Heather Rossiter
Spitsbergen is the largest island in the Svarlbad Peninsula, which lies east of Greenland, well north of Iceland and almost due north from Tromso in Northern Norway. Spitsbergen has two centres of Arctic Research: Longyearbyen across the 78th parallel and Ny-Alesund just short of the 79th - that is, approximately 11 degrees south of the North Pole.
Both research centres were originally coal-mining settlements. The Kongs Bay Coal Compani (sic) still owns the land and maintains the infrastructure of each town. The main client is the Norwegian Polar Research Institute (NPRI) but Germany, the U.K. and Japan all have year-round research programs centred in Ny-Alesund. Many of the scientists are women. I talked with four.
(18 July 95) In Longyearbyen,
I walked to the brightly painted Norwegian Polar Research Institute,
left my shoes with the many pairs of boots in the porch and, barefoot,
climbed the stairs to a well-equipped laboratory where I met Eva
Fuglei.
Eva, with a masters in Physiology, is a PhD student in the TERROK program of NPRI. Her field: the energetics of Arctic foxes and the adaptations that enable them to live in the Arctic. With others she is mapping their year-round energy budget. She has 9 in captivity: 8 white and 1 blue, varietals within the species, which she will keep for perhaps 2 years and then release.
When she first began, trapping foxes for study was difficult as there did not seem to be many about. Their recent abundance she thinks may relate to the very severe 93/94 winter when there was such terrific ice-cover over the vegetation that many reindeer died, the carcases still supporting the fox population. Her trap data will be published.
Her foxes are kept at the Animal House in Ny-Alesund and Eva commutes by plane. There are several flights a week.
Metabolic rate is assessed by indirect calorimetry. In a plexiglas chamber oxygen depletion and carbon dioxide addition to the airflow are measured. This is done prior to eating, during normal eating regimes and during starvation. Heart rate and deep-body temperature transmitters are implanted and readings recorded during activity (on treadmill to simulate running) and at rest. When this basal data is collected and correlated, data-logger implants will allow extension to a free-living budget.
The importance of these basal studies is to be able to recognise change such as might be caused by pollution, most probable because foxes are at the top of both the terrestrial and marine food chains. They eat land birds and reindeer but also seal carcases after the polar bear and sea birds. It is already plain that there is a high level of PCB contamination in the foxes.
Eva doesn't find the Arctic a particularly "tough" environment,
challenging but not tough. She has been in Longyearbyen for two
years. She took the first winter straight but last winter took
holidays in December/January. The winter is calm, she says, and
one can get on with one's work. The summers are more stressful
because of the constant interruptions from visiting scientists.
In Longyearbyen there is a cinema, hospital, church, schools and
lots of sporting possibilities including rifle, pistol and revolver
shooting groups. Eva's choice is skiing, but she and all the other
scientists find their snowscooters invaluable.
There are no roads out of Longyearbyen and it is very necessary to get out of the small closed community, to be able to get close to nature and away from other people, to listen to the silence and the foxes, to see polar bears and to enjoy the pristine environment and the freedom. Eva is fascinated by the past history of hunters and hermits who chose to live alone in the High Arctic. She enjoys seeing where they lived and learning how they solved the problems of survival. Nonetheless she always wears her revolver. Less than six months ago there was a death and a mauling by polar bear close to the city. It shocked everyone into awareness. People are much more careful now, all carry weapons.
Eva lives in Polar Institute Housing, painted externally in lots of bright colours. In her building there are 6 self-contained flats and some communal living rooms with new experimental air ventilation. She surprised me by saying it gets very hot when the sun shines, wirh so many windows.
Doing a course in Arctic Biology at Oslo University brought her to the Arctic. Previously most women had seen the Arctic as a masculine prerogative and in the Polar Institute there are many "tough" men; women still need to fight to be accepted, but with increasing numbers and support from other women it is becoming easier. Eva is not aware of the professional advantages of net-working among women scientists: it is a new concept for her. Role models, however, she sees as extremely important and she finds inspiration in reading about other women's achievements in the Arctic and Antarctic. She mentioned the Norwegian woman who recently walked alone to the South Pole.
Longyearbyen gives Eva the satisfaction of working alone. There are lots of challenges in working in Svarlbad, she says, but knowing "I can handle this, I can solve these problems" reveals her personal strength. She begins to know herself.
(20 July 95) When I was concerned at not being able to get through on the ship's wireless to Nina Melhus, Coordinator of Research in Spitsbergen for NPRI the Captain said "Don't worry; Nina is always on the wharf." In Kongsfjorden as the mailboat came alongside the Ny-Alesund pier a band began to play. Frenziedly beating the drumsticks, blowing into the trumpets and fingering the horns were Nina and some of the scientists I had come to interview. Later, in the Research Station, we talked more calmly.
