“Damn, I forgot sunscreen,” should not be my main packing regret this high in the Arctic this early in the year, but here we are.
I’m sitting in shirtsleeves on a floating dock in Svalbard, Norway, and I’m surrounded by signs of our overheating planet. The spring thaw has arrived over a month early, so fleets of snowmobiles and dog sleds sit parked in the mud, and instead of journeys into frozen wonderlands, I watch tourists take boat rides.
On the hillside to my right, gushing meltwater flows beneath relics of the coal mines recently closed in a green energy transition, while to my left, a Norse warship is making a rare appearance at Longyearbyen as Russian aggression and Donald Trump’s fixation with Greenland make the Arctic a hotspot in more ways than one.
Svalbard is heating seven times faster than the rest of the globe, and disappearing ice has created entirely new shipping channels along with a wave of speculators hoping to mine land and seafloor for the metals to run the future.
I’m about to board the MS Freya, a Swedish ship fortified to navigate the ice, but there is no telling how far we’ll have to sail to find it.
Stay tuned.
