Svalbard and Jan Mayen
In this region
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16 Oct 2016 – Pryamiden and the furthest north Lenin
Sunday 16/10/2016 -2°C, 5m/s. Sunrise 10:39 - Sunset 16:45.Late Saturday night we arrive and anchor close to Pyramiden 78°39.2´N, 16°22.9´E.Emerging onto an icy deck in crisp blue morning light, the moon still hangs over a now completely calm sea. In front of us the abandoned Russian settlement of Pyramiden sits silently at the foot of the snow-capped Pyramid Mountain. Once a model coal mining town until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, it still bears the scars of its mining days. In 1936, the Soviets acquired the rights to use the coalfields at Pyramiden and built the town to demonstrate Soviet power.Lenin's viewThe Russian government threw money at this place, even importing earth from the Ukraine so there would be grassy areas on top of the permafrost. Once there were green houses full of vegetables, hens laying eggs. A place where only the best coal miners and their families could work.It was desirable to live here - life was relaxed away from Mother Russia, people had more freedom. Any foreigner could come here without a visa, and it must of been impressive.In the 1980s more than 1,000 people lived in Pyramiden. Residents were assigned to different residential halls, which acquired their own nicknames - London for single men, Paris for the unmarried women (there was even pub on the ground floor of the women's building). Crazy House for families , so called because the children who would always play in the hallways. Gostinka (Russian for “hotel,”) was built to house short-term workers. There was a hospital, a large cafeteria - apparently so that the women didn't have to cook for their families and therefore could be useful workers (!) - a giant mosaic was made depicting the Svalbard landscape populated by heroes of Norse legends. Apparently the heated indoor pool was the best in Svalbard. All was constructed in typical Soviet block-style fashion of brick made on site with rounded edges to lessen the impact of the bitter winter wind. Somewhere there is even a grave yard for both humans and cats.Now blocks of abandoned flats where mine workers and their families once lived, are now colonised by kittiwakes. It''s difficult to imagine this waste land full of industry; I try to imagine families wandering the boardwalks on a summer evening. At top of town in front of the Culture House the northern-most bust of Lenin surveys empty streets and dilapidated buildings. We wander around the Culture house; inside is full of abandoned items - sets of old skis, a football lies in the sports court, the empty goals still in place - when was the last game? Russian books and pamphlets, old photographs of people who once lived and worked here. The world's northern-most grand piano - a "Red October" - sits on the stage in the dark and deserted auditorium. Jordi mounts the stars, sits and plays, the out-of-tune sound echoing eerily through the building. On the wall in a room upstairs is a panorama depicting the surrounding mountains. Who painted it? Rotting wooden walkways and bridges, huge mounds of scrap metal lie beside the dock juxtaposed with bright soviet monuments that reach for the sky proclaiming power. Its a pretty horrible mess but the setting surrounded by snow capped mountains, the Nordenskiöld glacier and fjord to the east, is magnificent. Waking to this everyday as you went to work - would you ever get used to it? But then the mine workers would spend their days in darkness, deep inside the mountain, to emerge into either the darkness of a polar night or blinking into the brilliant light of the summer season. Rusting swings sit in the playgroundWith the fall of the Soviet Union the money dried up, wages stopped being paid, there were shortages and standard of living fell, so families left. The town was abandonded. On March 31,1998, the last coal was extracted from the mine; seven months later, just before the ice arrived, on October 10th the last residents left. Pyramiden has now become, or they are attempting to make it, a tourist destination with a hotel staffed by a couple of Russians where visitors can enjoy staying in a Russian style room or opt for more European comforts.The Hotel - Russian style Before we leave to get back for dinner I make a quick drawing of the Pyramide mountain rubbing chalk and graphite across the page smudged with the icy water running from the mountain. Not really enough time to do much before we return to the boat. Just beyond me on the path Jordi is filming Spike dressed as a polar bear and sweeping snow. Drawing the mountain, photo courtesy of Jordi ForniesThe Pyramiden mountain, photo courtesy of Jordi ForniesLater we troop along the board walks and return in the dark to the hotel and sit in the bar drinking vodka infused with horseradish and then another with ginger (both are pretty good), watching videos of folk dancing Russians bands. I find the contrast between all this and the surrounding landscape bizarre and also depressing. Must be very weird for the few remaining caretakers who live there all year in the midst of such decay, particularly during the dark months of Polar Night. The Arctic has a complicated history of exploitation - exploitation of natural resources. Its animals have been fished and hunted to virtual extinction, it’s been mined, claimed, land stolen, people destroyed by disease, and of course now there are global warming issues – the threat of ecological destruction of the planet. When I was interviewed by the anthropologist on board we talked about the north and I found myself relating these places to the wall in the series Game of Thrones holding back the Wildling hoards of the icy north who are threatening to invade and, like Janssen’s Groke, bring winter to the rest of the world. I feel that Longyearbyen and Ny Ålesund are like walls but doing the opposite to that in the Games of Thrones - or maybe not quite the opposite - instead are trying to protect the north, to prevent the world from invading the Arctic, guarding, drawing attention to its fragility – holding us back from inflicting more human exploitation and destruction.
