HOME.
June 12, 2024 - Svalbard
My flight to Svalbard is at 12pm. I wake at 9:15am and start getting ready to go immediately. I leave a couple of perishable items in the bnb kitchen, grab some of the free coffee, then hail a taxi using Tromsø’s taxi app. I’m at the airport in no time, and check in at the desk with the Norwegian Airlines attendant - she checks my bag against my wishes and hands me my ticket. I pass through security and have to wait in a line at customs, as they haven’t opened the booths just yet; I wait there for about 15 minutes before the line starts moving, and once I’m through, it’s immediately time to board the aircraft. The short flight to the island is unremarkable for the most part, punctuated with extremely breathtaking sights as we descend through the clouds over the main island, Spitsbergen. The sea turns to ice, the ice turns to snow capped land, the land rises up into sharp razor-like mountains and falls away again into swirling glaciers that flow across valleys. The groundplane is so dynamic here when seen from above, varying in texture, color, pattern, and elevation. We drop extremely low to the water over a fjord, and turn in towards a strip of land to one side of a mountain. I can now see the airport, a simple complex of buildings containing one hangar, one ATC tower, and one terminal building - I browsed the construction documents for this buildings just a few days prior at the UiT SNSK archives.
Once we land, I exit the aircraft directly onto the tarmac and into a door in the side of the terminal building. A dog greets me searching for contraband, and I pass outside the building once again to the front face of the terminal - buses are queuing here to take arrivals into town. There is only one destination from here: Longyearbyen, the largest town in Svalbard. A giant post sits in front of the airport, pointing to destinations across the world and providing an estimate of distance to them. I have to walk back inside the terminal to retrieve my checked bag, after which I return to the buses. The driver explains how tickets work after the bus is fully boarded - it’s apparent this is routine for him. He comes around and charges for a round trip ticket, the second leg of which is redeemable whenever, forever, with no expiry; he emphasizes this last bit but still gets questions from individuals if their return date to the airport would be covered. Exiting the airport we pass old relics of mining infrastructure, and up on the hillside just above the airport I catch a glimpse of the Global Seed Vault. I’m returning to the vault tomorrow, though it’s hard to take my eyes off of the structure as we drive away from it into town.
Longyearbyen sits around a mile away from the airport. Warehouses line the shores of the fjord, an inlet off of the main Isfjorden called Adventfjorden - we pass a powerplant and recycling facility. The bus stops at major points in town, and my own happens to be the first stop. I’m staying at a small hotel called Mary Ann’s; I’m greeted by a cattle-ranch style gate to the property, adorned with reindeer antlers. I pace ahead of the other guests who got off at this stop, into a courtyard of sorts. There are Christmas trees everywhere, and an old bus parked in the yard that is now part of a restaurant here. Mary Ann’s used to function as old mining barracks, a fact that becomes ever more apparent as I step inside the building to find the reception desk. The walls within are lined with old photographs of Longyearbyen throughout the years, distributed amongst recovered signage and mining artifacts (like helmets) mounted atop aging wallpaper. Traditional rugs lie on top of hardwood floors and oldies music floats in the air. The receptionist, Julia, asks me to take off my shoes at the door before issuing my key and showing me the living room area that functions as a sort of 24/7 lounge with free coffee, tea, and a kitchen. I exit this building and walk one over to find my quarters - in this building too, I must take off my shoes, leave them in a mudroom, and traverse a hall past a full restaurant and bar. This restaurant, Vinterhagen, serves traditional food like reindeer and seal (though it’s extremely pricey and typically requires a reserved table for dinner). Beyond Vinterhagen is a door leading to a hallway of single rooms. Here I find number 27, my home for the next week and a half. I return to the reception desk sans my baggage - a billboard sits just inside the main door adorned with flyers for bus schedules, church services, and bans on flying drones in Adventdalen. I ask the receptionist about food options, as I haven’t eaten anything up to this point in the day. She points out a few restaurants in town before informing me they have lunch left over in the kitchen prepackaged for $9 if I’d like that. I say I would, and she comes back with a salmon and quinoa platter heated up - I’m elated. After refueling I head into town - I have to pass through the forest of Christmas trees surrounding the premises of Mary Ann’s lodge and duck under the full sized replica of a boat sitting in the yard before I’m on my way. Mary Ann’s sits on the other side of a stream from downtown Longyearbyen, but it’s otherwise very close to the main center of the city. I use a three foot wide bridge that doubles as a piping conduit to cross this rushing stream, passing underneath the abandoned trusses of an old cable car system that no longer functions on the island. Up on a hill behind me is the husk of the old cable car house, a striking structure elevated high up off the ground on stilts. In front of me, rows and rows of houses line a hillside, bright and colorful; up above them, avalanche retention fences grid off the mountainside slopes that rise sharply up from the valley floor. There is no snow on the ground here in the valley, though I can see small patches on top of the mountains, and much further up the valley, the beginning of a glacier gleaming white in the sun. The wind down here is chilling all the same, with air temp hovering in the mid-30’s.
