A Short Visit to Svalbard
After getting back from Jotunheimen in late July, Nancy went home to New England for a round of visits and business, while I (Rick) stayed in Trondheim with the girls and tried to settle back into work. The exceptionally fine summer weather and the Tour de France, the latter covered start-to-finish on local TV, conspired to make this (getting back to work that is) rather difficult.
Then came an even bigger distraction, in the form of an e-mail from NTNU's Bjorn Munro Jensen: Would I like to travel to Svalbard (Norway's high-arctic archipelago) to help out with a summer course? I really needed time to prepare for my plant physiology course but, well, sure, I supposed I could spare a few days. I flew out on the day Nancy flew in, and by early afternoon I was in Svalbard's captital, Longyearbyen, at 78 degrees north latitude. The town (above) is a little enclave of modernity dropped into an arctic valley, with a glacier brooding on the horizon and the occasional polar bear dropping in to see whassup.
A couple of Norwegian universities including NTNU have worked together to create UNIS (University Studies on Svalbard), with a few hundred students at a time residing in Longearbyen year-round and a regular schedule of courses. It may be the only university in the world to keep a rack of high-powered rifles near the main entrance, and where learning to use them to defend oneself against polar bears is a required part of the curriculum. The rifles are required for any and all activities outside of town. The bears are actually more common further north, but they can still show up in and around Longyearbyen at any time.
The first humans to regularly visit and eventually overwinter on Svalbard were Russians hunting polar bear and walrus. The big island of Spitsbergen also has abundant coal deposits, many visible as black seams along the mountainsides. Over the last century and a half various Russian, Norwegian, British, and American mining companies have attempted to make a profit here (or provide energy for comrades to the south), with mixed results at best. This is the remains of one of many mines dug into the hillsides around Longyearbyen. Coal was carried by tramways down to the waterfront where it was stockpiled in winter and loaded in ships in the short summer, when the ice melts in Isfjorden. Now a Norwegian mining concern is agressively developing a big mine on another part of the island, complete with high-tech equipment that spews coal out of the mountainside and delivers it to the waterfront via a conveyor belt running through a tunnel several kilometers long that runs under a glacier.
The first few days were mainly indoors, listening to lectures on various aspects of Svalbard and the Barents Sea, the latter being the real focus of the course. Most of the attendees were policy people from one or another government department involved in resource management or environmental protection. My own contribution was a lecture on arctic plant ecology and physiology. But over the last two days that I was there we boarded a boat and steamed along Isfjorden to various destinations, the first being...