Climate Change Central

Antennaforest, Spitsbergen, 2003

Halfway to the excavation site, Jørn Hurum stoops to pick up a golf-ball-size rock. “This,” he says, “is a knuckle from a marine reptile.” The 150-million-year-old fossil and scores like it are scattered all over the mountainside. “But when they’re weathered or we can’t glue them together, they’re useless,” explains the paleontologist, who works at Oslo’s Natural History Museum. “So we say they’re from an explodosaurus.”

As we scramble up the scree-strewn slope, I realize that finding the remains of these beasts is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, making Svalbard in the High Arctic a veritable Jurassic Park. “We found 11 more skeletons last week,” says Hurum. “This is the richest spot in the world for prehistoric marine reptiles.”

Sea monsters notwithstanding, Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago whose northern shores are a mere 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole (that’s roughly the distance between Calgary and Vancouver), puts on a jaw-dropping show on its own. Jagged cloud-piercing peaks give way to a landscape that undulates like the skirt of a flamenco dancer, its folds cradling rivers that sneak out from under glaciers covering at least 60 percent of the land mass. As we make our way by boat from the town of Longyearbyen across a frigid fjord to check out Hurum’s dig, we stop to admire a pod of beluga whales doing lunch near the shore. For Hurum – who’s teamed up with Spitsbergen Travel, an outfitter named for the archipelago’s biggest and only human-inhabited island, to bring tourists to the site during the two-week excavation season – it’s “important that people learn about all the science that goes on here.”

With most of the archipelago untouched by human hands, Svalbard offers a research setting without background noise.

For this Arctic outpost, all the science is about looking ahead. After a century wresting coal from its stratified geology, near-pristine Svalbard is seeing a new light at the end of the mineshaft. Old reptile knuckles form part of that vision. Sure, commercial mining is still the breadwinner for the islands’ 2,100 inhabitants, and Longyearbyen, the archipelago’s “capital,” is heated with coal scooped out from Mine 7 at the end of the road just east of town. But scientific sleuthing (like fossil hunts, research into CO2 capture and storage and university courses in polar ecology) accounts for an ever-larger chunk of Svalbard’s revamped economy, along with welcoming tourists hoping to immortalize a member of the 3,000-strong polar bear family. Longyearbyen made front-page news two years ago when the Svalbard Global Seed Vault swung open its brushed steel door to 4.5 million food-crop seed samples. And in September, Ny-Ålesund, an international research base some 100 kilometres northwest of Longyearbyen, stole the spotlight when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon dropped in to see the effects of climate change and to hear from the climate detectives working there. With all this science, Svalbard is a living lab.

Scientists use radars of different shapes and sizes to observe weather and turbulence high in the polar atmosphere in their search for climate-change clues. (Winternight, Spitsbergen, 2003)

The chase is on. I stumble across the spongy moss toward the pond, while biologist Maarten Loonen hollers instructions from the opposite shore. “Canada, stay where you are!” I stop. Loonen wades into the water and herds a gaggle of barnacle geese toward a spit that separates the pond from the icy Kongsfjorden. The geese, unable to fly until new feathers grow out during the annual moult, dash across the spit and slip into the sea. Two kayakers pick up the pursuit, driving them around Ny-Ålesund’s cruise-ship dock and power plant. After 45 minutes, the birds are back on land, corralled into a boathouse-cum-lab. The day before, Loonen and his team caught, tagged and took blood and measurements from 117 geese; this time, we’re lucky to get three.

An assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Loonen has studied barnacle geese for more than 20 years. They always come to Svalbard in the summer, and since 1988, so does he. With most of the islands untouched by human hands, it’s a pretty good place for a goose – or a scientist – to take up temporary residence. “It’s a largely untrampled environment,” says Loonen, offering a research setting without background noise.

Ny-Ålesund is perhaps the world’s epicentre for environmental and climate-change research. With state-of-the-art labs and equipment, the village attracts the likes of geologists, mycologists and glaciologists, who come for a few days or a few weeks. Cellphones and other wireless gadgets are outlawed lest they interfere with a massive antenna used by the Norwegian Mapping Authority. (No worries: There’s broadband for discussing the latest breakthrough with off-site colleagues.) Ten countries boast their own research stations in an assortment of multicoloured buildings (one of which shelters a family of plucky Arctic foxes), some dating back to the town’s mining heyday; coal extraction here ceased in 1963. Over the past decade, research days have shot up by more than 42 percent. During the brief summer, the population swells from 35 to a whopping 180 people swishing around in Gore-Tex and fleece.

It doesn’t hurt that Kings Bay, the state-owned company that runs this place, serves up three daily stick-to-your-ribs meals and snacks in a glass-walled mess hall. After a lunch of pan-seared halibut and roasted potatoes followed by cake – there’s always cake – I search for my hiking boots. Not an easy task when there are about 100 pairs vying for space in the floor-to-ceiling cubbyholes at the entry. (Here, as in the hotels, museums and outfitters’ offices in Longyearbyen, a no-shoes policy dating from the dirty coal days still holds.) I lace up and stroll over to the British station, where I meet Bruce Moffett and Stephanie Henderson-Begg. We drive to the base of Zeppelin Mountain, south of town, and hop into a four-seat cable car operated with a remote control. Slowly, we ascend to 474 metres, gasping at the vast landscape; some 15 kilometres to the east (I could have sworn it was only three) lies the bluish swath of Kongsbreen glacier, chunks of which chill the vodka on Saturday bar nights.

When we reach the atmospheric research station close to the summit, the microbiologists from the University of East London check their equipment: a vacuum cleaner and a strip of tape mounted to capture airborne particles that might contain ice-making bacteria. “Pure water doesn’t freeze until the temperature drops to -36.5ºC,” says Moffett. (I wonder if my old science teacher knows that.) “But some micro-organisms can produce ice at temperatures as high as -1ºC.” While this discovery is already used to create artificial snow and to preserve food, the two scientists’ main interest is the potential for weather modification. The idea is that you sprinkle bacterial protein (not live bacteria) into the air, creating ice crystals and, subsequently, clouds and rain. As Henderson-Begg explains it, “Clouds high in the atmosphere trap solar radiation, warming the planet. Low clouds reflect solar heat, keeping the planet cool. If we could modify clouds, we could prevent global warming.”

The next day, I head out with University of Sheffield plant ecologist Gareth Phoenix to collect moss campion. We hike across a delta created by glacial runoff, hopping from stone to stone in a futile attempt not to dunk our feet, until we reach a spot where the wildflower grows. The moss campion and other plants, like the polar willow, which reaches a grand height of three centimetres, will shed light on how the Arctic copes with pollution carried here from Europe. On our way back, a chubby Svalbard reindeer jogging across the moraine makes me think about the potential of the sci-fi ice bugs. It’s almost as if Phoenix had read my mind. “Svalbard is so spectacular, it makes you feel really insignificant as a human being and even more desperate to protect such a place,” he tells me. “Planet Earth has only one Arctic. It would be nice to keep it as it is.”

Over 10 trips to Svalbard, Norwegian photographer Christian Houge has shot research installations as land art. Part of the series Arctic Technology, these images have been shown in New York, London, San Francisco and elsewhere. soulfood.no

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