Latest news with #Longyearbyen
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I visited Europe's largest wilderness - where it's illegal to go outside without a weapon and seal is on the menu
Improbable, measureless and beautifully sinister, Svalbard is a natural film set - it's no wonder parts of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning were filmed here. The size of Ireland, the Norwegian archipelago is the largest wilderness in Europe - just 400 miles from the North Pole. Most of it is rock and ice and only one island, Spitsbergen, is inhabited, home to 2,600 souls in five tiny settlements. I'm here for a week - joining a snowmobile expedition. Here's how it went... Ultra cold at base camp Svalbard never thaws and is frozen to a depth of more than 330ft (100m). At the heart of this icy world is Longyearbyen, a former coal mining town. In spring the temperature hovers at about -15C. This is the world's most northerly town, featuring the most northerly library, pub, schools and a handful of 'Scandi cool' hotels. Seal features on menus. Snowmobiles are sold at the Co-op. Reindeer patrol the tundras. It's illegal to leave Longyearbyen without weapons. 'Polar bears can appear anywhere,' warns our guide, Elise, who carries a rifle. The previous week a group was stalked (luckily, without incident). Typically they're 7ft-plus and can weigh more than 100 stone (630kg). There are more than 3,000 in Svalbard. You can spot stuffed bears all over town: in the airport, pub and even the church. Out on the ice there are six in our group, each with a snowmobile. For eight hours we ride up frozen rivers, through ice fields and on to glaciers, the temperature dropping to -27C. We're wearing polar suits and the handlebars are heated. For sustenance we have freeze-dried curry. The size of Ireland, the Norwegian archipelago is the largest wilderness in Europe - just 400 miles from the North Pole After Longyearbyen we see no one else. It's an unforgettable ride, with mountains as white as clouds below a cobalt-blue sky. Cliffs arise in the distance looking like stacks of iced pink coins. On one occasion, at Horbyebreen, we enter a natural tunnel beneath the glacier. The silence is enormous. After 84 miles we reach the improbably stylish Nordenskiold Lodge, with leather armchairs, panoramic windows and even a sauna. Here we're looked after by a proper Arctic couple: Trond, a former trapper, and his partner, Ragna, who served up a superb reindeer stew. Plumbing is tricky in the tundra, so men have to pee outside. Doing so involves taking an armed guard (Trond) who keeps an eye out for polar bears with his .44 Magnum. Eight miles away is the Russian mining town of Pyramiden. Under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, Moscow is permitted to extract coal, and the town is a relic of Soviet times. Due to sanctions, we don't visit, but we do skirt the sea-ice around the town. It's a gloomy place of scabby tower blocks and rusting cranes that during its heyday (1975-85) was home to 900 miners. Now only 20 remain - plus a statue of Vladimir Lenin. On our final day we walk across a frozen bay to the bottom of Nordenskiold Glacier. Here great columns of ice sheer off and collapse with a boom. From afar the glacier wall looks like a torrent of smashed up skyscrapers. But close up it's more like a rampart made of turquoise marble. In the evening, Ragna drops chunks of this prehistoric ice in our whiskies. On Spitsbergen there are more huskies than humans. Before snowmobiles, dogs were the only way to travel. On our return I try what's known as mushing, any sport powered by dogs. With names like Ravioli, Stinky and Twix, they're strong, affectionate and eager to please. Compared with zipping in a snowmobile it's slow going. Not everyone survives Svalbard. Some missions prove truly impossible. The North Pole Museum in Longyearbyen is like a gallery of mishaps. It's all here: an aviator's maroon suit, bits of Roald Amundsen's plane and the doomed Italia airship. The city museum also has a 'catastrophe section'. One exhibit concerns the rifle of trapper Georg Nilsen, who vanished in 1921. His skeleton was discovered in 1965, crunched up by polar bears... his rifle jammed. John Gimlette is the author of The Gardens Of Mars: Madagascar, An Island Story, published by Head of Zeus.
