Where is the Island of Spitsbergen?
This remote Arctic island, about the size of Switzerlan4 was sculpted by Ice Age glaciers, and even now is locked under a thick cover of ice. Spitsbergen is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, located some 400 miles (640 kilometers) north of the Norwegian mainland in the Arctic Ocean. The Vikings first discovered the bleak and frozen island group in 1194 and gave it the forbidding name of Svalbard, meaning “cold coast.” Subsequently forgotten, the islands were rediscovered by the Dutch explorer Willem Barents in 1596. Impressed by their jagged profiles, he named the archipelago Spitsbergen, land of the “pointed peaks.”
Whalers soon converged upon the area, followed in turn by hunters and fur trappers. Then the islands drifted back into obscurity until their extensive coal deposits began to be exploited at the turn of this century. To this day, coal mining remains the islands’ principal industry. (Svalbard’s administrative center, Longyear City on Spitsbergen, was named for an American who began mining operations there in 1906.)
Although parts of Spitsbergen are bordered by broad coastal flatlands, the rugged, mountainous interior has more than enough pointed peaks to justify its name Composed of intensely folded and faulted rocks of many kinds, the highest of the peaks culminates 5,633 feet (1,717 meters) above the sea.
The mountains’ sharply chiseled crests and ridges are ample testimony to the severe glaciation that affected them during the Ice Age, as are the many fjords that indent the island’s tortuous coastline. Even now, some 60 percent of Svalbard’s land area is covered by glaciers and permanent snow-fields. In many places the glaciers stream down to the coastal lowlands and calve icebergs directly into the sea, which itself is clogged with drifting ice for several months of the year.
The warm waters of the North Atlantic Drift (a branch of the Gulf Stream) have a moderating effect on Spitsbergen’s climate. Even so, because of its far northern location, the entire archipelago is indeed a land of frozen coasts, especially in midwinter, when temperatures plummet to -40° F (-40° C), and the sun provides only an eerie glow at noon.
From April to August, by contrast, the daylight hours are long (in midsummer the sun does not set at all), and temperatures reach as high as 50° F (10° C). Surface ice melts, the upper layers of the frozen ground thaw, and harbors are opened to shipping. In a brief but spectacular display, carpets of colorful wildflowers burst into bloom. The year-round residents—polar bears, reindeer, and arctic foxes—are suddenly outnumbered by millions of migratory birds. Eiders, geese, gulls, and terns converge on the boggy tundra, where they feast on swarms of insects, while auks and guillemots nest on the rocky cliffs and fish along the coasts. Then the sun begins to dip beneath the horizon again, and before long Spitsbergen is locked once more beneath the frozen silence of winter. Leslie writes his Prague guide and loves travelling.
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