• Arctic Post – Thurs 13th Oct Fuglefjorden – how darkness and light are bound together
--> Thursday 13.10.2016 Fuglefjorden - how darkness and light are bound together-2°C, 3m/s. Sunrise 10:11 sunset 17.15. 9-10 m/sA pre-breakfast Zodiac trip has been planned; it’s still dark when I arrive on deck. Can’t see any stars yet, a luminous green sea and dark land mass is silhouetted against the sky. The group of early-morning risers clamber into the Zodiacs, and travel out into a sea of ice, leaning out to push large chunks of looming icebergs out of the way. The sea and ice heave slowly – almost as though breathing, ice turning and moving away. We get close to the glacier, a massive wall that looms above us. Still dark and snowing slightly, falling flakes glisten in the flash from my camera. No-one speaks, it feels magical, gently traveling around the bay in a sea of ice as dawn begins to break, apricot in a clear sky. I sometimes can’t quite believe where I am. The ship comes into view in front of us in a blue world surrounded by chunks of ice.We are traveling in a vacuum, a small band of international artists on a boat high above the Arctic Circle - an improbable place with its own contested history of struggles and exploitations, of politics and power, darkness and light, myths and realities - and it’s difficult to think of what might be going on at home in the UK and elsewhere in the world. Since we left Longyearbyen most of us have had no contact with the outside, no phone, internet or radio. We occasionally talk politics (more often we talk about food and next meal or the next place we will arrive at); the Americans artists are all fed up about the looming election and the possibility of a Trump triumph, some talking about leaving the country to go to live in Canada and I can’t say I would want to stay in a ‘trumped up’ America; another artist is struggling with visas to leave one country and go to another. There are a few domestic concerns for some, but as one of the guides remarks to me, being in a cold distant place helps to get away from heightened emotions … it becomes a form of protection - ‘The sky seems closer to the land. I feel such a small dot in the landscape that I feel so insignificant that it makes problems disappear. Nothing ever happens that is important when I am away in the north’. Someone else when I ask her about her sense of north says that she feels that there is no space or time for the superficial here - it cannot survive - no time for drama. ‘North is to me the place that makes you go on a pretty straight path to the essence of it all/everything. It can be hard (conditions) and has extremes, taking you quickly to the essentials of living and surviving, and in that of life - actions, relations, words, intentions, thoughts, meanings’. There is the old ambiguity about going up there to find or lose oneself, but it is perhaps more that the far north, and particularly the High Arctic, intensifies experiences rather than providing answers or transformations. Canadian artist Glen Gould made a radio documentary programme of sounds and words and silences called the Idea of the North. For Gould the idea of north was as a metaphor for the sheer physical profundity of the northern land, ‘an escape from the limitations of civilization’ .. as something ‘other’, separate, away from society; a state of mind within which lay creative possibilities. He concludes that this vast irreducible territory is a strength, a constant reminder of the need for unity, a source of saving humanity rather than seeing it simply as a source of wealth for natural resources. Author Peter Davidson in his book The Idea of North (2004) refers to its ‘absolute difficult beauty’. Trying to grapple with all this and make work is interesting – and challenging. Sometimes the landscape seems to just draw itself – it looks like drawings rather than reality - out of this world – and I wonder what I can add to it. Davidson writes: ‘apersistent myth of the north in our own time is that the exploration of the Arctic is morally pure, connected with concepts such as rigorous self-discipline and self-knowledge, allowing artists to cling to the popular belief that northern regions are untouched, pristine. It is both reality and imagination, both rich and dangerous, a northern haven, but also a harsh dark place’. It becomes a clear bright morning. Breakfast