I make my way to the Library - I’m hoping to catch a lecture on technologies and strategies being deployed here to advance Circular Economies in Longyearbyen, with a particular focus on trash and waste. This lecture is part of a series being conducted as part of ‘Sustainability Week’ here in Svalbard, coordinated by LPO Arkitekter (the primary architecture firm on the island). Unfortunately, this is one of the last lectures in the series - I only learned about Sustainability Week about two weeks ago while corresponding with a journalist working here in Longyearbyen, long after I’d booked my travel. I consider it fortuitous that there’s any overlap at all. The main library isn’t hard to find, as it’s one of the larger buildings in town along with the hospital and the shopping center. I have to take my shoes off again here, and it becomes evident this is a custom here. Padding through the library in socked feet, I find an attendant and confirm that the lecture is happening. The interiors are very modern, and there are a whole host of computers, study areas, stacks of books, and small gathering areas with projection screens. I sit down with some atlases of Svalbard and peruse the pages while I wait for the lecture to start. Slowly, people start to gather, and I put away the books to relocate around an array of screens on the wall. Pastries and coffee are wheeled in on a cart, and the space fills up with people. The librarian starts up a zoom call and two remote attendees join the gathering, both based in southern Norway.
It is at this point that the lecture begins. Dear Reader, please be advised that the entirety of the lecture was conducted in Norwegian, a language of which I know very little (and which hadn’t been a problem up until now). I’d been warned by the librarian when I came in earlier that it might not be in English, so luckily I’d drummed up a plan in the downtime before the presentation began. I sit listening intently for the next hour and a half, Google Translate app open, recording the speakers’ voices 30 seconds at a time - upon reaching a recording limit, the app processes the sound-byte and transcribes the presentation for me in English. In a bid to capture as much of the lecture as possible, I quickly scan the text while screenshotting the result before starting the process over again. Following this method, I’m able to loosely follow along, listening to both in-person and virtual speakers run through their slide decks with photographs and infographics, while simultaneously capturing a broken and gap-riddled transcription of the entire lecture and subsequent Q&A in my phone’s photo gallery. I am still combing back through those screenshots and digesting the contents of the lecture even as I write this a little while after. Attendees spoke on topics like transitioning Longyearbyen’s energy grid away from coal and towards diesel, with the end goal being an additional transition to biofuel while retrofitting existing facilities in order to do so. The speakers are hopeful, and talk of implementing these transitions in stages, using the word ‘modular’ as a way to refer to the piecemeal application of technologies over time. Other topics included a report from Longyearbyen’s recycling facilities, including a shareout of percentages and types of waste, largest sources of waste (the tourism and hospitality industry, in terms of both food waste and paper/plastic products), and how to be more efficient with future recycling efforts while reducing incineration. There are mentions of the Svalbardmelding, a report from the Norwegian government concerning their plan for the future of the island - I’d just learned about Svalbardmelding last week. A wealth of opinions have emerged in the wake of the report’s recent release on May 31st, which could be described as controversial at best. The last Svalbardmelding was released in 2016, with no directive or strong vision from the Norwegian government since; the latest report comes at a critical moment when ramping geopolitical activity beckons Norway to take a more vested interest in the island. I should note here that Norway has administrative responsibility over Svalbard, but the island cannot be considered strictly Norwegian. One item addressed in the Svalbardmelding report is the housing stock in Longyearbyen or lack thereof, which gets brought up during the course of the lecture - the government report forbids the expansion of new housing on Svalbard citing degrowth, maintenance, and environmental protection as the primary motives driving this concern. Thus, a major revamp and renovation of aging housing stock is needed to accommodate updated standards of living and thermal performance. This is one of the more mundane implications of the Svalbardmelding, and I will discuss the policy more in later writing - it is and will continue to be one of the most critical factors in shaping the future of Svalbard.
