Spitsbergen. Days 39 to 41. 6th to 8th August 2013.
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Guillemots after first flight fall.
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Guillemots after first flight fall.
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Midnight ice.
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Category Archives: Spitsbergen
Ice is Nice
Between Spitsbergen and Greenland. Days 41 and 42. 8th to 9th August 2013.
All shots are at sea between Spitsbergen and Iceland.
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Still close to Spitsbergen, we passed a seal on a floating ice shelf.
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Always, interesting pattern in the ice.
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Perhaps some kind of frozen prehistoric marine monster.
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This is the bow of the ship (a Russian icebreaker, originally built in Finland), cutting through the ice.
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And then we saw a couple of polar bears swimming (this is a long way away).
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That’s not a dog, it’s a polar bear!
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Watching us….
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Going down….
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This is not land. The polar bear is walking on an ice floe, sea covered by ice.
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This will soon be an historic image. Within ten years, at most twenty, all the sea ice in the Arctic will be gone. The polar bears may go too, because hunting seals on the ice floes is an essential part of their way of life. They can swim a long way but already some are likely drowning before they find the next patch of ice.
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A brief sunset-type moment, where the sea fog cleared enough for the sun to come through. It is 11:15pm, still too far north for the sun to actually set.
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Ice Is Nice, that’s what they say,
Ice Is Nice, throw some my way,
Ice Is Nice on any day,
Twice as nice when violins play.
(Deliberately misquoted)
Harbour Seals
Smeerenburg, Spitsbergen. Day 40. 7th August 2013.
From Hamiltonbukta in the morning, we sailed to Smeerenburg.
We ventured out in the zodiacs in the late morning and here is a selection of the surrounding glaciers. The ship is not the one we were one.
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Zodiacs at the bottom of the glacier give a sense of scale. Although the glacier looks solid and stable, it is moving, so it can’t be too safe to hang around at its base (the zodiacs aren’t actually that close). For example, there is a large rock on top of it probably somewhere between the size of a zodiac and a small house. After months or years that is going to tumble down the front.
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This is a huge moraine wall which shows how far that glacier has receded.
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A wider view, with the glacier and moraine wall from the preceding image on the left.
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After some time in the bay, we went back for lunch.
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After lunch, we went back to a different area. Carol (the expedition’s archaeologist) was showing some remains from a whaling station that used to be there. Another group of us was experimenting with neutral density filters and long exposures. This is an eight-second image from that exercise. There are lots of logs lying around in the background.
I still had impaired mobility and wasn’t racing round as much as the others. So Don, the expedition leader, who had decided to reconnoitre another area in a zodiac, invited me along. This proved a very fortuitous opportunity. We encountered a herd of harbour seals relaxing on the rocks. As I was the only photographer in the zodiac, I was able to get much better images than would have been possible in a full zodiac.
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Guillemots, Walruses and a Polar Bear
Hamiltonbukta, Spitsbergen. Day 40. 7th August 2013.
We had sailed overnight and were now in the remote bay of Hamiltonbukta, probably around forty kilometres from where those sealers were frozen in, in 1872. Early in the morning, we set out in the zodiacs.
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These are bird cliffs. There are thousands of guillemots up there nesting on little ledges.
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If you click on this image, you can see some of the birds up there. We were at the time when the chicks leave the nest, high on the cliffs. The only problem is that they haven’t flown before and they don’t do it very well. The parents call to them from down on the sea and they throw themselves out of the nest, half flying down to the sea, often bouncing off rocks on the way down but usually seemingly little the worse for wear. However, it is a hazardous journey and skuas and glaucous gulls are waiting to snap up any chicks they can, particularly the ones that don’t make it to the sea.
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Here’s one that made it down safely,
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now reunited with Mum
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and paddling off together.
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This is just a cliff, no ledges for the guillemots to nest. Note the waterfall at the right though.
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A little later we encountered a couple of walruses, mother and cub.
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They looked at us for a while, then slid back into the water.
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These were the only walruses we were to encounter on the journey.
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Another of the ubiquitous glaciers of Spitsbergen.
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I didn’t expect to see a yacht so far north, though.
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There was also a stray polar bear up on the cliffs. They are usually solitary.
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There are 2,000 to 3,000 polar bears in Spitsbergen (or Svalbard if you prefer). The males grow to 350-500kg and the females 150-250kg. They are 2 to 3 metres long.
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Patterns and details in the glacier….
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The floating ice sometimes assumes fantastic shapes.
