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WHERE THE SUN NEVER SETS

The Economist's energy and environment editor heads to north of Norway to eat reindeer and talk about climate change ...

From THE ECONOMIST online

Day one: Midnight

The plane landed, a little late, at exactly the same time as the sun finally set: 22:44. For more or less the entire journey, from London to Oslo, the sun, rather than descending to the horizon, had more or less stalled, tethered to the port wing tip. Flying north-east, the plane’s route had been almost parallel to the "terminator"—the great circle around the globe that separates day from night. Touchdown marked the point where plane and terminator finally coincided.

The trip to Oslo is the first leg of a journey to the Svalbard archipelago, a set of islands north of Norway which boast the most northerly settlement in the eastern hemisphere: Ny Alesund. On the western shore of the island of Spitsbergen, this place is devoted more or less entirely to scientific research. Over the coming days it will host a symposium called “The changing Arctic and its global implications”, arranged by various Norwegian ministries and state-held companies, and attended by, among others, Crown Prince Haakon as well as Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, former director-general of the World Health Organisation, and institutional midwife, through the 1987 Brundtland report, to the concept of sustainable development.

How sustainable it is for 40-odd people to travel a very long way in order to attend yet another meeting on climate change is obviously open to debate. At the same time, old Arctic hands say that it is impossible to appreciate what is happening in the Arctic without at least some experience of being there, and there is no real way of proving them wrong. There’s also the possibility that the combination of people, topic, setting and isolation (because of the nature of some of the research Ny Alesund is a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile phone-free zone) will conjure new freshness into potentially tired discussions. Certainly it’s not an opportunity to turn down.

And there is the added excitement of the midnight sun. From May until early October, the terminator remains firmly to the south of Ny Alesund, along with all the world’s agriculture, trees, marching bands and churches, not to mention 99.999999% of its population.

To think about climate change is to think about seeing the planet differently. Perhaps experiencing it without the interruption of night, but with ever-changing angles of illumination, will facilitate a fresh perspective. Or maybe it will just leave everyone tired and tetchy.

Day three: The unending light

Around 18:00, about an hour after the Ny Alesund symposium had got properly under way, the change started to happen. The sun turned from an occasional revelation from behind the clouds to something settled, even permanent. During dinner (king crab, reindeer and strawberries, all prepared with an ambition and skill far beyond what one has any right to hope for in the institutional cafeteria of a research village of a couple of hundred people), the day continued to brighten. By midnight the sky was all but cloudless, its zenith a little darker, and deeper, than the mid-afternoon angle of the sunshine would lead you to expect.

The air is cool. The light is warm. The colours have changed in response to the sky. The soil, such as it is, seems darker, richer. The plants have taken on a fuller set of greens, mixed through with lichen orange and the persistent, almost-afterburn purple of saxifrage in summer flower, deeper the longer you look. Standing water, of which there is a lot, has turned sky-vault blue—except for that which forms the larger, more distant ponds, and reflects the mountains beyond. The fjord, by contrast, is lighter now than the puddles, almost milky.

The sun hangs due north of us as we drink on the terrace and chat, and find the idea of sleep not so much impossible as irrelevant. Those accustomed to the Arctic look at the slack jaws of the neophytes with gentle amusement. Sometimes they say something to the effect that “this is quite special”, as though to reassure you, to ground you—or to acknowledge that even here, on top of the world, this still depth of perception mixed with a buzz of camaraderie is, indeed, uncommon.

Your correspondent does not have fine eyesight, or particularly strong prescriptions in his glasses. But the face of the glacier at the end of Kongsfjorden has a clear crazy paving of detail. Some locals say it is 12 kilometres away. Some say 15. As to the mountains beyond that, and those beyond them, who knows. Spiky peaks cut from flat lying sediments rise above the most distant snows.

Nearer to hand, the island in the fjord is solid marble. Not in the way it looks—in the rock it is made of. Englishmen keen to exploit that marble once had a settlement of their own—Ny London—somewhere over there. Then the marble, beautiful to look at, proved fragile to ship. Ny London failed. Some of its buildings, though, remain, shipped over the fjord and reconstructed, casting their midnight shadows towards us—but not very far. The shadows are barely longer than the low buildings that cast them.

Beneath the balcony, an ivory gull wanders along the edge of a small ditch. It is whiter than the patches of not particularly dirty snow nearby. A pair of terns drops by to harass it; harassing things, be they avian, human or inanimate, seems to be the terns’ stock in trade. The gull ignores them. A local tells me that the species is profoundly endangered. So it may be. But in this unending light it is hard to imagine it, or anything else that stands its ground, coming to an end. Rocks could be more fragile.

Now a stretch of the fjord by the marble island has been beaten into gold. The mountain shadow is shortening further; the unset sun is rising. Before it broke through the clouds, some seven hours ago, the day had been full of educative detail, of weather balloons and scattering lasers and oceanic mesocosms and research politics and pH measurements and mining history and any manner of other fascinating things. They should have been diarised. But they were before the sun, and now belong to another age. So does all thought of tomorrow’s discussions. For now, there is the sun, and the place, and the curious suspension of time: a solar eclipse in reverse, a world arisen and awake.

(This is part of a correspondent's diary about travelling to the Svalbard archipelago, published on The Economist online. See also Johann Hari's "The Arctic is melting" from the winter issue of Intelligent Life.)

Picture credit: Rerun van Pelt (via Flickr)