Sundneset, Barentsøya
Time is playing tricks on us. It doesn’t feel like a Saturday. It doesn’t seem like August. And it certainly doesn’t look like 2005. Instead we have wandered into an Arctic dream world, where it takes a thousand years to tattoo a rock, and we can scroll down millennia at a glance. Where we can breathe air formed ten thousand years ago but released from bondage only this morning, where in the afternoon we can stumble over a thousand-year-old whalebone that looks as if it were washed ashore last Saturday.
At midnight, when this day began, we were watching a languorous walrus, sprawled like Cleopatra on its icy couch, oblivious of our admiring stares. We left it, still dreaming of clam banquets, and continued threading our way through a maze of ice floes like lily pads on an indigo ocean. Observers on the bridge fell from their perches one by one, wilting before the glare of the midnight sun, to slink off to their beckoning bunks. Rising again at 0630, it seemed like the same drifting constellation of ice floes, but this time there was a bear, sitting right next to the ship. That’s Lindblad service for you, fresh bears delivered to your door! It was an old, shaggy male with scratches on his muzzle, dazed by the smorgasbord of smells coming from the galley: the irresistible smell of breakfast bacon and nothing visible but a giant tin box. We slipped away at last for our own breakfast rendezvous, and ended his tantalizing torture. An hour later a restless female and young cub were sighted, but she smelt us well downwind and set off away across the ice, her cub running behind, manfully jumping the gaps between the ice floes which mum took with agile, flying leaps.
Our course now took us west through Freemansund, leaving the open, icy waters of the Barents Sea, to emerge in the warm bay of Storfjord. The land on either side was so dramatic that Bud instantly decided to land at Sundneset, a beautiful dolerite headland on the southwestern tip of Barentsøya. It was a great thrill to stride out into this wild landscape, and unravel some of its secrets. A marshy stream valley spangled with yellow Bog Saxifrage. A snow-fringed lake with over two hundred wild geese on it. The skeleton of a young polar bear, apparently killed by a larger bear. Discarded reindeer antlers lying like Celtic combs in the moss. A dolerite ridge buffed by glaciers eons ago, now tattooed with gray, green and gold lichens which have been unfurling for a thousand years. And there, embedded in the tundra, a 20’ long jaw, the mighty bow of the bowhead whale. Toppled, like the ruins of a crumbling temple, or the traces of a forgotten civilization. This whale, one of the heaviest creatures ever on earth, once ploughed the frozen oceans like a mighty galleon, trawling a huge harvest of copepods from seas fizzing with life. It died a gentle death and drifted ashore in this bay long before men even knew Svalbard existed. It lies now on a fossil beach, which, released from the old icecap, has sprung back 100’ above current sea level. From the height, and what we know of glacial rebound, we can guess that it died up to 3000 years ago, when men were still banging rocks together. What a miracle it is that, millennia after, it now feeds the tiny arctic flowers that still grow over its grave. We pause, reveling in the irony that here, in the great empty spaces of the arctic, we have the time to ponder the paradox of time itself.
Time is playing tricks on us. It doesn’t feel like a Saturday. It doesn’t seem like August. And it certainly doesn’t look like 2005. Instead we have wandered into an Arctic dream world, where it takes a thousand years to tattoo a rock, and we can scroll down millennia at a glance. Where we can breathe air formed ten thousand years ago but released from bondage only this morning, where in the afternoon we can stumble over a thousand-year-old whalebone that looks as if it were washed ashore last Saturday.
At midnight, when this day began, we were watching a languorous walrus, sprawled like Cleopatra on its icy couch, oblivious of our admiring stares. We left it, still dreaming of clam banquets, and continued threading our way through a maze of ice floes like lily pads on an indigo ocean. Observers on the bridge fell from their perches one by one, wilting before the glare of the midnight sun, to slink off to their beckoning bunks. Rising again at 0630, it seemed like the same drifting constellation of ice floes, but this time there was a bear, sitting right next to the ship. That’s Lindblad service for you, fresh bears delivered to your door! It was an old, shaggy male with scratches on his muzzle, dazed by the smorgasbord of smells coming from the galley: the irresistible smell of breakfast bacon and nothing visible but a giant tin box. We slipped away at last for our own breakfast rendezvous, and ended his tantalizing torture. An hour later a restless female and young cub were sighted, but she smelt us well downwind and set off away across the ice, her cub running behind, manfully jumping the gaps between the ice floes which mum took with agile, flying leaps.
Our course now took us west through Freemansund, leaving the open, icy waters of the Barents Sea, to emerge in the warm bay of Storfjord. The land on either side was so dramatic that Bud instantly decided to land at Sundneset, a beautiful dolerite headland on the southwestern tip of Barentsøya. It was a great thrill to stride out into this wild landscape, and unravel some of its secrets. A marshy stream valley spangled with yellow Bog Saxifrage. A snow-fringed lake with over two hundred wild geese on it. The skeleton of a young polar bear, apparently killed by a larger bear. Discarded reindeer antlers lying like Celtic combs in the moss. A dolerite ridge buffed by glaciers eons ago, now tattooed with gray, green and gold lichens which have been unfurling for a thousand years. And there, embedded in the tundra, a 20’ long jaw, the mighty bow of the bowhead whale. Toppled, like the ruins of a crumbling temple, or the traces of a forgotten civilization. This whale, one of the heaviest creatures ever on earth, once ploughed the frozen oceans like a mighty galleon, trawling a huge harvest of copepods from seas fizzing with life. It died a gentle death and drifted ashore in this bay long before men even knew Svalbard existed. It lies now on a fossil beach, which, released from the old icecap, has sprung back 100’ above current sea level. From the height, and what we know of glacial rebound, we can guess that it died up to 3000 years ago, when men were still banging rocks together. What a miracle it is that, millennia after, it now feeds the tiny arctic flowers that still grow over its grave. We pause, reveling in the irony that here, in the great empty spaces of the arctic, we have the time to ponder the paradox of time itself.
