Arctic mountains
do at the poles. For a start, the sun doesn’t rise above
the horizon starting the third week of October. This
means that there is daylight, but not daylight as we
know it. Instead it’s a kind of bluish-grey light, with
the tips of the mountains alight with the last pink rays
of sun coloring their peaks. From November 14 –
January 29 there is no light at all.
Not only does the sun behave strangely, but so
does the moon. This time of the year the moon makes
an oval around the North Pole so it is nearly always
visible. The night sky is increasingly important as the
days get shorter by about 20 minutes per day. After
several days of sailing we had a clear night and many
of us were anxious to see the Northern Lights, the
aurora borealis. Ironically, the captain of the boat
informed us that we were too far north to see them.
They form a ring around the pole and we were well
inside the ring. We did finally see them some time
later when we worked our way south. We had to look
south in order to see them.
I filled up an entire sketchbook with ideas and
impressions. Each day was spent on land, hiking,
sketching, and taking photos. Like any tourist in an
unfamiliar land, my sketches are first impressions and
will stay in the sketchbook. I will use the sketches as
launching points for ideas and memories of how the
scenery affected me. A lot of the behavior of the
landscape is dictated by the permafrost that is 100600 meters thick. Because the earth is frozen starting
about 1 meter beneath the surface, there is no
drainage and that means only select plants can grow
there. Both of the Earth’s poles are deserts and this is
fortunate for the plants, given the lack of drainage.
Some plants, like the Tufted Saxifrage, look similar to
what I find in the desert of Southern California. No
trees grow in Svalbard. Frost heave and soil creep are
conditions of permafrost that push rocks to the
surface and make buildings unstable. In
Longyearbyen all water, sewer, and electrical ducts
have to be above the surface. Stones split due to
extreme cold and heat fluctuations over the years