Monday 10.10.2016 Blomstrandbreen 79°00,2´N, 012°13.1´E
Cloudy and overcast, a dark but beautiful morning. 2°C, 2m/s.
Sunrise 09:45
– Sunset 17:41
A wet foggy start to the day, still
dark while we eat breakfast; even as we assemble on deck and climb into the
Zodiacs it’s only just about getting light. We travel towards shore in the gloom of early morning, a pale
green sea, mist clinging low to the mountains. No-one speaks, the bay is full
of luminous glacial ice, pale turquoise blue, white, laced brown, large, small,
flat, jagged, float silently passed us, jostling for space. Travelling by
Zodiacs to shore is more hazardous today as we slowly push our way through the ice.
I look back to where the
Antigua sits surrounded by a gently swelling turquoise blue ice sea; some of those pieces are pretty big.
We set off trekking up the mountain at a brisk pace; our aim is to reach the head
of Blomstrandbreen. A tricky climb, the tundra crumbling and rocky, a bit like
climbing up scree. Stones strewn across the ground - pure white, jet black,
marble-like patterns, some like ancient bits of wood. Lying amongst them is a
small piece of reindeer antler, soft grey with darker markings.
We continue upwards and pass a pair
of harmless white Rock Tarmigan wandering amongst rocks and low foliage; they don’t
seem bothered by us.
Climbing through mist it feels as though we are suspended,
cocooned somewhere between sky and sea.
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Rock Tarmigan (archive photos) |
As we reach the top it clears and
there’s a spectacular view back to the shore. A thin line of a bright burnt
orange winds through the deep gorge below us; up here I can’t hear the stream.
I peer over the drop; before me a
stone strewn path dragged by the ice and then the glacier sweeps vertically
down to the sea edge where blue ice pushes up together, growing high into fat
rounded peaks, bunching on shoreline waiting their turn to calf and fall, break
into pieces and float out to sea. Pockets of mist hover and drift about us. Much of the ground is bare rocks, small pockets of snow lying on slopes, but not as much as there should be.![]() |
On the edge |
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Get off the Tundra Zlatan! |
Looking back down the way we’ve climbed I
can see far across the bay to yet another gleaming glacier. Cloud and mist
drifts, sun on ice. Below us lies the Antigua, a tiny speck in a vast space.
We pause, standing together where
once has been glacier, a silent group listening to the land and sea and sky. I
close my eyes. Now I hear the rush of water below us, then sounds of the
glacier calving, of air moving, air that feels so clear, then silence. I feel
so remote from the world and yet right in the midst of it. Overwhelmingly
beautiful, I think we have a collective sublime moment. Then we are herded back down at breakneck speed, slipping and sliding on the scree, as we're late for lunch (never mind being sublime when the captain is pacing the deck).
Cloud descends again as we arrive back on the Antigua, hanging low of the mountain we just climbed, intensifying the blues in the ice, dark dramatic peaks rising behind the glacier.
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Leaving Bloomstrandbreen - a flash of blue sky |
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sketch book - drawing on the move - leaving Bloomstrandbreen |
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sketch book - drawing on the move- passing glacier |
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sketch book - drawing on the move- mountains and glaciers |
We reach Ny Ålesund late afternoon.
Once a coal-mining settlement, now an international centre for arctic scientific research and environmental monitoring, with a shifting population of scientists/researchers from 10 countries. http://kingsbay.no/
Our arrival increases the population by 78%.
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Ny Ålesund |
Sitting against a backdrop of
mountains, it feels somewhere between entering a sci-fi movie set and an
episode of The Prisoner. Strangely-shaped antenna point into the sky monitoring
the northern lights, white domes sit eerily in the landscape listening to the
stratosphere, neat wooden buildings painted in pale colours, board walks,
notices forbidding you to walk on the tundra - geoscientists are studying
permafrost soils and changes in glacier systems and we mustn’t touch the
ground. There are devises to measure how higher levels of UV radiation are
affecting sea life in the fjords, to record how organisms are responding to
increasing ocean acidification. Occasionally a few people appear busily walking
from one building to another, clipboards in hand, a cyclist passes by.
Receiving strict instructions to observe all the signs and not walk off the path, we walk in file, careful where we put our feet, and arrive at the
Amundsen/Nobile mast. A rather bleak place,
I stare up at the metal structure.
It’s all that now remains of the launch station for airship Norge, along with a plaque that hails the event as a 'glorious achievement'.

In reality the expedition seems less heroic and more of a feat of survival judging by the accounts of the trip. Launched May
11th 1925 the aim was to observe uncharted sea between the Pole and
Alaska. Amundsen, the famous Norwegian expedition leader and navigator, and
Umberto Nobile, Italian airship designer and pilot, apparently didn’t hit it
off, relations becoming strained, understandable perhaps in such freezing,
cramped and noisy conditions (there were sixteen of them inside the ship). It all
became even worse when, a day later, they passed the North Pole and in true
patriotic style dropped their flags and Amundsen saw the Italian flag was
larger than the Norwegian and American flags. Size clearly matters. Amundsen
later contemptuously described the trip as "a circus wagon in the
sky".
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Photo taken in the Ny Ålesund museum |
The shop seems to sell mainly
tourist stuff – fridge magnets, socks, sweets (maybe scientists have sweet
teeth), the usual array of postcards, although there’s a couple of nice images
of old Ny Ålesund amongst them. I buy a couple and write one to send home.
It’s already dark when we return to the boat; 20 minutes less daylight each day now. In a couple of weeks there will be no daylight for several months as Polar night sets in. Late evening the sky is clear and Northern lights flicker. I'm finally sleeping on the top bunk and have a porthole through which to see the world. I breath a little easier.