A Drowned World

Standing near a glacier on the shore of Spitsbergen, an island in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, I ask my guide, Kristin Jæger Wexsahl, what changes she has witnessed in the place she calls home.

“In seven years,” she replies, “I can’t say I’ve seen climate change. I’ve seen a lot of different weather. But when you sit down and you read a trapper’s diaries from the 1920s, his experience of the land, where he traveled, how he traveled, which routes he took—it is completely different than what I’m experiencing.”

But, she adds, you don’t even have to go back that far: Twenty or thirty years is enough. “If you look at ice maps and trip descriptions and route descriptions,” she says, you see trips you can’t take anymore. “It’s always just been open sea when I’ve seen it.”

In front of us, at some distance, is a glacier. From where I stand it seems concrete and permanent, yet Kristen tells me it has been steadily shrinking since she moved to Svalbard. Later that morning we will approach the glacier and I’ll see with my own eyes the melt she is describing, my hands able to reach out and touch what is disappearing. Our conversation turns to changes taking place in the Arctic: the loss of marine life, the warming waters, the thawing permafrost. I ask her how she feels about all these changes in the place she calls home.

“It’s quite a lot of sadness,” she replies, “in realizing that everything you love about the world is falling to pieces.”

Thick, gray clouds dispense mist and gentle rain across Billefjorden, a stubby fjord clawing its way inland from a large bay on Spitsbergen. The glacier rises out of aqua green waters with the force of millennia. Its body is deep time made visible. Its ice blue walls cover rock that is a billion years old. It is impressive, beautiful, and doomed.

On the opposite shore lies the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden, built decades ago to house men who came to wrench