over there is a landing on Svidjotholmen (or ‘Spikeholmen’ after Spike one of the artists traveling with us), I’m really torn between going to the island and staying on the deck to work; in some ways I should make every opportunity to go on land. In the end I stay and work on deck. I watch silhouetted figures moving around on the island, dwarfed in front of the massive shape of Svidjotbreen, and hear the noise of a large glacial calving, which I’m later told causes a big wave to hit the island. I’m sure I’m going to regret not going… but will I gain anymore from drawing on land rather than looking at the land from the sea?Midday we sail south, the wind has dictated our direction. So this is as far north as we are going to get, I feel disappointed. Cloud hovering and descending, mountains disappear reappear disappear reaching up into the sky and I’m not sure where mountains stops and sky begins anymore. A thunder grey and pale blue world, pale turquoise blue-green sea, dark ripples traveling fast across its surface. We pass chunks of ice, one looks like a swan with wings outstretched, then a large intensely turquoise piece – it doesn’t look real. Snowings again, four seagulls flying just above the sea, a dark line against white. A dusting of new snow on the mountains, dark jagged teeth above smooth snow covering. We pass glacier after glacier; I wonder what early travelers made of all this, a place of horror or wonder? In the book ‘Arctic Dreams’ author Barry Lopez remarks:'...It is as though the land slowly works its way into the man... The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful. Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life. Its power flows into the mind from a realization of how darkness and light are bound together within it..”. Mid afternoon, snowing so heavily that I can’t see anything; we sail on in our own white world and take turns to sweep the deck. Late afternoon the snow stops, the sky clears, the sun setting pink-orange reflected in light green pink-tinged sea, dark clouds. I stay on deck desperately trying to paint as the wind picks up - 9-10 m/s; it’s icy and my paint begins to look a bit like those slush puppy drinks kids buy. There’s still a very cold wind blowing. Most of the mountains remain shrouded in grey mist, sea turns dark blue black, a Guillimot flies by.Evening, we anchor at Fjortende Julibukta and drink mulled wine on deck in the dark.
• Arctic log: Wednesday 12th October, Smeerenburg – Walrus, wonder and whaling (with added bits)
Wednesday 12.10.2016 Smeerenburg 79°43,7´N, 011°00.5´E, 2°C8m/s, wind picking up. Sunrise 10:02 – Sunset 17:23. I wake early and peer out of my porthole; still dark, there is now 22 minutes less daylight. I can just make out coastline and mountains. It’s raining; depressing, it shouldn’t be. What is happening to our climate? We move a short distance closer to the island of Smeerenburg, and there’s the usual scramble for equipment and to board the zodiac for the trip from ship to shore. The sky clear slightly as we leave the ship, light breaks through the clouds.Landing on the beach I gaze back to the far shore and dark mountains on the far side of the bay; it’s just wondrous, as though a stage has been set for me. In the gloom mist is gathering, hovering, moving slowly, and then it seems to be flowing upwards over the dark mountain peaks that poke through. Above an ethereal light is coming from somewhere out of the dark clouds so that the glaciers gleam, turning turquoise as they reach the sea. It looks so ridiculously magical, so unbelievably beautiful I feel I’m in a fairy tale world. Turning up the beach we find the walruses, lots of them, lying lazily in large companionable heaps, lolling, shifting, shuffling, rolling, an occasional flipper waving in the air, long white tusks appearing as a head raises to survey us, an occasional snort grunt and fart - they smell. A bit like huge slugs as wrinkled brown and pink skin rippling they haul their colossal bodies along the pale yellow sand. A young walrus swims with its parents, playfully sinking, surfacing, splashing, pausing to peer at this strange group who cluster on the beach and move as one edging closer to the Walrus mound, our cameras capturing their every move. (A point of information: the Walrus’s scientific name is Odobenus rosmarus which in Latin means tooth-walking seahorse).My feet are wet