The lecture wraps up after three presentations, with heavy emphasis on the need for circular economies in a world that is rapidly exhausting its resources and especially in a place that is more adversely impacted by climate change than others. Notably, there is direct discussion of the geopolitics involved with relying on the constant sourcing of rare earth minerals from countries like China versus severing that dependency with circular principles and material reuse. Much of the lecture is framed through the lens of business acumen, talk of increasing value, product/service models, and subscription based services/shared platforms as an analog for large-scale circular economies. Examples are pulled directly from the Norwegian car manufacturing industry, which I find fascinating given some of the ongoing work/research back home in the American midwest. There are direct comparisons of Norwegian emissions here on the island to estimated Russian emissions, and examples of case studies throughout Norway of emission reduction success stories; cruise ships are also used as an example of ultracompact ecosystems that have drastically revamped their operational emissions by implementing incremental change and modular technologies. Occasionally there is pushback from the audience, offering pointed corrections and demanding clarifications from those presenting; many think that not enough has been done so far, or that the efforts being spoken about are just lip-service for an otherwise stagnant attitude towards implementing change. Every time the speaker locks eyes with me while speaking passionately in their native tongue, I nod solemnly and return their gaze hoping it’s not horribly obvious I’d stepped off a plane for the first time in Svalbard earlier that afternoon.
I didn’t go completely unnoticed - the woman sitting next to me, Trina, stops me after the lecture and asks about how I was using Google Translate as she’d never seen anyone do that before. I explain to her what I was doing, and why - after hearing why I’m in town, she mentions a community clean-up happening tomorrow as the final event of ‘Sustainability Week’ and provides an email address for a community organization that I should reach out to for sign-up. I bid her and Ingvild, the project manager at LPO Arkitekter, farewell and walk up the street to a restaurant called Svalbar - it’s quite late now and I’m hungry again. Inside, the place looks like any other upscale modern restaurant back home: the lights are low, sleek wood finishes are accented by black and bronze hardware, and I have a chicken sandwich. I walk home after my meal, spotting two reindeer grazing in a rainwater runoff gully. These creatures are smaller than North American variants; they have shorter legs, more body fat, and shorter snouts, all very well suited for such a harsh climatic region. I sit with them for a moment before continuing back to the hotel.
Back in Mary Ann’s living room, I download my thoughts for the night. I meet a guy in the lounge named Dhruv - he’s a PhD student and researcher that’s come up from university in Poland to study glaciers. He tells me about previous semesters he’s been to Svalbard to study with UNIS, a university offering courses here in Longyearbyen specific to arctic matters. In the winter, he spent weekends on excursions to explore and overnight in remote ice caves. He also has his license to carry a rifle and flare gun here outside of the city limits, though he won’t need that equipment during this visit - in a few days time he’s hopping on a Polish research vessel and sailing south to a fjord called Homsund, where Poland has a monopoly on glacier research. Polish researchers and trappers were inhabiting this fjord prior to Norway converting the area into a national park and protecting the landscape from additional construction - as such, no one else can establish a base along the fjord’s shores, though the ongoing research in Homsund and the use of the facilities there is often internationally collaborative. Dhruv shows me a few online interactive mapping tools he’s used in the past to plan activities around Svalbard, including one with live weather data hyperlocal to the island. It’s late now, and Dhruv heads off to bed. I spend a few more minutes in the lounge before retiring as well.
location: tromsø (NO) - Longyearbyen (SJ)
ext air temp: 36.5 F
relative humidity: 72%
dew point: 32.1 F
wet bulb: 36.5 F
ground temp: --