Dr Clare Robinson of Sheffield University's Centre for Arctic Ecology is working on a project funded by the British Natural Environment Council to look at the effects of simulated climate change on plants and soils in the High Arctic. Clare is here for her third 2-month summer visit to the experiment running in situ since 1991.
A polythene greenhouse is kept constantly 3.5°C above ambient temperature, that is, at the conservative end that modellers predict will be the temperature change by the year 2050.
We could see through the window the British Station where she and sometimes 10 other people work. On field trips, cold is a problem to Clare who last year had to wear seven layers of clothes. The temperature was 2°C with a high chill factor from the wind and the rain. This summer it had been constantly as I found it: 5-7°C, no rain and not much wind.
When I asked her "why are you here?" she said "To a botanist this is almost a model ecosystem; the High Arctic ecosystem is very simple. There are only six vascular plants on our plot. Secondly, when climate change does occur, it is predicted to occur most rapidly in the Arctic. And personally, the Arctic is special: it is a chance in a lifetime to come here; it is a privilege, and professionally I think they might say: if she can organise three years of summer field work in the Arctic..."
Penny Hawkins from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Birmingham and funded by Biological and Biomedical Sciences Research Council, works in the NPRI.
As a foreigner she is required to work with a Norwegian partner. She and Dr Gabrielson are working on the Energetics of a commercially important seabird, the Guillemot, in a way similar to Eva's with foxes. In the laboratory the relationship between metabolic rate and the bird's heart rate is calibrated and then a heart rate data-logger is implanted in a wild bird.
"Catch them again 2 weeks later and you can interpret the birds metabolic rate and activity. We want to find out how much fish they eat and what they do. Seabirds," Penny said, "are important indicator species of pollution, with such things as PCBs in their tissues and it is important to understand the energetics so that if things do go wrong we can recognise changes in the system. And secondly commercially. These seabirds are at the top of the food chain, they eat a lot of fish, so through them the fisheries food chain can be monitored."
She also thinks it is "a privilege to be here, the space, it is so clean, it gives you a different perspective on your whole life, it is very motivating.. nothing man-made on the horizon, the scale is so different from anything we are used to. I love the sea and I love the birds but I'm starting to find them a bit of a problem. We let them go after we've done our work but it is getting to be a bit hard." She is changing career into Animal Welfare when her PhD is finished.
Ute Schwartz is the Scientific Coordinator at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and has been in Ny-Alesund since January 95. She takes care of logistics and organisation for all scientists coming up from Germany to the station. She also carries out routine experiments in Atmospheric Research but does not have her own research program.
Since 1989 the Wegener Institute has been studying ozone in the High Arctic atmosphere by balloon launching and this year ozone reduction has been recognised but not an ozone hole. She is one of two permanent station members, that is, in Ny-Alesund for an 8 month contract end to end; the others visit for 1 to 2 week periods, usually in winter and spring the most interesting time for atmospheric research.
When asked why she had come to the Arctic, Ute surprised me by saying, "Actually I didn't want a job here, I wanted a job in Antarctica. My dream when I was a student was to go to Antarctica. Germany has two Antarctic stations but only one woman so far has been there." Nonetheless she is happy with second best. The High Arctic "is a great experience, a chance to discover oneself by ranking the importance of other things, finding out what is important and what isn't, to prove to oneself what one can do. Professionally it is a chance to prove one's capacity to future employers, to develop problem solving abilities. If there's a problem here there is no-one else to go to, you just get on with it."
Of the 50 residents in Ny-Alesund this (1995) summer, twenty are women; yet Clare is the only woman at the British Station, there are only two at the NPRI and one of those was about to leave, and Ute is the only woman at the AWI. During the winter Ute was the only female scientist. Despite the imbalance they all said there was less gender exclusion in the Arctic than "at home", wherever that was. "At home many men are dismissive, condescending, talk you down or talk around you but that doesn't happen here," one said. "Many men at home seem to have an immature attitude which is divisive. Here they are a very mixed group but they don't call you 'girls'," another said. Ute said gender relationships are "pretty good" at AWI, but she reminds us she is used to being the only woman because she studied Physics.
