One of our Polar specialists, Holly Adams, was lucky enough to voyage Around Spitsbergen this summer...
What struck me most about Spitsbergen was the diversity of the landscapes. If truth be told, I hadn’t really known what to expect but desolation, ice, probably snow and perhaps sparse islands of moss for the reindeer to scrape a living from. The books tell you all about the wildlife to expect and the weather, but hardly a mention is made of the almost pre-historic looking valleys and waterfalls, the wide meadows of marshy grasslands, littered with melt-water streams and native flowers or the incredible canyons and stalagmites of the lunar-like polar deserts, which stretch for miles, elasticated between craggy glaciers and the horizon. And the glaciers are everywhere. Littering the horizons and mountainous shores, the great walls of ice lurked nonchalantly at the corner of your eye each day, looking vaguely surprised yet oddly proud at the deep clefts and mars they’ve carved through the landscapes around them, a huge force of destruction yet simultaneously creating; sculpting valleys and molding the landscapes as they inch their way, century by century, across, over and through the land in an mammoth maze of ice and water.
The atmosphere that shrouds the peaks and snakes between the boulders and pebbles, like the mists that so quickly descend, is laced with a primeval ambience, the landscape seeming to emit a sense of ancient stillness, as though forgotten up here at the top of the world since before the primordial mist advanced and life sprung anew in all its gooey, multicellular glory. As you step from the modern day zodiac onto the deceptively virginal-seeming landscape, a thin veil of change occurs and you are seamlessly transported from the 21st century into the Cretaceous. The ground is littered with ancient, fossilized bones, each the size of a whale (which is, in fact, precisely what they are), and an eerie tranquility hangs in the air as life is sparse in this area – even so, you are subconsciously expecting a pterodactyl to swoop across the sky!
But of course the landscape is anything but virginal and has been in constant flux for centuries – a point of interest for many geologists as the entire archipelago is a geography lesson surrounded by water. Layering every exposed cliff face is the geological history of Spitsbergen staring brazenly out at the arctic sky and each shore landing brings a new plethora of minerals, stone, shale or crust to crunch beneath your feet. Having scraped off the thick icing of snow, you can see the journey the fossilized cake below has taken from the molten oven-centre of the earth and the slow crawl from the equator to the Arctic. The wear and tear of eons of compression and sedimentation tells an immense story of the earths tectonic plates, those gigantic puzzle pieces on which we perch so precariously.
And the sunlight also lends itself to Spitsbergen’s timeless atmosphere, infusing the polar clouds and bathing the land in a constant, soft, cushion of light. Recognition of the flow of time is utterly lost as ones body-clock is tipped out of kilter, muddled and lost in a sea of undying daylight, and it is truly liberating to be free of the bonds of time that govern our daily lives. The midnight sun crests over streaks of puffy clouds, saturating the skyscape with dawn-like yellows and breathing crystals of turquoise luminosity into the fragile ice formations which glide across the glassy dark waters.
It is so easy to feel alone on Spitsbergen, passing the occasional abandoned shack whose windows stare back at you with empty, haunted eyes or the rusty, decaying crumbs of long forgotten se ttlements; time capsules of human activity beneath a sun which never sets, but to experience the isolation of such a remote, untouched and alien territory is something truly unique in this internationally connected and over-populated age.
Our summer 2011 Spitsbergen voyage dates and prices are now available - start planning your Arctic adventure now!
