Farewell Glacier
Video by Matt Wainwright
Barentsburg
We found a time machine here. It had been left like a cherished but now abandoned hobby project up on a promenade built, with similar optimism, to give the miners and their wives a summer Sunday view of the Barents[…..]
Tundra
A summer carpet On terraces of ice; Domesticated It could furnish a dream-room In a house of rock – Saxifrage forests Tower half an inch Into the mists; Parabolic arrays Of Arctic dandelions Rise and set Once a year; Terracotta[…..]
Monacobreen
We sailed across a very cold, still sea in sunlight – a meld of chrome and the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, leaving behind a wake of slowed-down time. We approached the glacier at the end of the[…..]
Rock concert
Video by Matt Wainwright.
Stuffed Polar Bears
Almost midnight; the Nooderlicht is moored in snow-blasted Fuglefjorden in north-west Svalbard, and we are all huddled together on the deck to watch the marvel of nature we’d been hoping we might witness; a polar bear diving in the freezing[…..]
SOS
Read more on our day of excitement when the emergency call went out. Continue reading
The Romance of Catastrophe
I spent some of this morning slowly reading a terrific book by Francis Spufford, about the polar expeditions, gloriously subtitled ‘Ice and the English imagination’; I read the chapter about the sublime, and, among other things, the romance of catastrophe[…..]
KINNVIKA
We woke up in Kinnvika fjord in the north west of Svalbard. From the deck, we saw low hinterlands scattered with snow, rising to peaks; and in the distance a thin white line of sea ice trapped by the wind[…..]