How do they live? Very well. The base facilities are fantastic. The central mess provides four meals a day although they usually manage to miss one either through being out doing field work or because they can't cope with another meal. Clare has a single room in the British Base. Penny has a single room in the Bachelors House, which has a mixed shower room with three cubicles: "You learn to be quick," she says, and Ute lives in the Blue House, the German station. There is socialising in the cafe, ("what I'd call a pub": Penny) Wednesdays and Fridays and on Saturday nights there is a bar in the mess. The cafe closes in the winter (my fellow passengers were eating waffles in the cafe while I was doing this interview, lucky them).
Ute, the only one who has been there during the winter, says it becomes something special, a small community where close relationships develop with others. "It is a time of hard work, usually till 8 or 9 o'clock, and then maybe we read or talk." The winter darkness is not depressing, Ute said, and compared it with Germany where "in the winter you go to work in the morning and it is dark, you do your work inside during the day and when you go home it is dark again. It is not so different here except at weekends and then you don't have the light, the daylight."
Integration of the scientists with the KBCC is complete: they run the base, use the mess, no-one knows who anyone else works for necessarily, all nationalities mixed together. Most of KBCC live with Penny in the Bachelors House. "Because everyone is away from home they are more outgoing, keen to get on with everyone else."
There are only two formal requirements for working in Svarlbad. The first is a stringent medical check to ensure physical fitness. They assured me there was no psychological-suitability testing. The second is weapon-training before coming to the Arctic and target practice on site. Unlike Eva, these women in Ny-Alesund carry rifles. Penny says it is a horrible thought that you might have to shoot a bear and the encounter is if possible, avoided. This summer geologists were called back from a field trip when it was learned there was a bear in the area. "If you had to shoot it, it wouldn't be fair that the bear had to lose its life for doing just what bears do," said Penny.
Before I left Ny-Alesund I paid a call on Eva's foxes and from the animal house looked out across the tundra, past the flock of barnacle geese and the Arctic terns who let you know who owns the flagpole, beyond the herd of reindeer to the glaciers slipping into the fjord. Last night had been noisy for people at the Base, the glaciers had been calving, and I could see the ice floating out beyond the mailboat that had brought me here. Summer for scientists in the High Arctic isn't uninteresting.
Look at a map and you see the main difference immediately. The Arctic is a sea surrounded by land and the Antarctic is land surrounded by water. From this come the temperature and accessibility differences.
The vast continent that is Antarctica is overlain by glaciers, 150 km deep in places, that slide slowly toward the oceans and creep out over the seas until gravity wins and huge blocks break off and become mighty Antarctic icebergs, sometimes 100 km long, bigger than anything ever seen in Arctic waters. The continent wraps the South pole in a landmass that projects north to 70°S except in the Weddell and the Ross Seas but in the Southern Ocean and on the Antarctic Peninsula the land comes North even beyond the Antarctic Circle. Fringing the Continent is an iceshelf of variable width. Katabatic winds roar across the icefields and out to sea pushing the ice northwards and chilling the waters. The northern limit of the pack ice that makes winter ship-access impossible is almost up to the fiftieth parallel. So a vast cold land is isolated even further by the vast frigid sea that encircles it.
At the other end of the world we see an ocean filling ten degrees around the Pole and in more than half the world coming down to the seventieth parallel. Much of the surface is frozen the year round but in July we sailed beyond the eightieth parallel without danger. The sea was strewn with small ice fragments but there are no glaciers to create icebergs, the real navigational danger. (Those that float into the North Atlantic come from glaciers in Greenland.)
Siberia, Russia and Canada flirt with the seventieth parallel, now across, now shrinking back. Many groups of islands straddle the eightieth parallel: Svarlbad, Svernaya Zemlya, Franz Joseph Land, Elizabeth Islands to name a few, but at the North Pole there is only water, frozen to a certain depth but beneath the ice always, year round, liquid water and into it pours the Northern Equatorial Gulf Stream warming Scandinavia, Iceland, Svarlbad as it rushes North, so that in July one can walk across the Arctic Circle wearing a t-shirt and can often stand on the deck of a ship above the eightieth parallel wearing an ordinary overcoat. In comparable latitudes in the South full thermal gear is de riguer at all times of year.
There was a permanent population: some natives, some elective hunters and coalminers, even hermits, in the North before the scientists came. In the South no-one had ever lived there until the twentieth century brought explorers and scientists to the bitter cold. Borchgrevinck, a Norwegian Australian, lead the first party to overwinter on Antarctica. From their base on Cape Adare they saw in the new century as they waited for their relief ship to cross the ice-strewn seas.
Establishing, supplying and peopling research stations in high latitudes, North and South, is therefore a very different proposition. Yet scientific and meteorological research stations now ring both poles and there is a permanent station at the South pole itself.