea in each window and a faulty drain that leaked sewage onto the permafrost in a yellow Yangtze of its own. In their steady pursuit of world domination the mandarins of Shanghai and Beijing had not overlooked the Arctic. Their scientists were bent over laboratory benches inside Yellow River measuring the long-range repercussions of the coal-fired power stations that were going live across China that year at the rate of one per day.
The season was not yet fully underway, and there were only two other residents in the British hut. Both were crustacean biologists from the University of Bangor. They were planning on dredging amphipods from the fjord and measuring their metabolism. The shrimp-like crustaceans are at the bottom of the food web (I soon learned), and population variation has a significant impact on their many predators. There was a lot of baffling talk about taking a molecular approach to link genotype to phenotypic plasticity, but on the whole I found it hard to get interested in the amphipods, a tankful of which were already paddling innocently in the lab. Half of the project cargo had failed to arrive, an occupational hazard in the polar regions, and the other half wasn’t working (likewise). Nia, the more senior of the biologists, remained sanguine, but Sam, her PhD student, was close to nervous collapse. He did not know – fortunately – that science cargo sometimes arrives at Ny-Ålesund a full year late.
The Norwegian King’s Bay Company ran the research station with a light touch and, like everything Scandinavian, its influence was civilised and benign. The self-service mess hall, which catered for a summer population of 130, occupied a purpose-built facility with windows on three sides. When Nick, the two unhappy biologists and I arrived for breakfast on the first morning, our Norwegian neighbours were already washing down their Geitost cheese with spoonfuls of cod liver oil from a glass jeroboam in pole position on the serving counter. After the meal, Nick gave me a tour of the mess complex, at every stop launching into a lengthy anecdote that did not end until a fresh one took over the baton. In one wing, he revealed the Byzantine waste disposal system. It represented a new art form, but even these complexities could not compete with the arrangements I remembered with agonising clarity from McMurdo station in the Antarctic. There a maniacally ecological management had come up with so many different categories of waste that I once stood in front of a row of bins having a breakdown as I attempted to dispose of a Pringles tube. The lid had to go in Plastic, the paper wrapped round the cardboard tube had to be peeled off and put in Printed Paper, the tube itself went in Thin Cardboard, the foil inner lid in Foil, the metal rim at the bottom in Light Metal, and the remaining Pringles, accidentally contaminated with Avgas, in Food Waste. The polar regions, invested now with sacerdotal status in the race to save the planet, foreshadowed waste-disposal governance coming soon to a kitchen near you.
Before I was allowed to walk beyond camp alone, I was required to take a rifle course. This, Nick assured me, would save me from the jaws of one of the many polar bears in the vicinity. (Not them again.) One end of a gun was much the same to me as the other, and I had little appetite for learning the difference; but the alternative, being crushed to eternal oblivion between the tobacco-yellow henges of a polar bear, attracted me even less, especially after my near-death bear experience on Southampton Island. The first component of the course consisted of two hours in a seminar room in the new marine biology lab. The teacher, Terje, was a ruddy-faced Norwegian in his twenties, and I was his only pupil. Sun poured through plate glass windows, varnishing the long blue desks, and in the room next door, vast marine specimen chest freezers hummed in unison. Terje began with the demoralising news that in Svalbard the average male bear weighs in at between 400 and 600kg (though it could be worse: elsewhere they swell to 1,000kg). ‘He can run at 40 kilometres an hour, which is 11 metres per second,’ Terje continued with pride, as if he had trained the beasts personally, ‘and unlike a tiger, he will never try to hide.’ It was also disheartening to learn that bears are moody, wayward and unpredictable. The most dangerous ones are the two-year-olds who have just left their mothers, as they are inexpert hunters, and hungry. ‘So you might want to avoid those,’ said Terje. Old and sick bears are also best avoided, as they can no longer hunt. ‘If he’s smacking his teeth’ (Terje demonstrated), ‘he is already annoyed, so get ready.’ Spring was apparently a risky time to travel as mothers protect new cubs by attacking. So it was important to bugger off if you saw any cubs at all. Nor was summer a season for relaxation. Here on the ice-free side of Spitsbergen, bears might be hungry due to a lack of pack ice on which to hunt. Terje illustrated each of his categories with examples of maulings somewhere in the archipelago, acting out the story by dropping on all fours and straining the hinge of his jaws. In 1977 – this was just one from an extensive repertoire of episodes – a group of Austrian campers at Magdalenefjord heard strange noises outside the tent. When one of them stuck his head out, a bear smashed it with a front paw and dragged the man to the sea ice, where, in full view of the other campers, it ate everything except a section of jaw and a belt buckle. (Terje removed his belt and swung it in the air.) I looked out of the window, certain that I would see a bear speeding towards the glacier with Nick dangling from his mouth, still talking. Finally Terje launched into a story about a bear headbutting the door of a trapper’s hut. The scientist inside had a rifle, but it was on the other side of the hut – the bear, who had bashed the door open, was between him and his gun. ‘But it was all right!’ said Terje, triumphant for once. ‘The door was too small for the bear to get his shoulders through. He could only fit his head and neck in.’ Silence hung heavy in the lab as I digested this information. ‘Surely,’ I asked, ‘the head is the business end?’ ‘The scientist hit the bear on the nose with a frying pan,’ Terje concluded, brandishing an imaginary utensil.
For the next stage Terje drove us up to the rifle range on one of the low hills behind camp. A cover of grey cloud had moved in, masking the sun. The air was like something paralysed. I struggled through the bullet routines before letting off a succession of rounds at a target, unnerving explosions in unmoving silence. We agreed I was a useless shot, and that was that. The first drops of rain fell, smacking the stones on the hills. Terje took the opportunity to tell me I was not, according to Svalbard legislation, supposed to shoot until the bear was 10 metres away. Ten metres was the length of the zodiacs in which we had been zipping around the fjords. ‘But I can’t even load in that time,’ I whined. ‘It is the sysselman’s [governor’s] rule,’ intoned Terje in his metronomically measured English. ‘If you shoot a bear, you must inform his office, and an investigative team arrive.’ I had the impression that if the bear ate me before I could uncock my rifle, it would be shrugged shoulders all round among the sysselman’s filing cabinets.
