Svalbard

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Spectacular Svalbard sits halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole and is one of the fastest warming places in the Arctic. It is also home to glaciers which are, to use the words of Dr. Will Harcourt, a glaciologist from the University of Aberdeen, "speeding up." Dr. Harcourt and his colleagues spent two…

General view of the miners’ town of Barentsburg on May 7, 2022, on the Svalbard Archipelago, northern Norway.Photo: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP (Getty Images)The war between Russia and Ukraine has extended operations at Norway’s last functioning coal mine in the Arctic.The Norwegian-owned coal company, Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullkompani, has opted to keep its last mine in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago in operation for an extra two years. The mine was supposed to close sometime in the fall of 2023, but it will now be open…

Science in meter and verse Credit: J. Berger/BRG/Global Crop Diversity TrustAdvertisement Hoarded at the heart of an Arctic mountain, within an archipelago of snow: an ark of seeds. Cocooned against soil, nuclear bodies hunker and wait for some future hungerscape. A gathering of crops, varied faces folded into foil, shuttered from the earth. Lentil, dark and round and pebble-smooth. Barley's slender husk of an eye. Each wrinkled chickpea the embryonic head of a bird. Sister…