The Independent
19-05-2025
- The Independent
The world's northernmost airport says its runway is starting to melt due to climate change
The world's northernmost commercial airport, popular with tourists seeking snowy landscapes and Arctic adventures, has warned that its runway is melting due to climate change. The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, loved for its Northern lights and outdoor activities, from dog-sledging to ice cave exploration, could see its main airport at risk as temperatures continue to rapidly rise. The airport is found in the town of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, which is roughly midway between the mainland and the North Pole. Two airlines, SAS and Norwegian, offer year-round flights from the airport to Norway 's mainland, as well as charter flights and private jets. While tourists continue to flock to the region for adventures in the polar wilderness, the airport has been feeling the effects of climate change within its already fragile landscape. Svalbard Airport's singular 2,300-metre-long runway was built upon a layer of permafrost in the 1970s, but decades on, this layer has started to melt. Ragnhild Kommisrud, the airport's manager, told CNN that during the summer months, they check the runway meticulously every day, as the soil must subside 'This is a challenge that we only expect to get worse with time,' she said. Global warming is a huge concern to the airport and Svalbard as a whole. 'It's important to clarify that the melting of permafrost in Svalbard is not caused by local emissions or activity alone but is a direct result of global climate change,' she told The Independent. 'The Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the global average, and this has severe implications for infrastructure, ecosystems, and communities in the region. 'What we are witnessing in Svalbard is one of the clearest signals of the accelerating climate crisis worldwide.' The melting of permafrost has affected structures beyond the airport across Svalbard, with some buildings and infrastructure becoming less stable, with an increased the risk of landslides and avalanches. While Svalbard's residential community has been committed to preventing climate change and preserving the natural landscape, until recently, the archipelago's economy had been largely dominated by coal. Over the past decade, coal mining operations have been winding down their production and in 2023, Longyearbyen's coal-fired power station was shut down and replaced with a diesel-powered plant. While this new plant still has a high carbon footprint, it has been able to cut carbon emissions by nearly half in the area, CNN reports. Since Svalbard has started to wind back its coal mining operations, tourism has stepped up to be a major economic contributor in the archipelago. Intrepid travellers who prefer to swap a city break for frozen fjords and adventurous activities travel to Svalbard. 'Svalbard used to be an extreme tourism destination, catering to the most adventurous travellers. It is still pretty niche, but we are becoming more mainstream,' says Ronny Brunvoll, CEO of Visit Svalbard, told CNN. Despite limitations such as harsh weather and long stints of darkness over winter, the region's popularity has also meant that overtourism could become a potential threat. Initiatives are already in place to quell tourist impact. To help preserve Svalbard, authorities introduced an environmental tax in 2007 of NOK 105 (£7.60) to be paid by visitors. In 2025, new cruise regulations were also put in place with passenger caps of 200 in protected areas. Avinor, Norway's government-owned airport operator, which operates Svalbard Airport and more than 40 others, has committed to a wider decarbonisation project. The group said last year that its goal is to reduce its own emissions by 42 per cent in 2030, and is collaborating with the Norwegian aviation sector's goal of being fossil-free by 2050. One of the ways it is venturing towards this goal is by establishing a biogas plant at the airport. The biogas plant hopes to come into service in early 2026, subject to the completion of the ongoing governmental approval process. 'Tackling the root causes of permafrost melting requires global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,' Ms Kommisrud added. 'What happens in the Arctic is ultimately shaped by emissions from all over the world.'