Our neighbour Maarten Loonen was a familiar figure in Ny-Ålesund. One of the tall inhabitants of the Dutch house, and the chief Dutch scientist on station, he was based at the University of Groningen and had been studying the fluctuating population of barnacle geese in Kongsfjord since 1990. In 1943 fewer than 300 roosted on the archipelago; at the time of my visit, the population had swelled to 25,000. Extreme weather stresses Arctic ecosystems (and they are relatively young: ten or twenty thousand years, following the retreat of the ice sheets, compared with millions in the tropics). An unseasonal snowstorm or big freeze can destroy a whole generation, in turn jeopardising species higher up the food chain. Maarten’s geese showed what a changing climate can do – if PCBs don’t do it first.
Like many Dutchmen, Maarten spoke better English than me, and with his spiky hair, round belly and smooth skin, I could imagine him turning into a barnacle goose when my back was turned. He invited me to go out observing with him for an afternoon, and so with rifles loaded we started off past the Japanese station, past the airstrip, past the rocket launch pad and over a bridge fording a river bloodied with sandstone deposits. There we reached a pond, and Maarten put up his tripod and telescope. At a distance of 200 metres, he read out information from rings he had put on geese feet three years previously. I didn’t believe it, so I looked through the lens myself. ‘If the sun is behind me’, Maarten boasted, ‘I can read them at 300 metres.’ We walked on to Brandal Point. The rain had begun to pound down again. All around, goslings had just hatched. Only the female incubates: to facilitate heat transmission, she has a pair of breast patches without feathers. For the first three days, goslings live off absorbed yolk. Then they learn to feed. A strong young goose pecks 120 times a minute when it finds food. But the Arctic fox population had kept time with the geese. ‘The average barnacle couple’, said Maarten, ‘produce fifty eggs, out of which 2.2 chicks reach adulthood.’ I had watched the dog-fox opposite my window ferrying goslings to his vixen and kits.
We walked on. ‘This grass is too long for them,’ Maarten remarked after we had reached stands of wet green at the lakeside. ‘In this state, it’s like spaghetti for geese, and they can’t eat it.’ The sun vanished behind a cloud. When it went, the colours went too. ‘I see the grass here with my goose mind,’ Maarten concluded before stopping to scrutinise a white blob against a patch of scree on the lower slope of the nearest mountain. But it was a boulder, not a bear. After all his years in the field, Maarten had plenty of experience with a rifle, but, like me, he was uncomfortable with the idea of a gun in his hand. ‘It’s a cultural thing,’ he said. ‘In Holland you are perceived virtually as a criminal if you hunt. But here in Norway you’re almost a homosexual if you don’t.’
A finger of land divided two narrow fjords, and the cliff at the end of it attracted birds. Puffin, pink-footed geese, long-tailed ducks, ivory gulls, dunlin, king eider, sanderlings and red-throated divers shrieked and squawked around lime-stained fissures. It was startling to see species familiar in dowdy British winter coats resplendent in summer plumage. Grey phalaropes in Arctic carmine, snow buntings transformed from dusty slate into dazzling black and white, golden plovers with refulgent breast feathers. Guano had fertilised soil cover below the cliff, enabling saxifrage and moss campion to outwit the permafrost, Arctic battlers that blossom in the short burst of summer. If you’re under snow from September till May, you need to grow a lot in the short burst of twenty-four-hour light. (The highest woody-stemmed plant in the archipelago still only reaches 15 centimetres.) Fauna also has to maximise the brief growth period. The flight feathers of a barnacle gosling grow 7 millimetres a day after hatching in Svalbard in June. Lichen approaches the problem from the other end by living so long that it can grow as slowly as it wants. Some patches on the bird cliff were alive before Britain became an island.
The next day a ship brought science cargo, and crates blocked the entrance to our hut. But they were the wrong crates, and Sam stood looking at them with the horror of Lady Bracknell observing a handbag. Another reprieve for the amphipods, but disaster for Nia and Sam. The rain continued to belt down. Nick, buoyant as ever and determined to salvage something from the day, emerged from a storeroom brandishing two raffia-clad bottles of Chianti. It turned out that residents of Ny-Ålesund marked Saturday with a special dinner. They changed out of windpants into civilian clothes, brought alcohol to the mess hall, and proposed toasts. A natural authoritarian, Nick made his team go back if they set out from the hut looking too polar. He himself had a roster of herbaceous Saturday-night ties. On that particular Saturday, the imminent departure of a long-term resident provoked the round of postprandial speeches that are a Scandinavian pastime. Nick told me he once attended a formal dinner at Ny-Ålesund at which he was placed thirteenth out of fourteen in the order of speeches, and that was to celebrate the opening of the new jetty.
To experience the romance of the trapper, I went to stay in the nearest hut. Two new arrivals at Nick’s empire were coming along: Antonia, a wildlife watercolourist from Dorset on a mission to paint barnacle geese, and her partner Richard, a landscape photographer. In the mess hall, I ordered a field box of food for three, ticking off items on a printed list. The rain had finally ended, cleansing the air – breathing deeply, it was as if the lungs had been rinsed. The ground beyond the shingle beach was crunchy underfoot when we jumped from the zodiac, as the sun had not softened the fretted ice above the permafrost.
