I have not seen a more ethereal morning in my life. Not earlier, not since.
The build-up to this morning certainly didn’t suggest beauty of any kind. The weather was freezing cold. The sea seemed angry. I was throwing up over the side. There was nothing I wished for more than being tucked under a warm blanket in the comfort of my cabin.
Instead, I stayed outside.
I was in Svalbard, and ‘outside’ meant being out in choppy Arctic waters, in sub-zero temperatures, on a Zodiac—an inflatable raft—that was merrily rocking away in step with the waves.
As if in reward for our persistence, in a few hours, we could feel a gradual change build up. The temperature started easing up. The waves got out of their edgy mood. The sun began to meekly assert itself.
The sky turned into a mellow shade of blue tinged with the faintest of yellows. When I turned around in my Zodiac, I could see our ship in the distance, looking picture-postcard pretty in a scene bathed in shades of blue.
And, as if all this was not enough, the prettiest polar bear I have ever seen was taking a stroll in front of us.
I was at Svalbard, an archipelago above Norway and below the North Pole. This is a place of mountains, glaciers, fjords, rocks, ice… and the polar bear.
While the occasional polar bear is known to wander a bit too close to the town of Longyearbyen, in the summer months, you usually board a ship. You then proceed to roam around the different islands, sail down the fjords, and search for that small pale yellow dot in the landscape, which might turn out to be a polar bear. Of course, you run into walruses, seals, and numerous birds, but you are always on the lookout for the King of the North.
To be on the deck of your ship and watch the stark landscape around you is an exercise in realizing your insignificance. The wind makes it feel colder than the thermometer reading; it is usually eerily quiet, and at the edge of the vastness of the water around you, broad, squat mountains solemnly stare back at you.
You feel alone. You feel like a tiny speck.
If you go early in summer, in May or June, much of the mountainsides will be covered in snow, with protruding bits of rocks and stones throwing up fascinating patterns. Pale blue glaciers nestle between the mountains. Thick chunks of ice hang at the edges like an overflowing scoop of ice cream over a cone. Drifting pieces of ice of varying shapes and sizes float in the water. Occasionally, a large piece of ice floats past disinterestedly.
To really feel the vastness of the landscape around you, you need a polar bear to wander into the frame. It is when you see this massive predator, often measuring more than 7-8 feet in length, being reduced to a dot in the frame that the massive vastness of the place dawns on you. This is the time of the season when you would see polar bears roll about in the snow as if they have no care in the world and are having a blast.
If you go a little later, say in July, it might look like a totally different place. The snow would have melted, and you would be greeted with stark, dry, brown mountainsides. The water will mostly be bereft of much ice, and the temperatures will have eased up a bit.
The glaciers would have calved a bit and maybe because of that, look a deeper shade of blue.
The polar bear will no longer be a hard-to-separate pale yellow dot in a sea of white but instead be a pale yellow dot in a sea of brown and could just as easily be mistaken for a dirty white rock.
We see a lot more walruses in large colonies. Seals too will be basking in the warmth of the sun, an alert eye always out for the predatory bear.
There are far more birds at this time, often resting on pieces of ice that have fallen o f the glacier. Of course, if you really need to experience birds, there is no better place than the bird cli fs of Alkefjellet. The cli fs loom large, tall, and imposing. Sheer vertical cli fs house tens of thousands of screaming birds nesting there, perched on the minutest of horizontal surfaces on the craggy cli f faces. Around you, sea gulls and guillemots are flying, shrieking, fighting, and crashing into the cold waters. Alkefjellet is a picture of madness in a sea of calmness.
One warm morning, we got the loveliest of all sightings. A pod of beluga whales appeared and came close enough to our ship for even a phone to deliver a good, sharp image. There is something immensely satisfying in watching these gentle, white, bulbous-nosed creatures goofing around your ship. They hung around for the better part of an hour before deciding to bid us goodbye.
Svalbard is an incredible place. Remote. Stark. Raw. Beauty of the type that isn’t easily experienced.
However, this remote and relatively inaccessible place is under severe threat.
These are not mountains that are expected to be brown and bare in summer. These are not waters that are supposed to be bereft of drift ice, which was the case even in the northern parts.
These are not glaciers that are supposed to flaunt pretty waterfalls caused by the melting ice.
All that is happening.
The Arctic is in crisis.
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.
In other words, sea ice is melting, frozen ground (called permafrost) is thawing, and the habitat for the wildlife there is shrinking.
All this is also happening fast.
In Svalbard, it is estimated that by 2040, Arctic sea ice may disappear altogether during summer months. That is just about 15 years away.
The ice is critical since a large ecosystem’s existence depends on sea ice. The most well-known example is, of course, the polar bear. Polar bears use the sea ice for traveling between islands. Swimming is five times more tiring. Most critically, ice serves as a platform for hunting seals. With ice declining and breaking up earlier, bears have less time to hunt.
In other words, polar bears will spend longer times hunting, their health consequently will suffer, and that, in turn, will lead to lower reproductive rates, higher infant mortality… and eventually, extinction.
Polar bears are not alone in facing this threat. There are the seals.
For example, when they are born, the pups of the harp seals are pure white, camouflaging beautifully on the Arctic ice floes. The pups use the ice as platforms for nursing and resting for the first month or so of their life, growing until they are ready for life in the water. As the ice melts faster, these pups will end up in the water before they are ready to fend for themselves.
The slightly older seals—the yearlings—also get impacted. Their chief source of food is small crustaceans and fish, like krill, that are usually found along the sea ice edge.
No sea ice, no krill, no food for the seals.
This is happening right now. Remote sensing by satellites showed that 97 percent of the Greenland ice cap has experienced surface melting. Greenland is the largest single contributor to global sea level rise, its melting ice cap adding some 300 cubic kilometers (72 cubic miles) of water per year to the ocean.
This melted water does not just remain on the surface and refreeze later in winter. It goes down into the ice sheet through large holes called moulins and accelerates the ‘glacial advance’. This in turn results in glaciers calving (breaking o f) more icebergs into the ocean.
This is a self-destructing cycle.
Less ice leads to higher temperatures, leading to more melting, and hence, even less ice.
Actually, it gets worse. With less ice, there will naturally be more sea traffic, and the impact of the noise and polluting effect of large cargo ships is frightening to contemplate.
One might be tempted to shrug one’s shoulders and say this is not our problem. This is a problem only for the few who live in those regions.
Not so.
A 2019 UN report estimates this increase will have the potential to displace more than 680 million people around the world. Some of the impacted cities include Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, Bangladesh, and Shanghai.
This is not someone else’s problem. It impacts everyone.
To say that the situation is serious would be an understatement.
It is real. It’s facing us.
Right now