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The scale of the glaciers is most impressive.
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Bird cliffs again.
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(I am about to increase my posting rate until the end of the month. One a day is not enough to finish Spitsbergen and Greenland in that time so some days there will be two posts).
Blue Whales
At sea, Spitsbergen. Day 39. 6th August 2013.
At 11:30pm, we were summoned on deck for a sighting of a couple of blue whales. It being very far north in summer, there was still plenty of light and the sun wasn’t intending to set. We sailed along with them for some distance, although they were several hundred metres away.
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Blue whales are the largest animal ever known to have lived, at up to 30 metres long and 180 tonnes in weight. This is one of the reasons why you are most unlikely to see a blue whale in an Olympic-size swimming pool. The largest dinosaurs may have been as long but their length is usually an extrapolation from just a few vertebrae and as land animals, their weight was a fraction of the blue whale.
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It is much easier to photograph a blue whale than a humpback whale because they swim along in a straight line and surface several times before going down. This means it is easy to predict where it may come up again and may also account for why they were hunted almost to extinction by the early 20th century.
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Taking photographs of the whales is one thing, but including some of the setting gives another dimension of context.
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We were somewhere near the north-west corner of Spitsbergen.
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Lilliehöökbreen
Lilliehöökbreen, Spitsbergen. Day 39. 6th August 2013.
From Tinayrebukta we sailed about twenty-six kilometres to the end of the neighbouring (fjord) Lilliehöökfjorden at Lilliehöökbreen. This is where a massive glacier comes out, twenty-two kilometres long and eight kilometres wide at the end of the fjord.
If you’re on a PC, click the image to see it at a much larger size and get a tiny snippet of the great majesty of the location.
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Remarkable shapes in the details atop the glacier.
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A distant view with a long lens.
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A black guillemot taking off.
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Kittiwakes.
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Kittiwakes.
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Kittiwakes.
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Kittiwakes.
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Note the ship, which gives you an idea of the scale. It is 72 metres long. Click on the image for a larger size if you can’t see it.
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The ship is also visible here. (Click to expand to much larger size).
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An ice duck.
Sometimes the ice berglets can assume fanciful shapes. This is a selection from the previous image.
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(Image expands to much larger size if you click on it).
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Polar Bears at Tinayrebukta
Tinayrebukta, Spitsbergen. Day 39. 6th August 2013.
We had left Longyearbeyan the previous afternoon and sailed north up the coast of Spitsbergen during the night to a northern fjord, Tinayrebukta. We piled into the zodiacs in the early morning and within half an hour came across a pair of polar bears, mother and cub, who had been feeding off a reindeer carcase and weren’t at all concerned about us.
You can go on a voyage such as this and not see a single polar bear and we had jagged two in the first half hour.
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This is the voyage. Up the coast of Spitsbergen, across to Greenland, down the coast of Greenland through the fjords and then down to Iceland. The red dots don’t all indicate stops. Many are intermediate points to simulate the route. There is also serious distortion here due to the Mercator projection. Spitsbergen (or Svalbard to use the less ambiguous name) is actually half the size of Iceland.
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This is the voyage in Spitsbergen. Longyearbyen is at the bottom of the map. I have included the trip to Pyramiden. From Longyearbyen we sailed to Tinayrebukta (this post), Lilliehöökbreen, Hamiltonbukta and Smeerenburg, then departed for Greenland.
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We were able to watch the polar bears for a while.
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After a while they settled down.
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… for an after-dinner snooze.
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This gives an idea of the situation. There were four or five zodiacs filled with people. The bears are on the shore on the left.
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Bear and reindeer carcase.
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Snoozing time….
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Not far away, a magnificent glacier spilling slowly from the mountains into a still fjord.
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May be a different glacier.
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Same glacier, further back.
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Black guillemots.
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A great number of gulls in front of a glacier.
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Ivory gull.
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Kittiwake.
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Bearded Seal.
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Bearded Seal.
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Ice on the water.
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Another massive glacier.
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The same view from further out.
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Now we were starting to head back to the ship for lunch.
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There’s the ship (Polar Pioneer) on the left, and a couple of zodiacs heading back towards it.
Pyramiden Monochromes
Longyearbyen, Pyramiden, Isfjorden, Spitsbergen. Day 37. 4th August 2013.
Welcoming committee, Longyearbyen.
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Nordenskiöld Glacier. (Expands to large image).
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Coal mining plant above Longyearbyen.
