On Top of the World

It’s hard to define the Arctic. 

It is not a continent; in fact, much of it is not even land, but ocean, large swaths of which consist of frozen sea ice.  It is not confined to any particular country; rather, it spans a polar region that includes the northern parts of Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.  And many of those parts of the Arctic that do consist of land are covered by thick glaciers, some thousands of years old.  Broken fragments of these glaciers, icebergs, float across portions of open ocean.  Although much of the land in the Arctic technically is considered desert, the glaciers and icebergs found on and around it contain approximately 20% of the Earth’s supply of fresh water!

How could anything possibly survive in this harsh environment?  Yet the polar bear, walrus, whales, Arctic fox, musk ox, and numerous bird species all do, having specially adapted over millennia not only to live, but thrive in this place of snow, ice, seawater, tundra, and sharp volcanic rock.  But with climate change, its unique characteristics are fast disappearing. 

Warming oceans lead to melting glaciers and sea ice.  Many species of fish, which depend on the floating ice to spawn, are dwindling in numbers, creating pressure on their many predators for adequate sustenance.  Polar bears require sea ice in order to ambush seals, their primary nutrition source.  And, most alarming, the Arctic is warming at a faster rate than other parts of the world, in some places 5 to 7 times higher than the global average.  The Greenland ice sheet is shrinking at a rapid rate, and scientists predict that in the near future, huge areas of ocean that were once covered in ice will be entirely ice-free year-round.

The photographs in this collection reflect this fast-changing environment.  Most of these photographs were taken in Svalbard, an archipelago of islands in the high Arctic north of Norway, and in the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean, but a few are from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

I find myself drawn to the North more and more these days, intrigued by the rugged beauty, the isolation, and the hardy denizens it shelters, soberly mindful that I may be among the last of generations to see the otherworldly eeriness of this lonely place before it is altered irretrievably.