A broadloom of dirty ice and meltwater streams patterned the land around the point. Clouds came and went from the other side of the fjord, and from the interior; but you could see spits bergen. Three female geese had set up a crèche in the shallows of the fjord. The hut itself, fifty metres from shore, was made of rough-hewn planks weathered to the colour of birchbark. An anteroom contained a set of bunk beds, and the single inner room a wood-burning stove, a table, two benches, two gas rings and kitchen equipment including a stack of plates welded together by fossilised food items. Remembering Terje’s story, I had brought my own frying pan for self-defence purposes. We fired up the stove, which quickly began to draw. Odd gloves dangled from pegs on a line above it, and someone had pinned the skin of a harp seal on the wall over one of the benches, opposite a small window with floral curtains looking out at the Conway Glacier at the southern end of King Haakon VII Land. One particular trapper occupied the hut for many years. He used to return from his annual visit to the mainland with the previous year’s supply of Tromsø newspapers. Each day, on his way to his traps, he would deposit a newspaper in a mailbox he had made near the hut. Then he would collect it on the way back, and enjoy last year’s news. Trapping flourished until 1940, and the governor still issues permits to individuals keen to live the polar life (or live a version of it. A trapper on Kapp Wijk has a fast satellite Internet connection in his hut). Trappers have been banned from taking bears since 1973, but they still catch eider for down, and Arctic fox in white or – if the hunter is lucky – blue winter coats. It seemed a desperately romantic life, Internet notwithstanding.
The three of us walked along the point. The rubbly strand was thick with Siberian driftwood, swept from the great rivers as they froze and spun in the circular currents of the Arctic Ocean before being blown onto the beaches of Spitsbergen. Antonia already had her sketchbook out, whipping through pencil drawings of a pair of geese on the edge of Brandallaguna, a triangular body of water behind the point. The light was flat. Big windsock-shaped clouds hung in the sky below a layer of cirrostratus. Richard lay down to photograph ribs of driftwood. I picked among beluga tusks and rusted barrel hoops in the metre-high ice foot, a weak and unstable wall of ice and snow left on the shore when the winter sea ice broke up. We looked out for bears, and listened to small waves slap the pebbles. Out in the open sea at the end of the fjord, a dazzling stripe on the underside of distant clouds mapped the sea ice. In a polar phenomenon called ice blink, clouds are lit from underneath by sunlight reflected up from a patch of pack ice in a contrasting dark area of water. When Nansen first came upon ice blink, he wrote, ‘I felt instinctively that I stood on the threshold of a new world.’ Of all the Arctic landscapes I have seen, this one, without a permanent population, could claim to be the purest. Like the Antarctic, Svalbard was terra incognita (or frigore inhabitabilis, as it appears on pre-Renaissance maps). No people had invested this land with the spiritual meaning that confers a sense of ownership more powerfully than political foot stamping. Whalers, trappers, explorers, miners and scientists – they were visitors, like me. It was easy to feel at home in a place that was nobody’s home.
The portions of food neatly wrapped in the wooden box were moderate, except for a whack of sausages, which was unfortunate, as it turned out that Richard and Antonia were vegetarian. But we also had some pancake mix. Then it emerged that the propane bottle had run out of gas, so not even I could tackle the sausage mountain. We had plenty of bread though, which we could eat with jam and – ham. In the evening we set the kettle on the stove and looked out of the window. Sunlight shone through in moteless shafts. The stove was an efficient heater but a poor boiler: its tower design meant such little heat was coming out of the top that after two hours the water in the kettle was only tepid. The trapper was never in a hurry. Nor were we. Midnight could have been midday – in every sense. Even when the sun doesn’t set, at sub-Arctic latitudes a temperature difference distinguishes day from night, because at midday the sun is at the highest point of its trajectory, making the air warmer, and at midnight at its lowest point, thus cooling the ‘night’. The difference in the sun’s altitude between midday and midnight reduces as one approaches the Pole – and so, therefore, does the temperature differential. (The further north you travel, in other words, the smaller the difference between day and night – a suitable metaphor for the otherworldliness of the polar regions.) Kongsfjord was not far from the 80th parallel, a latitude at which the planet enters the magic zone of day–night equilibrium. But the presence of the frying pan in the sleeping bag was not conducive to sound slumber.
In the morning we were standing outside our front door eating bread and jam when a dog-fox ran by with two goslings in its mouth. Cloud hung low like a lid, and Nick’s voice was crackling out of the VHF radio, halfway through an anecdote about a schoolmate whose head was so flat at the back he could stand flush to a wall.
Pole-seekers approached in search of another kind of romance. In 1773 Captain the Hon. Constantine Phipps landed on Svalbard during a Royal Navy expedition in HMS Racehorse and the ill-named Carcass, both ice-strengthened men-of-war vessels known as ‘bombs’. The fourteen-year-old midshipman on Carcass was one Horatio Nelson. Phipps was under instruction to see how far he could get to the North Pole (an optimistic coda to the order stated that under no circumstances should he go any further). He nearly got both ships terminally stuck in ice, and the navigational chart he brought back was, according to Sir Martin Conway, doyen of Svalbard historians, ‘a marvel for its extraordinary badness’. But Phipps also returned with useful observational data, as well as an important natural history log (it was he who gave the polar bear its scientific name, Ursus maritimus). At 80°N, a wounded bear had almost changed the outcome of Trafalgar. Or so Nelsonian mythology would have us believe. The account of the plucky little sailor engaging in full-frontal combat with a monster bear has played an important role in the sedulous creation of the Nelson legend and its knightly progression towards apotheosis at Trafalgar. A fixated public endlessly recycled the image of the encounter (still do): Landseer engraved it, Southey popularised it, souvenir manufacturers stamped it on plates and pamphleteers, novelists and poets enshrined it in prose and verse. The Eagle comic worked it up for the schoolboys of the 1950s and in the 1980s Ladybird immortalised it for the succeeding generation. Only the historical record makes little of the episode. Awkwardly, it reveals that young Nelson was stalking the bear, rather than the other way round. Nelson is not a figure whose accomplishments require embellishment. Yet the Arctic even fictionalises him. The truth was that he wanted to give his father a bearskin. When his flintlock musket flashed in the pan, he slunk back to the waiting Carcass. There is something fine in the fanciful story’s origin in a key voyage of the Enlightenment, an age devoted to the eradication of myth and ignorance.