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Husky Hotel
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen. Day 38. 5th August 2013.
This was the day I was to depart with 48 others on an AuroraExpeditions cruise up the coast of Spitsbergen, across to Greenland, down the coast of Greenland and then across to Iceland. I went out to the airport to meet the other expeditioners as they arrived on the plane. We then went for a tour around Longyearbyen on the bus, including a visit to this “husky hotel”. Some dogs we could say hello to; others we were warned to stay away from. Borneo was one of the friendly ones.
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Later on in Greenland we encountered another pack of huskies that was much better cared for and much happier. Maybe this was more like a canine concentration camp than a hotel.
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I remember that Pingo was one we were warned not to approach too closely.
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Nearby there were three reindeer in an open meadow.
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An old coal mining plant with Longyearbyen in the background. The population is over 2,000.
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Having boarded the ship (Russian icebreaker Polar Pioneer), we had a lifeboat drill. Climbing into the claustrophobic capsule in calm conditions was one thing; being tossed like a cork on a stormy sea with 3D vomit flying round might be another.
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And so we were off into the wilderness of Spitsbergen. We had been sailing for two and a half or three hours. I would think we were still in Isfjorden, the fjord leading to Longyearbyen.
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Kapp Thorsden
Between Pyramiden and Longyearbyen , Spitsbergen. Day 37. 4th August 2013.
(Whoops, I have a few posts out of order. This post was supposed to come after Pyramiden and Lenin and before Husky Hotel. The previous Lofoten Monochromes was supposed to be at the end of the Lofoten images, before Spitsbergen).
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We are now heading back from Pyramiden to Longyearbyen, along the north bank of the fjord.
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Wonderful colours and shapes.
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A stray puffin deperately tries to escape the proximity of the ship. Just as well I saw lots in Scotland because by the time I got to Iceland, the season was too late and they were nowhere to be found.
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Spartan accommodation, it would seem…
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… perhaps associated with this old, boarded up mine.
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An old wooden boat in a landscape, that might still float, at least a little way.
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A waterfall that definitely wouldn’t be flowing in winter.
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I suspect the difference in colour is just due to haze and distance.
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A distant valley (with a long telephoto lens).
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This is probably quite old because it appears to have a turf roof.
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You’ll probably need to click on the image for a larger size to see it, but there’s a stream flowing through this image, a waterfall at the top, a reindeer with impressive antlers in the middle and cut poles on the beach.
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No question it’s a rugged, unforgiving landscape.
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This is the Swedish House or Svenskhuset at Kapp Thordsen. If you click on the image you may be able to make out that there are two people seated in front of the door of the house. There is another person over to the right on the hillside and items on the ground to the right of the house that perhaps may include some from the nineteenth century. There is a line coming down the hill to the house, probably either electricity from a generator or a water supply. There is also a reindeer in front of the left-hand stream (though it requires the full-sized file to see that).
This was the site of a remarkable drama in 1872.
Six sealing vessels with 59 men were trapped by the ice north of Spitsbergen near Grahuken with winter approaching and little food. Swedish explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld happened to be nearby setting up winter quarters at Polhem. Seven sealers crossed 50 kilometres of ice to ask him for assistance. He was able to provide some but advised making for the Swedish House at Kapp Thorsen which was well supplied with canned food. Seventeen of the sealers rowed 350 kilometres in seven days to get there. Meanwhile, two weeks later, there was a break in the ice and the remaining sealers were able to escape in two ships.
When some people came to visit the seventeen sealers at Kapp Thorsen nine months later, they were all dead. The last survivor appeared to have died shortly before. At the time they were assumed to have died of scurvy due to a surprising lack of competence in their own survival. However, a recent scientific study has shown that they died of lead poisoning. They likely cooked their food in the cans on the stove and the solder in the cans was 50% lead. The same fate was shared by John Franklin’s men in their search for the North-West Passage. They had enough food for four years but most of it was in tin cans.
Incidentally, Adolf Nordenskiöld who the sealers met and who gave his name to the glacier we visited three posts ago, was the first man to sail the North-East Passage. In 1878-79, he sailed from Scandinavia along the north coast of Russia, was trapped in ice near the Bering Strait for a winter, and returned by a more southerly route including through the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869.
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The following images are distant views from between Kapp Thorden and Longyearbyen but I can’t be entirely sure what direction they are looking in.
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A whale, probably a humpback whale.
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A northern giant petrel, I think.
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Long lens shots of glacial landscapes…
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Murray Foote 