In the Endless Arctic Light

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.