A century after Nelson was not attacked by a bear, the possibilities of floating over the North Pole in an air balloon captured the Scandinavian imagination. The strandflats of Svalbard’s Danskøya (Danish Island) offered the most north-westerly harbour, and eager balloonists flocked north in the race for primacy. In 1896 Swedish engineer Salomon Andrée planned to set out in his 212,000-cubic feet hydrogen balloon Ornen (Eagle). Tall, fat and passionate, and fired by a restless, rigorous curiosity, Andrée had once eaten forty boiled eggs as an experiment. Eagle was the world’s biggest balloon to date, made of 3,360 squares of pongee silk varnished and sewn together with 86 miles of stitching. The pilots steered with drag ropes. But unfavourable winds aborted Andrée’s mission. In 1897, he tried again, returning to his scaffolding and hangar on Danskøya and dyeing Svalbard waters red as he brewed sulphuric acid and iron filings for his gas. The balloon’s cargo included Belgian chocolates, four jars of whortleberry jam, a specially designed primus that could hang outside the gondola, thirty-six carrier pigeons and a dinner jacket. The king and queen of Sweden came up for the launch. This time Eagle did land: it crashed on the pack ice at almost 83°N, its silken canopy armoured with frost. Andrée, with companions Nils Strindberg (nephew of August) and Knut Fraenkel, had little choice but to set off over the ice and march 200 miles to safety, crossing leads a mile wide in a canvas boat.3 The three were never seen alive again. For a generation, their story remained the greatest polar mystery since Franklin. Then in 1930 sealers found their last camp, together with the bodies, undeveloped film and Andrée’s flight logs and diary, on Kvitøya, the fifth largest Svalbard island. A recent study concluded the men probably died of bacterial food poisoning such as botulism, but trichinosis has always been a possibility – a disease caused by eating meat, in their case polar bear, infected with the larvae of a parasite. ‘We think we can well face death, having done what we have done,’ Andrée had written as he floated over the Arctic Ocean.
The ice-damaged prints recovered from the final camp are among the most affecting of any polar images: a study in the unequal battle between man and the Arctic. The photographer was twenty-four-year-old Strindberg, a university physics teacher. He had designed a special reflex camera for the voyage, in a sealed case. Love and adventure pulled him in opposite directions. He had left a fiancée in Norway, and wrote to her almost every day. ‘I am sure that I am laying down the foundations of our future happiness’, Strindberg confided in a letter found on his body. Anna Charlier waited for him for thirteen years, then married an Englishman, Gilbert Hawtrey, and settled in Paignton, Devon. But when she died (by which time she had learned the news from Kvitøya), she asked for her heart to be cut out and buried in Sweden with Strindberg. Hawtrey obliged. Perhaps he is the true hero of the Andrée story.
International hopes shifted to the airship, the latest transport sensation. American journalist Walter Wellman stepped forward. He had received a telegram from the editor of the Chicago Record-Herald with the order, BUILD AN AIRSHIP AND WITH IT GO FIND THE NORTH POLE, surely a candidate for the most ambitious instruction ever to issue from a newsroom. Wellman duly set out for Spitsbergen with a hydrogen-filled airship three years in a row, each time just failing to kill himself. Then he heard that Peary had made it, and he lost interest in the North Pole, leaving the ice clear for Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. In 1925 Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth flew a pair of Dornier seaplanes to Spitsbergen to make the first of two aerial attempts over the North Pole. Ellsworth’s father, a coal millionaire and numismatist, had agreed to fund the expedition providing Lincoln gave up smoking (he also agreed to upgrade the sewer system in his home town of Hudson, Ohio if the town imposed a fifty-year alcohol ban). Much of the Arctic Ocean remained unexplored, and by crossing from one side to the other, Amundsen hoped he might learn something of the landmass still rumoured to exist in the vicinity of the Pole. But the Dornier engines failed at 87ºN, and the aviators only just escaped with their lives. Amundsen and Ellsworth then also decided to try airships. Now called Zeppelins, the best airships were at that time designed and manufactured in Italy (like Germany, Italy had actively deployed airships in the war, building 20 semi-rigid M-1 class vessels with a bomb load of 1,000 kilograms) and so Amundsen and Ellsworth asked leading aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile to collaborate in an expedition which would cross the Arctic Ocean from Spitsbergen to North America. All the western governments were busy commissioning airship models, and the press leapt hungrily on every story featuring fresh gondola designs or innovative ballast theory. When Andrée inflated Eagle in front of the world’s press, balloon technology was as avant garde as that of the wireless had once been, or the motor car. Who could have known that the age of the airship would be fleeting?
Nobile was a slight, hyperactive colonel who knew more about airship engineering than any man alive, and he had piloted a great number, always accompanied by his terrier Titina, who sat alongside him in the gondola. Amundsen and Ellsworth bought the medium-sized, semi-rigid N1, Nobile’s latest cigar-shaped Zeppelin. It was inevitable that Mussolini would perceive the expedition as a propaganda opportunity. He was consolidating power in a characteristically Italian rumbustious political setting, and, like any other leader, was on the lookout for bandwagons. Nobile was anti-fascist, but nobody cared about that. Mussolini told Amundsen he could have the N1 free if it flew under an Italian flag. Amundsen refused. The N1, rechristened Norge, was to traverse the Arctic in Norwegian colours. The national rivalry played out against the backdrop of an Arctic air race was shaped at least in part by the aspirations of two young countries striving to write their names in the geographical record books. And they did. In April 1926, Amundsen, Nobile, Ellsworth and an Italian-Norwegian crew floated over the Pole in Norge. Amundsen and his colleague Oscar Wisting, who had been with him in the Antarctic, were the first at, or over, both Poles. Peary’s claim to have reached 90 north in 1909 was almost certainly false, so the Norge men were the first human beings to see the North Pole.
