Spitzbergen and climate change

Now Spitzbergen, you may know this depending on whether you are in geography classes as well as science, but it’s about 500 miles north of the north coast of Norway, and a few hundred miles from the North Pole. It’s as far as you can sail before you get to the polar ice cap, and we went there, not in a science research vessel with a steel hull, and not with just a crew of scientists, we went there with artists and scientists in a 1910 two masted schooner.

This is just to give you an idea of what Spitzbergen looks like, it’s ice, it’s snow, it’s glacier, it’s frozen water, it’s an entirely ice-based landscape, so you can imagine that if the temperatures start to rise this is going to have a dramatic effect, and this is the reason why you get, as I’m sure you are familiar with in New Zealand, a lot of exploration at the Antarctic, and why we also have exploration at the Arctic. It’s because these environments are particularly sensitive to what’s happening on the planet. And the reason these polar bears are threatened is because of this.

(Just keep on forwarding…) One of the things about Spitzbergen that is interesting, well two, is that it is a very divided land, because the west coast is hit by the Gulf Stream and you might have heard about the Gulf Stream, it’s what keeps Europe warm, huge amounts of energy that start in the United States, down in the Gulf of Mexico, go right the way across the Atlantic, and warm the western coast, it’s about as much energy as is put out by every single power station in the United States everyday, and it all comes free of charge right across the Atlantic. It all comes from the sun originally and warms the west coast and keeps it relatively ice free. But the eastern coast is traditionally full of pack ice a lot of the year, it’s impossible to sail through it.

But our expedition we started with this idea that it might be possible, it might be possible to sail all the way round because of climate change, because the water temperatures are warmer, we were going to prove that you can now sail all the way round. And one of the reasons that this is interesting, the picture that you are seeing now, is that’s the tracks of a polar bear, now New Zealand is famous for having more sheep than people, but Spitzbergen has rather more polar bears than people. There are about 3000 polar bears and the trouble is that the latest prediction is that they are all going to die, and they are all going to die quite quickly, probably before the year 2050, so that’s within the lifetimes of a lot of these bears.