Svalbard – Top of the World

In 2019 a group of us went to Antarctica on a mid-sized ship with only 80 passengers. The sights there were incredible with icebergs, whales, and millions of penguins. A few years later we heard about an opportunity to do a trip to the arctic hosted by ecologist Chris Morgan. It focused on arctic wildlife, including polar bears around the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Unfortunately Mr. Morgan wasn’t ultimately able to join us, but we had excellent guides and naturalists.

In late June 2023 we set off for Norway, eventually reaching the settlement of Longyearbyen at 78 degrees north. It was started as a coal mining town in 1906 by an American, John Munro Longyear, but has been increasingly focusing on polar research and tourism (coal mining has largely ceased). Since this town is above the arctic circle the sun never sets in the summertime, and never rises in the winter.

In 2008, the Norwegian government decided to create a secure facility to protect world crop diversity by storing seeds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault now contains millions of seeds from distinct crop samples, including hundreds of thousands of different kinds of wheat and rice.

Our ship, the Polar Pioneer, started off life as a Russian research vessel, built in Finland in 1982. It was subsequently retrofitted for arctic and antarctic expeditions, and is capable of ice breaking.

Our first excursion was to a well-known gathering of male walruses. They were mostly sleeping on the beach. Since this wasn’t the breeding season, the males were peaceful. Female groups are in different areas with the young.

Breaking through the ice was amazing with the sound of it cracking, and the birds looking for fish that were newly exposed

Along the way we took small zodiac boats to land to do some hiking and saw arctic flora, reindeer, and endless views of glaciers.

We next travelled to Svalbard’s largest ice cap, Austfonna. It’s Europe’s third-largest glacier. At this time of year it has waterfalls in a few places.

At one point, the captain called out “fogbow!” over the PA. So we rushed out to see. It’s like a rainbow, except without much color.

For a few days we hadn’t spotted any bears on the ice. When we finally left the most dense ice areas, we started spotting them, both in the water, and small icebergs, and land. One of them was a small bear that was probably born this year, but we never did see its mother.

Next up was an extremely large colony of thick-billed murres (also known as Brünnich’s guillemot). Arctic foxes are known to visit this colony and we were lucky enough to follow one as it searched for anything edible. At this time of year the foxes have dark coats (in winter they are white).

Finally, as we were returning to Longyearbyen, we spotted a beautiful medium-sized polar bear. The ship slowly approached next to the ice. The bear became curious, possibly due to smell and circled the boat many times.

Shortly thereafter we saw blue whales, spouting

Having seen nine polar bears, a few blue whales, walruses, endless birds, an arctic fox, reindeer, and lots of flora we returned to Longyearbyen for one more day, and celebrated with a fantastic birthday dinner for Roger (details in a future post).