But did a balloon count? You decide: it’s only a matter of opinion. The conquest of the North Pole has none of the tragic glamour of its southern counterpart – no race to the finish, no definitive record, no household name immortalised in death. Norge, the sources agree, made the first of many uncontested flyovers. In 1948, twenty-four Soviets landed near the Pole and walked to the spot: they were the first to stand there. In 1958 the crew of an American nuclear submarine became the first to travel under the Pole, and the following year another US sub surfaced. In 1968 four Americans rode from Canada by snow scooter. In 1969, Briton Wally Herbert and three others sledged from Alaska to Svalbard via the Pole. Theirs was the greatest Arctic journey of our time and has never enjoyed the recognition it deserves, perhaps because Ed Hillary’s conquest of Everest the previous decade had shaken all the fairydust over the Himalaya. Herbert, a man with a Napoleonic sense of drama, followed the drift of the ice and together with his companions camped on floes for two winters, drinking Bass bitter, using napkins at table and picking up airdrops of steaks, bottles of HP sauce and eggs that didn’t crack. In an agonising summer sledge, degree by painful degree, they made the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean. It took 407 days to reach 90ºN from Barrow, Alaska, and when they got there Herbert telegraphed the Queen. Trying to stand at the Pole, he wrote later, ‘had been like trying to step on the shadow of a bird that was circling overhead’.
The crew of the Norge, meanwhile, celebrated with egg nog, and by dropping flags onto the pack ice. To Amundsen and Ellsworth’s fury, Nobile tossed out not one but many tricolori, all larger than theirs. Like toddlers in a nursery, they all wanted the biggest. Norge continued without misadventure to Alaska, landing in Teller after seventy hours aloft. It was the first flight between Europe and North America, predating Lindbergh’s trailblazing crossing from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget by thirteen months, and one of the oldest geographical myths of all time died, as the aeronauts confirmed that there was no landmass in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. (Mercator, the greatest cartographer who ever lived, had depicted, in his 1595 Atlas, an exquisitely symmetrical ring of Arctic land with slender passages to an area of water at the centre, allowing the perpetuation of another myth: that of an open water route to the Pole.) But Amundsen and Nobile had clashed from the outset. Both were tricky characters. Each claimed the other had contributed little or nothing of consequence to the Norge mission. They were polar opposites: Amundsen the lugubrious Thor of Viking legend, Nobile the operatic, gnome-like figure from southern Italy, and the Arctic amplified their traits into caricatures. Amundsen attacked Nobile publicly, accusing him of being a bad pilot, and of gesturing with his hands while giving orders, surely part of the job description of being Italian. The situation deteriorated when Mussolini co-opted the triumph of Norge as a fascist victory, transfiguring Nobile into a national hero. Of the ninety-four pages of Amundsen’s autobiography dealing with Norge, barely one omits a strike at Nobile, that ‘strutting dreamer’ guilty of arrogance, incompetence, pettiness, an ‘itch for ostentation’, lack of self-control, vanity, ‘illusions of greatness’ and above all determination to claim for himself the leadership of the first expedition to cross the Arctic Ocean by air. ‘Fortunately’, wrote Amundsen at the conclusion of his 40,000-word tirade, ‘I have a sense of humour.’
Public interest in the Pole continued undiminished, and Nobile determined to return to the Arctic. In 1928, in a high-profile mission supported by the Italian government, and now elevated to the rank of general, he took the airship Italia up to Spitsbergen to fly to the Pole and carry out a scientific programme which included a survey of unmapped sectors of the Arctic Ocean. There was to be no Norwegian flag this time. Leaving a ship in Kongsfjord, Nobile again reached the Pole, this time dropping a wooden cross presented by the Pope wrapped in yet another large Italian flag. The crew played ‘The Bells of San Giusto’ on a gramophone, and set off back to Spitsbergen. At 81°N, the gondola section of Italia crashed onto pack ice. Six men in the main part of the airship floated off and were never seen again. The injured Nobile, eight survivors and Titina set up camp on a floe, contriving to make their tent red, and so conspicuous from the air. Radio operator Giuseppe Biagi struggled day and night to send a message to the mother ship moored in Kongsfjord. After hours of crackling, the wireless intermittently leapt to life. But nobody seemed to be hearing the desperate appeals from the floe. Three men set out on a march for help, reaching such a state of exhaustion, exposure and hunger that one died. The others learned from a wireless broadcast that the Italian authorities had announced their deaths. Days passed. Then a farmer in Arkhangel heard Biagi’s SOS.
News of the crash went global, initiating the most frenetic Arctic search in the history of exploration. The rescue turned into a race between rescuers, between nations, and between newspapers and radio stations. An armada of vessels and at least twenty planes set out to find Nobile. Before anyone was able to land at the red tent, or manoeuvre an icebreaker within walking distance, planes dropped emergency supplies including laxatives and cakes that tasted of salt as they had been contaminated by seawater. Rescuers crashed and had to be rescued, recriminations fanned across Europe as countries raced to be first at the tent, rumours circulated that the two marchers who had survived had eaten the third, and a sensational news story ran and ran. But all eight men got out in the end, as did the dog. Like the arrest of Dr Crippen as he disembarked from a liner in New York, Nobile’s rescue was a landmark in the history of wireless technology.
Amundsen joined the stampede of rescuers. In public, he said it was a gesture of reconciliation. But he had been asked to help, and it was more a case of saving face than saving Nobile. Amundsen failed to engage with life outside the polar regions: he needed a grand obsession to keep him sane. Now in his fifties, he had withdrawn from public life into private bitterness, nurturing imagined resentments against a multitude of former friends, family and colleagues, and against life itself (‘the Norwegians, almost to a man, turned on me with unbelievable ferocity’, he wrote after going bankrupt in 1924 solely on account of his stubborn truculence). He drowned in self-pity while his mentor Nansen pondered his own insignificance. Rage, prejudice and unhappiness exist in some dark place in all of us, but Amundsen’s undignified autobiography, My Life as an Explorer, gave them form. Now he took off from mainland Norway, heading for Svalbard in a French seaplane, the first man to attempt a flight over that dismal stretch of water. On this trip, the wintry veteran fought his last campaign. He never made it to Svalbard, vanishing without trace in the Barents Sea. How often reconciliation comes too late. And how little we learn.
