David Rothenberg - OnEarth Magazine, from NRDC

The Arctic Circle: The Loneliness of the Coal Town

Oct. 19th, Barentsburg
If you think it is strange there is a Russian town on Spitsbergen, remember that this land is not exactly part of Norway. It really is a kind of no-man's territory, not subject to any taxation, where historically a man could arrive from anywhere and stake a claim. The American Longyear founded Longyearbyen, the Russians had Pyramiden, now abandoned, and Barentsburg, still going strong. Long before climate change grabbed our attention the Arctic had tremendous strategic importance, and the Germans bombed all of it in World War II. They even had one far and remote weather station that was the final place the Nazis surrendered in September 1945.
Whereas Ny Ålesund is a curious modern science town of satellite dishes, nationalistic research buildings from nations as diverse as China, India, Germany and France, Barentsburg looks like a little slice of Siberia. You walk up to the city up hundreds of carefully constructed ...read full post

Comments (0) | November 9, 2009
The Arctic Circle: Science at the End of the Earth

Oct. 18th, Ny Ålesund, Arctic Science Village
In Ny Ålesund, a former mining village that is now an international center for climate research, most of the two hundred researchers and technicians have left for the season. But at the Alfred Wegener Polar Institute, a German engineer still remains, for a whole year in this inaccessible outpost, to repeat the same experiments every day. In one he releases a large white weather balloon, each day at 1pm, which rises and drifts into the stratosphere before exploding when it gets too high, but not before transmitting essential data from its disposable radio which will never be found. Then at night he shoots a high energy laser beam straight up into the clouds, of such power that even a tiny fraction of its bright beam is diffused back through the cloud cover and can be registered by the naked eye. The beam bounces through the building inside a complex and irregular rectilinear box, down to the floor off a large ...read full post

Comments (0) | November 6, 2009
The Arctic Circle: The Graves of Failed Dreams

Oct. 17th, Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
In 1910 Ernest Mansfield was convinced that this was going to be the site of the greatest marble quarry in the world, so he set up the Northern Exploration Company to cut all the stone out. He named the spot New London. Some of his machines remain right on the rails, having never even been used. The whole project fell apart, there was nothing worth taking.
The more we experience this distance the place, the less it seems it's a wilderness. Spitsbergen is the warmest place in the Arctic, because it's the end of the gulf stream, so much of the sea surrounding remains ice-free most of the year. Already by 1700 the Dutch had killed all the whales here, and after that came trappers, hunters, miners, still trying to extract something useful out of the landscape. What might remain most useful today is strategy-a few years ago a cable was laid all the way from Norway under the sea, bringing fast communication ...read full post

Comments (0) | November 5, 2009
The Arctic Circle: The Cruel Beauty of Nature

October 14th, Sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E
The bell rings on deck, that means there's something to see. "Ayeaah," says the captain, usually a man of few words, "seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North."

Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don't seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it's probably been there for months.
"Ooohhh..." someone says, "it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film." "Hey," someone else has a bright idea, "let's put those binoculars over a camera lens, see what kind of effect ...read full post

Comments (0) | November 4, 2009
The Arctic Circle: Moffen Island

October 10th, Moffen Island, 80°N, 14.5°E

From this completely flat island on the horizon we see nothing, as if we are deposited in some alien sea. It is strangely warm and moist, nothing like the endless winter one might imagine at the end of the road of darkness. Through September it is forbidden to land on this island in case breeding walruses and seabirds might be disturbed. By October the law permits us, and it is now possible to walk right up to huddled walruses and tap them on the shoulder, inject them with tranquilizers, and take a sample of something. But we're not scientists, so we don't do that, though we do approach close enough to feel their eyes looking right at us, squinting, trying to see something of interest. Eye of the walrus-doesn't sound as romantic as ‘eye of the whale,' and I don't know how humans have been changed or touched by it.
...read full post

Comments (0) | October 16, 2009
The Arctic Circle: A saxophone someplace far off played

October 9th, Sallyhamnen, 79.7° N 11.2°E

Today we saw three fat walruses asleep in front of an abandoned cabin. A wet snow fell from a dark gray sky. Later we came across seven polar bears eating the rotting carcass of a minke whale. From the peaks above they had slid down fat tracks indented in the snow, making the whole area look like a polar bear ski resort. Baby bears played in the snow with their parents and each other. Two arctic foxes padded by, hoping for a taste. The mouths of the bears were covered in blood as they came down to the shore and smiled again as they reached for the carcass to pull off another piece of rancid meat. We all snapped as many photos as we dared.

Later I played my soprano saxophone aboard the zodiac as we motored close to the whiteblue tongue of a ...read full post

Comments (0) | October 15, 2009
The Arctic Circle: A Circle of Artists and Scientists in the Arctic

October 8th, Fourteenth of July Bay, Krossfjorden, Spisbergen 79.2Ą N 12ĄE

We have been out two nights, a hundred year old schooner populated by fourteen artists, two scientists, and a crew of four, and already we have met a phenonemon of nature that cannot be captured in an image. The aurora borealis is a beautiful piece of natural performance art cannot be filmed or photographed. A time-lapse photo reveals only fuzzy colors, and a moving image cannot get enough light to capture the dynamic strangeness of it all. The Northern lights have been painted as hanging, shimmering curtains of multicolored fire, and old engravings show an imaginary fierce luminosity that wants to leap from the page into our minds.
It is the aurora that makes me more than smile, but open my mouth into an astonished "O." I have seen it many ...read full post

Comments (2) | October 15, 2009