The connected Arctic

NY ALESUND, a village devoted to scientific research on the island of Spitsbergen, in the high Arctic, seems about as isolated as it is possible to get. Beyond the confines of the village and its outstations, there is no sign of human beings; just snow, water, rock and scrawny soil.

To the north, it's a straight trip to the pole. This is true everywhere, by definition, but from Ny Alesund the trip is shorter than from any other permanently inhabited settlement. To the west is Greenland (the most northerly, uninhabited bit), followed by Ellesmere Island (part of Canada), a lot of sometimes frozen ocean and some Russian islands before a humanity-free circumnavigation brings you back to Ny Alesund. To the south is everything else in the world, most of it a very long way off. The nearest city, Tromso, is more than 1,000km away, and hardly a metropolis. For four months a year even the sun does not make it to Ny Alesund. Before the 20th century, no one lived here, nor would anyone have wanted to.

Yet for all its physical isolation Ny Alesund is connected to the world in a surprising number of ways. Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago, is an inherently international place: the 1920 treaty that gives Norway sovereignty over it also allows any other nation that signs the treaty to set up shop there for its own ends. After a mining accident in 1962 brought an end to Ny Alesund's original raison d'être (and brought down the Norwegian government, too, demonstrating a surprisingly direct connection to national political power) various of the countries that are signatories to the treaty started to set up scientific operations there, helped by Kings Bay, the company that had previously run the mines. The village now houses scientific bases from about a dozen countries, and citizens from a good few more, most of them European but not all: there are facilities here paid for by South Korea, India and China, which has a building guarded by a couple of fine ornamental lions.

The village logs some 14,000 researcher-days a year: the scientists normally come and go on twice-weekly flights from Longyearbyen, about 110km away, except for those who arrive on research ships, or on the vessels that bring in provisions and fuel to replenish the stocks in the rather rusted tanks that stand up above the jetty. A few dozen of them spend the winter up here. “The midnight sun is one thing,” one of the select few boasts, “but the full moon at noon is rarer and finer.”

Many of these researchers study the local environment. They measure the weather, catalogue the vegetation (still oddly rich in some parts of the settlement, as a result of cowpats from the animals that the miners brought up half a century ago), study the waters of the fjord and measure the health of the glaciers that empty into it. The Arctic is changing faster in response to global warming than any other region of the planet, and the snows, seas and sparse grazing grounds around Ny Alesund form one of the best studied reaches of this global front line. This is another key connection to the rest of the globe: Ny Alesund is where the future of one of the Earth's most vulnerable regions is most readily glimpsed, and where the passing of what has gone will be most fully recorded.

Some raise their eyes heavenwards, launching weekly balloons to probe the ozone layer, watching with wonder the northern lights higher still. Others look at the air itself, rather than through it. The Arctic is the world's attic: a lot of junk lofted high into the atmosphere farther south ends up there. And the facilities for studying it all, especially those high above the settlement in the laboratory at the summit of Mt Zeppelin, away from any local disturbances, are exquisitely sensitive. Some of these instruments form part of the world's network for monitoring carbon dioxide levels. Others monitor methane, carbon monoxide, ozone, lead, and all sorts of particles. Some bottle up air for yet more meticulous examination far away, in Britain, or in Boulder, Colorado. Kim Holmen of the Norwegian Polar Institute says some of his equipment could detect a cigarette at 2km. Through their careful monitoring he and his colleagues connect themselves to conflagrations a great deal farther away than that, picking up industrial pollutants and forest fires from all parts of Eurasia.

Some pollution comes from nearer by. Cruise ships visit Ny Alesund throughout the summer, some small, some large. Kings Bay receives landing fees for some 30,000 people a year. And then there are the bigwigs and brasshats. Aloft in his air-sampling eerie, Holmen has greeted a significant fraction of the American Senate, various heads of state, UN grand poobahs, Nobel prize winners and religious leaders. The heirs to the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish thrones all visited together as their nations' patrons of International Polar Year in 2008. Ny Alesund may never match Rodeo Drive for celebrity spotting, but for a village of a few hundred it does pretty well.

Over by the airstrip, there's further evidence of global reach: a ground station to which various German Earth-observing satellites send down their data. The Arctic is a good place for this. Most such satellites use orbits that go more or less from pole to pole in order to see as much of the planet below as possible, so a receiver near one of the poles can get data sent down to it more or less on every orbit. Among the satellites thus serviced is TerraSAR-X, which sounds like a garish robot dinosaur but is in fact a high-resolution radar system. More sedately named is the Grace mission, which is exquisitely sensitive to the little lumps and bumps of the Earth's gravitational field, and thus can measure the slight changes in it caused by such things as ice caps melting.

And then there is the most far-reaching connection of all. Farther along the airstrip, a radio telescope scans the skies (and requires that the rest of the base be free of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile phones). It is aimed at a select set of quasars, black-hole-powered infernos billions of light-years away, each brighter than a hundred galaxies. But though it is looking at the quasars, it is studying the Earth. The radio telescope is run not by astronomers, but by Norway's mapping institute. Linked in a network with other such dishes all over the world, it uses exact measurements of the quasars—which provide a universal set of stationary reference points—to define with otherwise impossible precision the rotation and movements of the Earth's crust. The precision of GPS satellite navigation depends on the painstaking connection of the Earth to its cosmic context that this dish and its fellows provide. The dish above Ny Alesund, and its partners all over the rest of the planet, are part of the reason why people everywhere else are increasingly able to know exactly where they are just by looking at a screen. At the same time, it produces local knowledge, such as the fact that, as the ice burden on the islands lessens, the archipelago is rising by about a centimetre every year.

The village's bleak surroundings of snow, ice and rock have all the grandeur of the wilderness, the emptiness that inspires romantics who, as Shelley put it in “Julian and Maddalo”:

... love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore

More barren than its billows;

Yet, like Shelley's rider on the shore, Ny Alesund and its inhabitants are not alone. They are linked to the rest of the Earth: representatives of a planet studying itself in microcosm.