Nobile limped back to Norway and a reception almost as frigid as the red tent. In his homeland, he discovered that Mussolini had turned against him too: crashes and foreign rescuers were not what the dictator had in mind. An inquiry followed, then a trial. Officially blamed for the disaster, by 1929 former hero Nobile was virtually a political prisoner, and he remained an outcast for three decades. Arctic authority Vilhjalmur Stefansson concluded he had been ‘well and truly railroaded’, and Captain Scott’s man Tryggve Gran said he was ‘a new Dreyfus’. Not only had he failed: he had followed the wrong star. In the year of the Italia debacle, Hubert Wilkins and a co-pilot flew a Lockheed Vega monoplane from Alaska to Spitsbergen, and Gino Watkins prepared for pioneering aviation missions in Greenland.
Exploration for its own sake burned out in the years following the wobbly progress of balloons and airships over Svalbard. But a new race had emerged from the wreckage of the gondolas: the energy race. Nobody wanted Svalbard’s whales or furs anymore. They wanted its coal.
On the west coast of Spitsbergen volcanic eructations of pitchy smoke off Grønfjord signal the proximity of Barentsburg, a Russian-owned mining outpost exuding, along with the smoke, more than a whiff of the Soviet era.4 I saw it all when I left Ny-Ålesund for a week on a ship circumnavigating the island. Barentsburg was an anti-oasis: a grimy human hellhole in an otherwise pristine wilderness. I loved it. The coal company representative waiting on the wharf, a pasty young man in a parka, introduced himself as Slava. He spoke English with a heavy accent and impeccable diction. ‘Modernisation this year will improve ecological aspect of power plant,’ he said as thirty of us filed past Himalayan peaks of metal leaking toxic substances into the permafrost. We climbed steep flights of steps, past a child’s swing with rigid poles, a cat, and a sign in Cyrillic announcing a cafe that no longer existed. At the top of the steps we paused in front of the anchor of the Hercules, a Russian supply ship that sank on the way back to Murmansk in 1948 with the loss of all hands. Someone had hooked a bunch of pink plastic roses over one of the prongs. The humanity of the Arctic had a pathos its southern counterpart did not share.
Slava had learned his English at Moscow University. What he liked most was telling jokes, and he had honed his sense of comic timing. Pausing in front of a mural of trees painted on a wall next to the coal-loading pier, he announced, ‘This is only forest in Svalbard. Is evergreen.’ His eyes scanned the audience, hungry for laughter. Keen to please him, we began to oblige with vigour.
In 1932 what was left of Barentsburg passed to the Soviet state. Now run by Trust Arktikugol, the mine produces 120 thousand tonnes annually, most of which goes to Holland and Denmark. Of the 500 Russian and Ukrainian residents, 150 are women. Miners have a two-year renewable contract. ‘Some are here five, ten, twenty years,’ Slava claimed, raising his voice to contend with the screaming of blacklegged kittiwakes, ‘enjoying the magic of these wonderful places.’ The truth was that Barentsburg had suffered from a critical lack of investment, chiefly as a result of the withdrawal of state subsidies as Russia listed from command to market economy. Outdated safety equipment contributed to an accident in 1997 in which twenty-three perished. And Slava did not mention a murder in 2004, when one miner killed another in a gambling brawl, or the appalling shortages of food and other essential goods during the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or the 1996 Tupolev crash in which 143 miners and their families died. When he revealed that there were only fifteen years of coal left, I asked about the future of the mine. ‘The leadership’, he said, ‘have yet to announce plan.’ A proper Soviet touch that. Here at Barentsburg the Soviet Union had never collapsed at all.
We walked along mud streets cobwebbed with snow, past folksy wooden buildings with fretwork window frames, though Slava revealed that everyone now lives in monolithic blocks at the back of the settlement. Shrouded figures emerged from doorways, nodding in our direction before hurrying away. Alongside a bust of Lenin, miners had painted more murals, this time of blue-eyed, lantern-jawed heroes of the motherland, fists raised against the tundra. Black replaced white as the default colour in Barentsburg. A fine layer of coal dust rimed everything; one could imagine never getting clean, and coal dust working its way into the very organs. At the end of a street, a herd of pigs huddled in the corner of a blackened pen. ‘Most northerly pigs in world!’ Slava shouted in triumph. Everything solid seemed to speak of more prosperous times: a Culture Hall with a concert auditorium, a huge school where five children followed the Russian syllabus and a monumental Sports Hall with interlocking Olympic rings above worked-iron doors. Inside, a crystal-studded mosaic of a polar bear overlooked a swimming pool filled with heated seawater which, during the transmission process, had mysteriously turned brown. Snowy mountains glittered dimly through the misted windows, and a pale sun threw shadows over tiers of peeling spectator seating. Silence echoed back from the high ceiling in a lament for something indefinable that had vanished.
It was hard not to sense fear in the wind that chased puffs of coal dust through the streets. It blew in a memory of the gulag. Pausing outside a 100-room concrete hotel in which nobody stayed, Slava announced that passengers booked in for a week if their ship left without them. Nobody laughed. ‘It is joke,’ he added miserably. At that moment, a limousine with blacked-out windows cruised down the street, turning left at the end, towards the accommodation blocks. A small Russian flag flapped on the bonnet. ‘It is Russian consul,’ said Slava. ‘He lives in big consulate,’ and he pointed to an attempt at a concrete mansion. The scale of public buildings at Barentsburg owed everything to post-Stalinist gamesmanship.