and I’m cold, and there are only so many photographs to be taken of a walrus; seeing them in the flesh is what counts, and they are pretty amazing to watch, but even this has its limits. Eventually we are able to tour around the remains of Smeerenburg - ´Blubbertown’ - an old 17th Century Dutch whaling station. First occupied by the Dutch in 1614, in its heyday (1630s) Smeerenburg was made up of 16–17 buildings. A board commemorates the site with a map showing the location of buildings and ovens. Having be warned to tread carefully and keep off the tundra (again!) we are allowed to wander carefully around the old ovens. Blackened lumps mark the remains of blubber ovens - rock fused with sand, gravel, and whale oil boiled together to make “blubber cement”, and where cooking vessels to render oil from the fat once stood. Remains of blubber ovensFlensing. Facsimile of a woodcut in the Cosmograhie Universelle ofThevet Folio, Paris 1574Blubber cement - It has a texture resembling asphalt. During this time there were as many as 200 men working ashore, 'flensing' whales (stripping the blubber), the blubber was then cut into small pieces, put into casks and boiled until it became oil. Scattered on the beach a mass of wood lies abandoned, amongst them the bleached white bones left from whales killed and dismembered on the beach; I ponder how old they must be. Surfaces scoured by wind and snow, lichen is beginning to take over, the bones look almost sculptural - shades of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. A barren windswept island, swept by wild sea and storm, it must have been a pretty awful place to be amid the stench of death and boiling oil. On the ground lie patches of bright green and orange mosses, presumably fertilized by the ashes of slaughtered whales. By the second half of the century Smeerenberg was mostly abandoned since they had exhausted the supply of whales. The whale population never recovered. There are almost none left in the waters around Svalbard. Somewhere out here are the graves of over 100 men who lost their lives during the 17th and 18th century… but then I think of all the whales they killed. In the book The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding I find this quote:Extract from The Solitude of Thomas Cave, by Georgina HardingI look around me and imagine the horror of it all, but the surrounding mountains are a complete contrast to the slaughter and chaos that this beach must have endured. In the same book I find a quote echoing what I'm now seeing Across on the shore I can see the usual photographers at work. Despite its dark history it's a place to capture. I make a few quick drawings looking up at the misty blue blur of dark mountains and snow; the sky has that end-of-day pink.Standing awaiting the zodiacs a small Arctic fox appears trotting down to the beach. I watch from the Zodiac as it suddenly jumps into the mass of Walrus and disappears. In the afternoon I stay on board while others go on a trek up to the top of a glacier; I’m so tempted to join them but my clothes and boots are still wet from the morning, instead I spend some time trying to make colours that I see in the landscape. Grinding the water-colour pigments together that I’ve brought with me, mixing in sea water collected by lowering a bucket over the side of the boat and hoisting it up. This is a project I planned before I left the UK, and I still haven’t actually done anything about until now, so I need to get on with it while I have the opportunity and the deck is pretty much deserted. I spend half the time staring at the sea and glacier, trying to decide what exactly are those colours out there. Once I've mixed a batch I ask for them to be put in the freezer to be used at a later date… -->The Antigua moves off in cloud. We travel slowly through a pale green/grey icy sea, snow covering, ice scattering, sea slowly swelling as if breathing. Ellis O’Connor joins me on deck and we’re both drawing again as land and ice slips by. Marvelling at it allCan’t stop now - white that isn’t white, white that is many whites, soft black, dissolving merging melting dripping. I gather snow and push it into charcoal and pastel across the paper. Cold fingers. Visibility disappearing in freezing ice and snow that whips across the deck. These are some of the most perfect moments.Evening, we anchor in Fuglefjorden, 79°45,3´N, 