BBC News
08-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Visit the Arctic vault holding back-ups of great works
High above the Arctic Circle, the archipelago of Svalbard lies halfway between mainland Norway and the North mountainous, and remote, it's home to hundreds of polar bears and a couple of sparse of those is Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, and just outside the settlement, in a decommissioned coal mine, is The Arctic World Archive (AWA) - an underground vault for pay to have their data stored on film and kept in the vault, for potentially hundreds of years. "This is a place to make sure that information survives technology obsolescence, time and ageing. That's our mission," says founder Rune Bjerkestrand, leading the way on head-torches we descended a dark passageway and followed the old rail tracks 300 metres into the mountainside, until we reached the archive's metal the vault, stands a shipping container stacked with silver packets, each containing reels of film, on which the data is stored."It's a lot of memories, a lot of heritage," Mr Bjerkestrand says."It's anything from digitised art pieces, literature, music, motion picture, you name it."Since the archive's launch eight years ago, more than 100 deposits have been made by institutions, companies and individuals, from 30-plus the many digitised artefacts are 3D scans and models of the Taj Mahal; tranches of ancient manuscripts from the Vatican Library; satellite observations of Earth from space; and Norway's treasured painting, the Scream, by Edvard Munck. The AWA is a commercial operation and relies on technology provided by Norwegian data preservation company, Piql, which Mr Bjerkestrand also was inspired by the Global Seed Vault, a seed bank that's located only a few hundred metres away, a repository where crops can be recovered after natural or manmade disasters."Today, there are a lot of risks to information and data," said Mr Bjerkstand. "There is terrorism, war, cyber hackers."According to him, Svalbard is the perfect place, for hosting a secure data storage facility."It's far away from everything! Far away from wars, crisis, terrorism, disasters. What could be safer!"Underground it's dark, dry and chilly, with temperatures remaining sub-zero all year-round; conditions which Mr Bjerkestrand claims are ideal for keeping the film safe for global warming cause the thick Arctic permafrost to thaw, the vault is still robust enough to preserve its contents he the back of the chamber, another large metal box contains GitHub's Code software developer has archived hundreds of reels of open source code here, which are the building blocks underpinning computer operating systems, software, websites and languages, AI tools, and every active public repository on its platform, written by its 150 million users, are also stored here."It's incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software, it's become so critical to our day to day lives," Githhub's chief operating officer, Kyle Daigle tells the firm has explored a variety of long-term storage solutions, he said, and there are challenges. "Some of our existing mechanisms can be stored for a very long time, but you need technology to read them." At Piql's headquarters in southern Norway, data files are encoded onto photosensitive film."Data is a sequence of bits and bytes," explains senior product developer, Alexey Mantsev, as film ran through a spool at his fingertips."We convert the sequence of the bits which come from our clients data into images. Every image [or frame] is about eight million pixels."Once these images are exposed and developed, the processed film appears grey, but viewed more closely, it's similar to a mass of tiny QR information can't be deleted or changed, and is easily retrievable explains Mr Mantsev. "We can scan it back, and decode the data just the same way as reading data from a hard drive, but we will be reading data from the film."One key question arising with long-term storage methods, is whether people will understand what has been preserved and how to recover it, centuries into the a scenario Piql has also thought about, and so a guide that can be magnified and read optically, is printed onto the film, as well. Every day more data is being used and generated than ever before, but experts have long warned of a potential "digital Dark Age", as technological advances render previous software and hardware could mean the files and formats we use now, face a similar fate to the floppy disks and DVD drives of the firms offer long-term data of magnetic tape known as LTO (Linear Tape Open), are the most common form, but newer innovations promise to revolutionise how we preserve example, Microsoft's Project Silica has developed 2mm-thick panes of glass, onto which chunks of data is transferred by powerful a team of scientists from the University of Southhampton have created a so-called 5D memory crystal, which has saved a record of the human also been placed in the Memory of Mankind repository, another vault safeguarding historic documents, hidden in a salt mine in Austria. The Arctic World Archive receives deposits three times a year, and as the BBC visited, recordings of endangered languages and the manuscripts of the composer Chopin, were among the latest reels placed in the Christian Clauwers, who's been documenting South Pacific Islands threatened by sea level rise, was also adding his work."I deposited footage and photography, visual witnesses of the Marshall Islands," he says."The highest point of the island is three meters, and they're facing huge impact of climate change.""It was really humbling and surreal," says archivist Joanne Shortland, head of Heritage Collections at the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, after depositing records, engineers' drawings and photographs of historic car models."I have all these formats that are becoming obsolete."You need to keep changing the file format and making sure that it's accessible in 20 or 30, years time. The digital world has so many problems."