Many others besides Russians came in pursuit of minerals, staking hundreds of claims. Foreshadowing superpower conflicts, well-bred Americans stepped from the pages of Henry James novels to establish private mineral fiefdoms that would compete with Barentsburg. In 1901 John Munro Longyear, an industrialist from Marquette, Michigan, disembarked from a tourist ship in Bellsund on Spitsbergen with his wife and five children. He said, ‘This looks like gold country.’ Klondike was still on the mind of every entrepreneur, and coal was black gold. Returning with two partners, in 1906 Longyear, a Christian Scientist, founded a mining settlement that he named after himself on the west coast of Spitsbergen 55 kilometres from Barentsburg (though the two are not connected by road). Many of his mines capital operational. Today a resident of Longyearbyen – now the unofficial capital of Svalbard – stays six years, on average: when people reach the end of a posting, they return to the mainland to grow old. ‘We are not allowed to die here,’ a waiter told me at breakfast in a hotel in Longyearbyen, though I wonder how even the omnipotent sysselman banned death from his empire.
In her book North of the Desolate Sea, Liv Balstad, wife of the first post-war sysselman, gives a lively account of life in the Svalbard mining communities in the forties and fifties, emphasising both positive, of which there was some, and negative, of which there was a good deal. A husky nearly killed her baby, the first mail plane crashed on the way back to Norway, everyone squabbled their way through winter as cold and darkness bit deep and her husband fermented fish in a tub under their bed. And then there were accidents. Balstad saw coffins being hauled to the wharf adorned with wreaths made from pot plants. On 5 January 1962, twenty-one miners perished after a seam disintegrated. Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen resigned amid accusations of inadequate safety provisions. ‘When a man comes up here,’ Balstad wrote, ‘he knows really only what he is coming from, not what he is coming to . . . for most of them, Svalbard is the solution to a plan, a dream.’ She cited ‘the power of adaptability and the art of resignation’ as the essential characteristics required to survive. Women, who made up 10 per cent of the population, tended to fare better than men in winter. ‘Once she [the woman resident] has found the Svalbard melody,’ Balstad wrote, ‘she knits herself more strongly than the man to the land and all it means.’ Communities developed to support the mineworkers, maintaining their own schools, newspapers and ski-jumping contests. Balstad recorded that as the fifties progressed, ‘while the so-called Cold War gradually extended its hold on the outside world, the friendship between the Norwegians and the Russians in Spitsbergen became steadily warmer’. The two groups exchanged social visits by boat, with folk dancing displays on either side. In the photographs of these events, the Soviet women are three times the size of their Norwegian counterparts.
A spirit of warmth and cooperation had persisted in the coal towns. A ship’s steward told me she had spent most of her childhood in Longyearbyen. Her father was employed by the Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullcompani. ‘Fifteen years ago, when I was at school,’ she said as we leaned over the bow rail, ‘Longyearbyen was even more of a mining town than it is now. There were no food shops. Mum used to fill in an order form, the mine company consolidated the orders and a week later a man came to the door with a box of food with our name on. My father’s pay number was also marked on the lid, and the food bill was deducted from his pay along with rent and electricity. Every day we got milk from an Iron Cow outside the company offices. It had been made up from powdered milk.’ In winter, Longyearbyen had less snow than Tromsø on the mainland. ‘But what falls’, Ingrid said, ‘stays till May and blows around. Longyearbyen becomes another country in winter. Snowmobiles have the tundra to themselves. We used to say it was a good winter when the snow stayed a long time, not when it went early, like people do down in mainland Norway.’ Then she paused, narrowing her eyes and scrutinising the water between ship and shore. She said, ‘There’s a calf with that beluga.’
At Christmas, one particular trapper always called on the Balstads. For many years he had lived alone at Sassen, a few miles from Longyearbyen, and he came to town at Christmas to send a telegram to his family in Norway. In his twenty-ninth year, he failed to appear, so they sent someone to his hut. He had had a heart attack. But they were able to get him home alive. ‘They were diehards,’ Balstad concluded, ‘these men who would just as soon hunt a polar bear in their bare underpants at 35° below zero . . . as the rest of us go into a baker’s shop. And they were artists in life.’
In addition to its cast of lively biologists, Svalbard attracted atmospheric chemists probing the alteration in planetary gases. It was an ironic development on an archipelago with a modern history shaped entirely by the extraction of hydrocarbons, as coal had caused part of the damage the chemists were assessing. Attention in some quarters at least had shifted from raping the Arctic (or conquering it by getting there first) to saving it, and a cosmic dimension had entered the science literature. Like other aspects of the northern polar regions, the proximity of coal mines and cutting-edge climatology in Svalbard highlighted the frailty of human endeavour.
Irish physicist John Tyndall was one of the first to explain the greenhouse effect properly, as long ago as the 1860s. He suggested that slight changes in atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. The role of water vapour in the heat-trapping layer of gases was, he said, that of ‘a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man. Remove it for a single summer night . . . and the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.’ The term ‘greenhouse effect’, not one of Tyndall’s, is a misnomer, as greenhouses work by preventing convective cooling; but it has cemented itself into many languages notwithstanding its inaccuracy. Tyndall went on to identify the relative radiative forcing values of different greenhouse gases, demonstrating for the first time that ‘perfectly colorless and invisible gases and vapours’ were able both to absorb and to emit radiant heat. Climate change is part of a natural order involving glacial cycles and violent climatic shifts. Ice cores have revealed temperature instability during both ice ages and interglacials like our own: without any human interference, ice ages have always had warm periods, and interglacials cold ones. Factors that vary the amount of received solar radiation include changes in the angle of the earth’s axis, the waning of the sun, and, as shown by the Greenland cores, volcanic eruptions. The task facing Scandinavian atmospheric chemists on the ground in Spitsbergen – and others in labs around the world – is to prise apart natural methods of readjusting earth’s energy balance from anthropogenic interference in the same processes.