011°31.5´E. Out on deck in the dark I listen to ice scrapping along the side of the boat, to ice cracking releasing its age-old air.Addendum: In January 2017 I travel to Amsterdam and wandering around the Rijksmuseum come across a painting of Smeerenberg The Whale-Oil Refinery near the Village of Smeerenburg (1639) by Cornelis de Man. The Whale-Oil Refinery near the Village of Smeerenburg (1639) by Cornelis de Man, Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamClearly from the look of it De Man didn’t actually ever visit the whaling station, painting it from the comfort of his studio at home, and apparently basing it on a Danish painting of a Svalbard whaling station and other images. I also discover in a nearby case beautiful knitted hats that were removed from excavated graves on Smeerenberg. I suppose due to the freezing conditions so far north, much of the clothing was very well-preserved. As the Rijksmuseum caption notes the men were bundled up so tightly against the cold that they would have only “recognized by the colours and patterns of their caps". As in Shetland fishermen wore distinctive jumper patterns knitted for each family members, I suppose here too, men working in Smeerenburg when pulled from the sea would also be identifiable by the pattern and colour of each hat. The original dyed rich colours of the thick caps have long since faded which have taken up the uniform brown colour of the soil they were buried in, but their original patterns with strips and varying shapes are still visible. They are wonderful pieces to pause by and wonder about who wore them and who knitted them.
• Monday 10th October – Blomstrandbreen trek – "Get off the tundra!"
--> Monday 10.10.2016 Blomstrandbreen 79°00,2´N, 012°13.1´E Cloudy and overcast, a dark but beautiful morning. 2°C, 2m/s. Sunrise 09:45 – Sunset 17:41A wet foggy start to the day, still dark while we eat breakfast; even as we assemble on deck and climb into the Zodiacs it’s only just about getting light. We travel towards shore in the gloom of early morning, a pale green sea, mist clinging low to the mountains. No-one speaks, the bay is full of luminous glacial ice, pale turquoise blue, white, laced brown, large, small, flat, jagged, float silently passed us, jostling for space. Travelling by Zodiacs to shore is more hazardous today as we slowly push our way through the ice. I look back to where the Antigua sits surrounded by a gently swelling turquoise blue ice sea; some of those pieces are pretty big.We set off trekking up the mountain at a brisk pace; our aim is to reach the head of Blomstrandbreen. A tricky climb, the tundra crumbling and rocky, a bit like climbing up scree. Stones strewn across the ground - pure white, jet black, marble-like patterns, some like ancient bits of wood. Lying amongst them is a small piece of reindeer antler, soft grey with darker markings. Then something white moves up ahead. We all freeze. Sara looks worried, her hand travels to the rifle; this is not a good sign. We’re too far up to retreat, nowhere to shelter. We stand exchanging looks, whispering, then relief, it’s a pale reindeer, its arctic coat beginning to show. I wonder what we would have done if it had been a polar bear - maybe better not to think. We continue upwards and pass a pair of harmless white Rock Tarmigan wandering amongst rocks and low foliage; they don’t seem bothered by us. Rock Tarmigan (archive photos)Climbing through mist it feels as though we are suspended, cocooned somewhere between sky and sea. As we reach the top it clears and there’s a spectacular view back to the shore. A thin line of a bright burnt orange winds through the deep gorge below us; up here I can’t hear the stream. I peer over the drop; before me a stone strewn path dragged by the ice and then the glacier sweeps vertically down to the sea edge where blue ice pushes up together, growing high into fat rounded peaks, bunching on shoreline waiting their turn to calf and fall, break into pieces and float out to sea. Pockets of mist hover and drift about us. Much of the ground is bare rocks, small pockets of snow lying on slopes, but not as much as there should be.On the edgeGet off the Tundra Zlatan!Looking back down the way we’ve climbed I can see far across the bay to yet another gleaming glacier. Cloud and mist drifts, sun on ice. Below us lies the Antigua, a tiny speck in a vast space. We pause, standing