Death dots the beach. Not a white sandy beach, but a dark, finely grained moraine made up of rock and soil, debris left behind by the glacier that was once here. Our boat is moored on the western shore of the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago, some 500 miles from the North Pole, and a wide range of organic remains confronts us. Whale baleen. Reindeer hair and horns. Goose feathers and delicate bones. Stacks of deadwood—Siberian larch that drifted westward with Arctic currents to be deposited on this otherwise treeless shoreline. Where the moraine is especially fine and wet—it’s called “glacial flour”—we find the going difficult. So it is that we’re all wearing aptly named Arctic Muck Boots. Meanwhile, to keep polar bears away, three guides stake our perimeter with flare guns and, as a last resort, carry bolt-action rifles. We spot only one polar bear. The human presence, however, is all too apparent. We see a bright orange fishing buoy the size of a soccer ball, attached to yards of green nylon netting, as well as discarded single-use plastics.
About two dozen of us—painters, photographers, writers, and academics from all over the world—have been selected for the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency Program. A statement on its website describes the residency as “a nexus where art intersects science, architecture, education, and activism—an incubator for thought and experimentation for artists and innovators who seek out and foster areas of collaboration to engage in the central issues of our time.” No issue of our time is of greater urgency than climate change, and as the Arctic Ocean warms four times faster than the rest of the world’s seas, we are all here for 14 days of endless summer sunlight to bear witness, sailing roughly 10 degrees latitude from the North Pole. Given the seductive hold that the Arctic has had on my imagination, now is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to touch the polar ice.
Flying approximately 600 miles from the Norwegian mainland, we had beheld an otherworldly sight: the Svalbard Archipelago of nine islands and their many fjords rising out of the sea, the terrain raw in black-and-white, unclothed by trees. Dark, sharply jagged mountains as tall as 3,000 feet thrust through the whitest veil of snow cover and ice. We boarded our vessel—a refurbished tall ship, a three-masted barkentine—in the estuary at Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s biggest settlement, which has a year-round population of less than 3,000. At latitude 78 degrees north, it is considered the world’s northernmost municipality. Once we embarked upon the rolling swells of open ocean, our smallness and the Arctic’s vastness came into stark, sometimes queasy relief.
Perhaps no other place on Earth tickles the creative impulse quite like the Arctic. For Mary Shelley, the perpetual cold and ice were part of the setting for her 1818 masterpiece, Frankenstein—Captain Robert Walton encounters Victor Frankenstein when his own tall ship is locked in Arctic ice. Shelley wrote the novel in the dawn of the heroic age of Arctic discovery, when explorers sought a northwest passage and hoped to reach the North Pole. In their ambitious pursuit of knowledge, Dr. Frankenstein and Captain Walton were mirror images.
Today, the Arctic’s melting ice abuses that Romantic imagination. (The most powerful and enduring image of the climate crisis is of polar bears forced onto shrinking ice floes.) It’s as if a sacred place has been despoiled, an ideal dissolved. Filling the conceptual space is something called “the Arctic paradox,” a phrase I hear often during and after our voyage. In meteorology, this paradox is shorthand for the puzzling phenomenon whereby a warming Arctic often creates a polar vortex that brings especially chilly temperatures to lower latitudes. More broadly, the paradox addresses the fact that Arctic communities such as those on the Svalbard Archipelago are at once innocent poster children for and guilty perpetrators of climate change. For most of the 20th century, the archipelago’s economy thrived on coal mining. As the mines closed, tourism (hardly a carbon-neutral activity) became the basis for inhabitants’ livelihoods. I’m forced to wonder whether what we’re doing can best be categorized as disaster (or at least dark) tourism. The amount of carbon that each of us has emitted in simply getting to Svalbard is hard to justify. But my staying home would have made little difference on a global scale. Moreover, what would happen to the population of this remote region if tourists stopped coming and spending their money? Therein lies another paradox, and a source of yet more despair.
Some of my fellow voyagers have taken to plunging off the side of the anchored ship. Operatic screams tell us just how cold the water is, though even without those cries, we have a pretty good idea as we watch chunks of floating ice brush against the swimmers. The dips become a daily ritual, taken in the morning or at midnight, though the time of day has little meaning in a place where the summer sun never sets. (Tomorrow, I promise myself, I’ll join them … but that tomorrow never comes.)
Without interludes of night, the Arctic’s stark, white beauty is unrelenting; without dark glasses and sunscreen, it can even hurt. Like the complex problem of climate change, the vast emptiness of the monochromatic, silent landscape overwhelms. The artists aboard ship, who have brought with them cutting-edge audio and visual equipment, including several hydrophones and at least four drones, decide to narrow the focus, zoom in, miniaturize the frame. Perhaps that’s what creativity is all about: forget the big picture, over which you have no control.
Mirja Busch, a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin, is making art out of close-up images of puddles created by glacier meltwater. She says she is “scaling down climate change to something that can be grasped in everyday experience. An ordinary puddle makes the abstract visible.” As the boat sails to Svalbard’s very tip, at latitude 80 degrees north, a photographer experiments with using ice as a camera lens, while an American art professor and an Australian climate activist focus on listening. What they hear (and record) are not the sounds of silence, as might be expected in Arctic stillness, but the mysterious pop and crackle of the surrounding ice.
A sculptor from Canada, Janet Patterson, finds herself fashioning Cinderella shoes from ice. Frozen seawater is “too crumbly,” she says, but ice from calving glaciers can be carved like soft stone. “It’s perfect. In addition to its obvious appearance, both the fairy-tale slipper and ice have an ‘expiration date.’ As Cinderella dashes from the castle at the stroke of midnight, before all her finery disappears, so, too, do my shoes disappear in the wake of climate change.”
Others photograph, film, and sketch wildlife: a huddle of walruses at the mouth of a fjord, flocks of birds soaring about the ship’s masts. So many seabirds—how do you tell them apart? Skimming the sea surface, diving underwater, soaring from a rocky cliff face, perched on a floe. Are these Arctic terns, guillemots, kittiwakes, or skuas? Dead birds, alas, are easy to identify. We find plenty of them when we go ashore—probably killed, we’re told, by bird flu or ingested plastics. Like saints’ relics, carcasses are brought onboard, and a Boston artist, Julia Hechtman, is inspired to create ghostly cyanotypes. The bluish patina of these prints seems so like that of a newly minted iceberg that the printing process itself, using Arctic seawater, takes on the quality of a sacred ritual.
Each day at a different anchorage, we climb into outboard-powered Zodiac boats that ferry us to landfall. Ghosts often greet us when we step ashore. Peeking through thin snow cover is the wreckage of a Luftwaffe bomber and, on a rock-strewn hillside, the scattered remnants of a Nazi weather station. Piles of discolored rock show where 19th-century whalers rendered blubber into oil. Other rocks carefully outline a whaler’s grave. Though somewhat jumbled by the recurrent freezing and thawing of the ground in which the body was laid to rest, the rocks retain a recognizable, rectangular frame.
We leave the rocks, and what feels like hallowed ground, and begin to process what we’ve been experiencing. Through the voice of Captain Walton, Mary Shelley created a classic framing device for her narrative. How will we present-day Arctic visitors frame the subject of climate change, the monster of our own creation?
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