March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010
August 2010
September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 August 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 December 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 July 2016 August 2016 September 2016 October 2016 November 2016 December 2016 January 2017 February 2017 March 2017 April 2017 May 2017 June 2017 July 2017 August 2017 September 2017 October 2017 November 2017 December 2017 January 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April 2018 May 2018 June 2018 July 2018 August 2018 September 2018 October 2018 November 2018 December 2018 January 2019 February 2019 March 2019 April 2019 May 2019 June 2019 July 2019 August 2019 September 2019 October 2019 November 2019 December 2019 January 2020 February 2020 March 2020 April 2020 May 2020 June 2020 July 2020 August 2020 September 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 April 2021 May 2021 June 2021 July 2021 August 2021 September 2021 October 2021 November 2021 December 2021 January 2022 February 2022 March 2022 April 2022 May 2022 June 2022 July 2022 August 2022 September 2022 October 2022 November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 February 2023 March 2023 April 2023 May 2023 June 2023 July 2023 August 2023 September 2023 October 2023 November 2023 December 2023 January 2024 February 2024 March 2024 April 2024 May 2024 June 2024 July 2024 August 2024 September 2024 October 2024 November 2024 December 2024
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27
28
29
30
31
News Every Day |

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.

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?

The post In the Endless Arctic Light appeared first on The American Scholar.

Москва

Geekvape побеждает на ежегодной премии Vaping360 2024 года

Bigg Boss 18: BB exposes Rajat Dalal in front of the entire house; plays audio calling Avinash Mishra 'tharki'; the latter asks 'Eisha ko toh tu behan maanta hai na..'

'Gully cricket khel raha hai kya?': Rohit rebukes Yashasvi

Hina Khan inspires fans with positivity amid stage 3 breast cancer battle; sings this popular song

Watch: Bumrah's peach of a delivery to dismiss Head for a duck

Ria.city






Read also

Four suspected motorcycle, cylinder thieves arrested in Ogun

'Same trips, different prices': Fare differential between iPhone, Android stumps app-cab users

Suspected killer of Niger ex-perm sec died in hospital – Police

News, articles, comments, with a minute-by-minute update, now on Today24.pro

News Every Day

Bigg Boss 18: BB exposes Rajat Dalal in front of the entire house; plays audio calling Avinash Mishra 'tharki'; the latter asks 'Eisha ko toh tu behan maanta hai na..'

Today24.pro — latest news 24/7. You can add your news instantly now — here


News Every Day

'Gully cricket khel raha hai kya?': Rohit rebukes Yashasvi



Sports today


Новости тенниса
WTA

Елена Рыбакина проводит 100-ю неделю подряд в топ-10 рейтинга WTA



Спорт в России и мире
Москва

Боец террористической направленности // Экс-спортсмена обвиняют в теракте и нападении на полицейского



All sports news today





Sports in Russia today

Москва

Боец террористической направленности // Экс-спортсмена обвиняют в теракте и нападении на полицейского


Новости России

Game News

Не качаются приложения в Google Play? Собрали список альтернатив на Android


Russian.city


Game News

Sorry Metaphor, but after playing 300 hours worth of Atlus RPGs in 2024, Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance is my favorite


Губернаторы России
УЕФА

Митрофанов: «Официальные лица УЕФА прекрасно видят качественный уровень организации на турнирах в России»


Артист обжег рот водой из театрального буфета

Кабмин запретил майнинг в 10 регионах России до 2031 года

Свыше 6,5 тысячи жителей Москвы и Московской области получили справки о статусе предпенсионера в клиентских службах регионального Отделения СФР и МФЦ

В Чехове мужчина поджег дом с семьей внутри


«Не успевал довести до ума»: Савосин — о программе под Рахманинова, заигрывании со зрителем и виртуальной Лиге чемпионов

Лоза: «Наталье Фатеевой — 90! Как же безжалостно и несправедливо время. Раньше актрисы были намного привлекательнее»

Певица Земфира выложила фото с белыми волосами

Певица Анна Семенович посетила Единый пункт отбора на военную службу по контракту


Елена Рыбакина оценила нового тренера и раскрыла свое состояние перед турниром

Соболенко прибыла на первый турнир 2025 года после решения Рыбакиной

Петкович: когда Алькарас плох, он чертовски ужасен. У него нет плана Б

Елена Рыбакина проводит 100-ю неделю подряд в топ-10 рейтинга WTA



В Чехове мужчина поджег дом с семьей внутри

В Московской области при силовой поддержке ОМОН 'Пересвет" Росгвардии задержаны подозреваемые в разбойном нападении на пенсионерку

Подозреваемые в разбойном нападении на пенсионерку задержаны при силовой поддержке ОМОН Росгвардии в Подмосковье

Кабмин запретил майнинг в 10 регионах России до 2031 года


В Мордовии представители Росгвардии вручили медали и удостоверения подшефным кадетам «Гвардейской смены»

В Московской области при силовой поддержке ОМОН 'Пересвет" Росгвардии задержаны подозреваемые в разбойном нападении на пенсионерку

Сергей Собянин отчитался о прошлом и будущем // Мэр пообещал Мосгордуме сделать из Москвы лучший город Земли

В Приморском филиале ведомственной охраны Минтранса России прошли учебно-методические сборы начальников команд


Елочки с иголочки: сколько звезды потратили на новогодний декор

Выставка бьюти-елей открылась в рамках «Путешествия в Рождество»

Ефимов: микроквартиры создают сверхвысокую плотность населения в Москве

Mash: артист Соколов выдумал историю с отравлением в буфете Большого театра



Путин в России и мире






Персональные новости Russian.city
Сергей Шнуров

"У меня всегда лежит ножик, который я с удовольствием воткну в спину". Сергей Шнуров рассказал о работе с Инстасамкой, отношении к "сделанным" девушкам и жизни после 40 лет



News Every Day

Watch: Bumrah's peach of a delivery to dismiss Head for a duck




Friends of Today24

Музыкальные новости

Персональные новости