It would be another thirty-three years before their skeletons were found.Īnother section of the museum is dedicated to the not- so-derring-do of journalist and all-around chancer Walter Wellman. On July 11, 1897, he and his two crewmen took off for the pole, floated over the horizon, and disappeared. There is a section about Swedish hero Salomon Au gust Andrée, who decided he would try to fly from Svalbard to the North Pole in a balloon. With its faded cuttings, black-and-white pictures, typed notes, and shaky newsreel footage, the museum tells the story of the aeronauts who once upon a time explored the unknown lands of the North Pole by hot-air balloon, airship, and primitive airplane. Airships had once flown over Svalbard.Įntering the shack is like stepping into a fantasy world. On the front are the words “North Pole Expedition Museum.” Right next to that label is a picture of a zeppelin. Un derneath were the words “Gjelder hele Svalbard,” meaning “applies to all of Svalbard.”ĭown by the quayside, past where the scientists mon itoring the melting permafrost park their half-tracks, is a small black wooden shack with a sizable wooden cutout of a polar bear looking straight at you. I had my picture taken-quickly-by the sign with a polar bear inside a big red triangle on the edge of town. The super- markets warned customers not to bring their guns into the store. The grim wooden hostels were now bunk rooms for hikers, and the dingy bars they frequented looked as if they’d seen their fair share of fights. The mountainsides above the town are covered by the remains of aerial ropeways that once took coal from mines to the harbor the mine entrances them selves, which are little more than large holes in the side of the mountain and a handful of forbidding abandoned factories, rumored to host raves. ![]() On the drive into town, it felt like we could slip into Ly ra’s Svalbard at any time. In the future whether any survivors of our civilization would be able to reach it is a question we will hopefully never have to answer. The seed vault is the world’s guarantee of crop diversity It was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a long-term seed storage facility built to stand the test of time-and the challenges of natural or manmade disas ters. Jutting out of the mountainside above the airport was the gray rectangular entrance to what appeared to be a nuclear bunker. At the end of the runway lay the cold, gray, and deadly waters of the Arctic Ocean itself. If that didn’t make us realize how far north we had traveled, on three sides of the tarmac strip were mountains covered in snow, their glaciers glinting fiendishly in the April sunlight. As we dragged our bags across the tarmac to the lonely airport terminal building, the icy wind from the North Pole that cut through our down jackets as if we weren’t even wearing them was a healthy reminder of where we actually were. The two-and-a-half-hour flight time in a modern airliner did make the ends of the earth seem closer. ![]() I caught a Boeing from London via Oslo to Longyearbyen, the “capital” of these remote islands. ![]() It was on Svalbard, I now knew, that I would find answers to my last questions. of the great grim iron-bound coast, the cliffs a thousand feet and more high where the foul cliff-ghasts perched and swooped, the coal pits and fire mines where the bearsmiths hammered out mighty sheets of iron and riveted them into armor.” ![]() In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Sval bard is described to Lyra, the heroine of the books, as “the farthest, coldest, darkest regions of the wild.” It is a land of “slow-crawling glaciers of the rock and ice floes where the bright-tusked walruses lay in groups of a hundred or more, of the seas teeming with seals. Svalbard is a tiny group of dots in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Suddenly I could hear the throb of zeppelin engines in my ears. As I fumbled with the book, an old map unfolded itself from the back cover to offer another clue: “Svalbard,” it was titled.
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