Ny Ålesund and Kongsfjord. May 2000. Part II.

[Read the first part of this post here]

We were working from Ny Ålesund, the northernmost village on earth. Set on a little flat land by the fjord, it's a multicoloured scatter of old miners' cottages mixed with more modern buildings. Some huts date back to the original coal mine, opened during World War I. One's been kept as a little museum to life back then. Looks rough. Transport to markets was always an issue: from Ny Ålesund, it's about twice as far to Oslo as it is to the North Pole. Despite the prop of government subsidies, a series of fatal accidents in the 1950s and early 1960s saw the collapse of the King's Bay Coal Company's mining venture in 1963. Soon after, the village was reborn for research, initially just Norwegian, then gradually other nations established research programs. Ny Ålesund remains a company town, and King's Bay AS, as it's now known, owns and provides almost everything on site.

There were never any indigenous Svalbardians. Although Norwegians, Icelanders and Pomors (the people of northwestern Russia) claim stories of might-be Svalbard, the archipelago remained unmapped until visited by a Frisian, Willem Barents, just before the end of the 16th Century. Barents found Spitzbergen, the largest of Svalbard's islands. His late Renaissance mix of vessel and mapping technology guaranteed him a place in history, but not his life. He died before returning to the Netherlands. These days, travel to Ny Ålesund is quite a bit easier.



A little under two hours' 737 flight from Tromsø,and I was at Longyearbyen's small airport. Boasting a bit under 2000 people, Longyear is the largest of Svalbard's six settlements. I'd travelled with Kit, Christian and Dag, scientists with the Norwegian Polar Institute. We had an afternoon to take in the town – for me, the most important option being shopping for cold weather gear. Dinner in a log-cabin restaurant was followed by an overnight stay at the Polar Institute's barracks by the airport.

Come morning, we trundled our gear out to a high-winged, long-nosed Dornier. Just a half hour hop with a little over a dozen other scientists, and we'd be at Ny Ålesund. It's a short but spectacular flight. The little Dornier's not pressurized, so stays low, close enough to take in the landscape clearly. I'd thought, when flying in to Tromsø a couple of days earlier, that northern Norway was a landscape of ice, mountains and white. But northern Norway includes trees – a few small birches, but trees just the same. Compared with Spitzbergen's mountains, northern Norway is rainforest.

Longyear's few signs of humanity disappear within seconds of takeoff. We humans are ubiquitous - there aren't many places on land with no sign whatsoever of our presence. But this flight is an exception: no buildings or roads or power lines or huts. The flight crosses Isfjord, a short view of open water. Then land again, mountains, snow, glaciers. No trees. Ranks and ranks and ranks of jutting white peaks. Glaciers fill valleys.

Welcome to the Arctic.

Too soon, the open water of Kongsfjord, and a colored sprinkle of wooden buildings. Ny Ålesund.

Well, not all too soon - Sofie was waiting to meet me. Back then – early May, 2000 – we were just months off marriage. She'd already done a few weeks' fieldwork, so we hadn't seen each other for a while. Sofie's classical Flemish: round, cute face; button nose; large eyes; strong, rather than slender physique. Not much more than her smile was showing when I saw her. The rest of her was indistinguishable, covered in multiple layers of Polarfleece and GoreTex. Arctic fashion is mostly unflattering.

She'd been working with Bjørn, a research assistant for KitnChristian. Kit and Christian are a couple, two highly successful scientists. They're near enough to inseparable, and to Sofie and I their names merged into one. Kit was Sofie's mentor for her postdoctoral fellowship in Norway, a Canadian who combined intellect with a look that mixed tall and formidable – sort of Shieldmaiden With PhD. She treated Sofie like a kid sister.

High Arctic work is impossible alone, so Sofie and Bjørn had been working together, alternating days, Sofie recording bearded seal calls, then Bjørn shooting a few ringed seals for a Polar Institute project. So they vacillated between two extremes of research: benign (listening, taping seal calls) to ferociously invasive (shooting seals). Bjørn looked the archetypal Norwegian - tall, blond, solid, outdoorsy – and, fitting his archetype, he was a good shot. At least the seals died quickly.


Bjørn's project was finished by the time I arrived.

April had seen most of inner Kongsfjord frozen, so Sofie had been snowmobiling out to make her recordings. But by now, the sea ice was breaking up on the fjord, and we could start using boats.

[Read the next part of this post here.]