Longyearbyen, Svalbard, to Franz Josef Land. September, October 2002

We fly low, scaring most of the harps into diving. A few gaze up, little heads and shoulders bobbing in open water between the floes. The ice edge, way north this year, holds them. Pans the size of suburban house blocks jostle each other, seals splopping into cracks of water as we pass. Transect legs end over dense pack. As we bank, turning at the top of one V to make our way back southeast, I gaze at ice, solid to the North Pole. Floes crammed together, cracks showing their boundary, but no more open water. Just ice. White, less than 600 miles to the world's end.

Arktika levels off, the next leg begins, dreams of the Pole vanish. I rub the fog off the domed window one more time, wriggle again into another not-too-uncomfortable position, change focus, shift from taking in scenery to scanning for marine mammals. The ice stretches on, miles and miles of water mixing solid white and liquid dark. Mammals of the ice edge dive or stare, as they want. Walrus, polar bears gaze up from ice floes. Bears weave heads in aggression at our noise, giant white bear-snakes. One bear, head, shoulders and forepaws bright red with blood, sits on a pan little bigger than itself, challenging the plane for its ringed seal, a red smear on the ice. Minke whales, humpbacks, whitesided dolphins dive as we pass over. White shoulder flashes of the minkes shine underwater as they go. Killer whales – mammal eaters prowling the ice edge in threes - ignore us. By the east shore of Spitzbergen, belugas glow cream underwater. But mostly salt water, rough, deep blue-grey. For all the flying, little to see. We're nowhere near the capelin schools swarming to the south.

The flights cover the Barents Sea, Svalbard to Franz Josef Land, south almost to the sea’s centre, a sparse plaid of northeast-southwest, northwest-southeast lines. Each day’s flying longer than a transAtlantic flight. Engines drone, I stare at sea. We Norwegians, and Norwegian-helpers, do two hours on, one hour off. The Russians never take a break. Mostly nothing. Hours of black-blue ocean surface, a sighting, more nothing. I wipe the bubble of the window when it fogs too much. Stretch, wriggle, stay alert. Animals, when they appear, gone immediately. Russian crickles through the headphones when the crew sees something. Rain. Fog. Wind. Whitecaps on blackness. We drop below fogbanks, to thirty metres above the ice. Anything swimming below us dives deep, frightened by our noise.

We pass over most of Svalbard's islands – Spitzbergen, Nordaustlandet, Edgeøya, Hopen, brown, bare, relief from just sea. We're so low I look up at the hills. Long pebble beaches. Whale bones. We're flying over one of the most remote parts of the planet. No point thinking about what happens if we ditch in the sea.

Report from this survey (warning - 4.2MB pdf!)