Chemists at Ny-Ålesund had built a laboratory suite at 474 metres, and a cable car to service it. Called Zeppelin Station after the mountain it sat on (Zeppelinfjellet, in turn after Amundsen’s airship), it overlooked the whole of Kongsfjord, including the dam of glaciers at the end, as well as the carboniferous uplands. When I returned from my circumnavigation I ascended, in the cable car, with a Norwegian graduate student called Dorothea who went up every day to change the filters in the equipment. Below us on the tundra, a haze of fine drizzle softened the outlines of a lake frozen into a convex bulge. Once we were in the lab, and the freezer entrance doors shut tight behind us, Dorothea unveiled a bewildering array of instrumentation housed in iron cubes, glass cylinders and steel bell jars; some were clicking softly, some described an inky line on a spool of graph paper, and some just sat there looking menacing, coolly calibrated to track some clear, odourless gas gathering to disrupt the energy balance of the planet. Dorothea had a lecture ready. ‘The gases we measure here are those that block earth’s heat radiation,’ she said, ‘preventing it escaping into space. Without that natural blocking effect, a sheet of ice would cover the earth. But with too thick a layer of the dozens of greenhouse gases, not enough radiated heat would get out, and the planet would boil, like Venus.’ She had the Zeppelin data to hand. ‘At the start of the nineties’, she explained, ‘machines here measured carbon dioxide at one part per million. Last week it was up at almost 3 ppm. This automated gas chronometer’ – we paused in front of a white metal box resembling a dishwasher – ‘has a flame ionising detector that analyses a sample of methane every fifteen minutes and sends the information to Stockholm. In quantity, methane is the third greenhouse gas, after water vapour and carbon dioxide. It is ten times more effective than CO2 in absorbing and reradiating infrared energy back to earth’s surface – in other words, it contributes hugely to the oxidising capacity of the planet. Levels have rocketed by about one per cent annually over the past two decades, largely as a result of human activity like rice cultivation and modern livestock practices.’ Almost all the data yields revealed some kind of correlation between anthropogenic emissions and temperature increase. Dorothea ploughed on. ‘Although earth has become dramatically both hotter and colder many times, it has only rarely been warmer than it is now. And the greatest warming’, she said, opening the door on another, darkened lab, ‘has taken place above 40° of latitude in the northern hemisphere. Sure, the Antarctic is melting. But the Arctic is melting faster. If the modellers are correct and the trend up here continues, life on earth will have a lot of adapting to do.’
There is broad consensus that ‘dangerous’ climate change means two Celsius degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels.5 A layperson might think such a rise relatively insignificant. But only a few degrees separate a warm earth from its iced-up doppelganger. Between the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, mean temperatures were probably only a degree or two below present levels – but think of all those images of ice skaters and ox-roasts on the Thames. In the thirteenth century, in the region known now as Four Corners in the south-western United States, the entire Anasazi civilisation collapsed as a result of a modest drop in temperature and rainfall. By comparing children’s teeth from the year 1100 with those of 1450, scientists at the University of Michigan found that mean annual temperatures in western Greenland fell by about 1.5°C during that period. As we have seen, that apparently insignificant drop played a role in the demise of the Norse. As one scientist has pointed out, these abrupt disappearances reveal to what extent humanity exists in ‘precarious equipoise between survival and oblivion’. A short act in the drama was being played out in the labs and the mines of Svalbard.
Freak weather has been recorded throughout human history (think of Noah). The twentieth century had its share. In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck depicts the human cost of the dust bowl experience of the thirties as tens of thousands of Okies trekked west to California in pursuit of a nugatory dream of life. But freak weather tends not to last long. The warming of the past decades indicates that at the start of the twenty-first century even a small change could have a radically destructive effect on the inhabited world. It is not the planet that is at risk. It is us.
In the lab, a man sat in the gloom eating Jammy Dodgers. We walked past him, through another door and down a corridor. Mass spectrometry detectors, condensation particle counters, electro-polished stainless steel canisters collecting air – the battery of multi-million kroner equipment quantifying the imminent big bake queued up for recognition. I was gasping for a Jammy Dodger: it seemed the only short-term solution. A graph on the wall revealed that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide remained approximately constant between 1000 to 1800, then rose; at the end of the millennium the coloured bars shot three-quarters of the way up the sheet. The extent to which man, for the first time in history, has become the central force in shaping both climate and ecosystems is reflected in the term ‘anthropocene’, coined in 2000 by Dutch chemist and Nobel-laureate Paul Crutzen. His suggestion that the influence of human behaviour on the earth constitutes a new geological epoch is gaining ground.
The early migrants might have stopped in Greenland and left Svalbard alone. But the anthropocene had arrived without them. The latest thing was oil. Like so many places in the Arctic, the Barents Sea south and west of Svalbard had been identified as a potential source of gas and oil. At the time of my visit, Russia and Norway were quietly arguing about where their respective marine economic zones began and ended. Coal had already played a decisive role in shaping Svalbard’s environmental history, and now oil was taking on the role. A bell is tolling in Svalbard for the whole Arctic. But as Geir Wing Gabrielsen suggested, it is not too late, yet.
1 Although few individuals besides terns migrate between the Arctic and the Antarctic, several hundred marine species have made the journey over many generations, drifting on deep currents. A round trip can take a species 1,600 years. Successful transpolar travellers include a snail that spins a net of mucus to catch algae.
2 Biard was suspicious, and the rotter hired a private detective. One day a posse of policemen surprised the naked lovers in the bedroom and duly arrested them. Léonie was carted off to Saint-Lazare prison, but as a pair de France (a peer), Hugo was immune from prosecution. He began writing a novel called ‘Jean Tréjean’, about a convict and an abandoned woman. It was a plea for natural justice, the title soon changing to ‘Les Misères’, and subsequently Les Misérables.
3 A lead is a lane of open water between ice floes.
4 The terms of the Svalbard Treaty, signed by the main powers in 1920 and in force from 1925, permit signatories to engage in commercial activities on the islands. Diplomats had hammered out the details at the Paris Peace Conference – one of the few agreements reached there that still have practical significance. Sovereignty of Svalbard was an easy problem for the Versailles peacemakers to solve, especially as the islands, unlike Kurdistan or Palestine, did not present a human face: there were no indigenous delegations petitioning the conference halls.
5 There is little consensus on anything else, especially the percentage of energy cuts required to prevent the two degrees becoming reality.