together where once has been glacier, a silent group listening to the land and sea and sky. I close my eyes. Now I hear the rush of water below us, then sounds of the glacier calving, of air moving, air that feels so clear, then silence. I feel so remote from the world and yet right in the midst of it. Overwhelmingly beautiful, I think we have a collective sublime moment. Then we are herded back down at breakneck speed, slipping and sliding on the scree, as we're late for lunch (never mind being sublime when the captain is pacing the deck).Cloud descends again as we arrive back on the Antigua, hanging low of the mountain we just climbed, intensifying the blues in the ice, dark dramatic peaks rising behind the glacier. Leaving Bloomstrandbreen - a flash of blue skyAfternoon, we head northwards, and I hang about on the deck and draw fast. sketch book - drawing on the move - leaving Bloomstrandbreensketch book - drawing on the move- passing glaciersketch book - drawing on the move- mountains and glaciersWe reach Ny Ålesund late afternoon. Once a coal-mining settlement, now an international centre for arctic scientific research and environmental monitoring, with a shifting population of scientists/researchers from 10 countries. http://kingsbay.no/ Our arrival increases the population by 78%. Ny ÅlesundSitting against a backdrop of mountains, it feels somewhere between entering a sci-fi movie set and an episode of The Prisoner. Strangely-shaped antenna point into the sky monitoring the northern lights, white domes sit eerily in the landscape listening to the stratosphere, neat wooden buildings painted in pale colours, board walks, notices forbidding you to walk on the tundra - geoscientists are studying permafrost soils and changes in glacier systems and we mustn’t touch the ground. There are devises to measure how higher levels of UV radiation are affecting sea life in the fjords, to record how organisms are responding to increasing ocean acidification. Occasionally a few people appear busily walking from one building to another, clipboards in hand, a cyclist passes by. Receiving strict instructions to observe all the signs and not walk off the path, we walk in file, careful where we put our feet, and arrive at the Amundsen/Nobile mast. A rather bleak place, I stare up at the metal structure. It’s all that now remains of the launch station for airship Norge, along with a plaque that hails the event as a 'glorious achievement'.In reality the expedition seems less heroic and more of a feat of survival judging by the accounts of the trip. Launched May 11th 1925 the aim was to observe uncharted sea between the Pole and Alaska. Amundsen, the famous Norwegian expedition leader and navigator, and Umberto Nobile, Italian airship designer and pilot, apparently didn’t hit it off, relations becoming strained, understandable perhaps in such freezing, cramped and noisy conditions (there were sixteen of them inside the ship). It all became even worse when, a day later, they passed the North Pole and in true patriotic style dropped their flags and Amundsen saw the Italian flag was larger than the Norwegian and American flags. Size clearly matters. Amundsen later contemptuously described the trip as "a circus wagon in the sky".Airship Norge hovers over Ny-Ålesund before heading for the North Pole. (Image: Norwegian Polar Institute Photo Library)Photo taken in the Ny Ålesund museumNy Ålesund’s museum tells the history of mining up until early 1960’s when, on 5 November 1962, there was an explosion in the Ester mine. The entire work shift, consisting of 21 miners, lost their lives. 10 of the bodies were brought up to the shocked town, 11 were never found. The mine became their grave and was closed. The shop seems to sell mainly tourist stuff – fridge magnets, socks, sweets (maybe scientists have sweet teeth), the usual array of postcards, although there’s a couple of nice images of old Ny Ålesund amongst them. I buy a couple and write one to send home.It’s already dark when we return to the boat; 20 minutes less daylight each day now. In a couple of weeks there will be no daylight for several months as Polar night sets in. Late evening the sky is clear and Northern lights flicker. I'm finally sleeping on the top bunk and have a porthole through which to see the world. I breath a little easier.
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