Here is a condensed, easy-to-read version of my article about the promise and peril of methane hydrates off the coast of the Svalbard archipelago.
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Friederike Gründger, a post-doc scholar working with Helge Niemann, filters methanotrophic microbes from water samples to measure methane consumption during research cruise in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Easter is celebrated lots of ways around the world, but one of the most unique is found in northern Norway, in the land of the Sami, where colorful costumes and hypnotic singing are par for the course. Here’s my article about it in Smithsonian Magazine.
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Women in traditional Sami costumes from across Scandinavia perform at the Sami Easter Festival in Kautokeino, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Posted today in the online version of The Atlantic magazine, here is an inside, first-person account of the fascinating research being pursued by scientists in a remote fjord in the dead of the Arctic winter.
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Scientists launch autonomous, self-propelled kayak in heart of the polar night to correlate marine biomass movements with tiny changes in ambient light of the four-month long darkness. © Randall Hyman
At 78° north, some 800 miles from the North Pole, it doesn’t take long to shuck the winter blues. Okay, there’s no sun, but instead of warm beaches, there’s bathing in moonlight, starlight and occasional Northern Lights while dog sledding and snowmobiling in the mountains and then hiking between pubs and restaurants in town, sampling regional food and drink. To learn more, see my article in this week’s online National Geographic.
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Dogsledding at mid-day in the polar night
© Randall Hyman
Accompanying a research team at 78° north aboard the RV Helmer Hanssen off the Svalbard coast, I have been witnessing discoveries about the Arctic Ocean’s long winter night that herald a sea change in arctic marine biology. Using sensitive light measuring instruments, an ROV (remotely-operated underwater vehicle), traditional trawling techniques and a robotic kayak, scientists continue to be amazed by how active life is during this cold, dark season that was formerly assumed to be a time of stasis. More about that in an upcoming magazine article.
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Searchlights pierce the four-month-long darkness of the polar night on a scientific expedition to unlock its secrets. © Randall Hyman
As I prepare to join a research team aboard a ship off the Svalbard archipelago later this month, my alma mater, Indiana University, recently published this short piece about my 2015 Alicia Patterson Foundation honors (America’s oldest journalism fellowship) in their alumni magazine. Earlier this month, I served on the Foundation’s five-judge panel in Washington choosing 2016’s six new fellows. While in town, I had the honor and pleasure of presenting my lecture show on Arctic climate change to the diplomatic and military staff of the Norwegian Embassy. More to come in late January on the final leg of my fellowship.
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What does the receding Arctic ice pack have to do with global climate health and why are polar bears eating 44-pound omelettes? Connect the dots in this narrative about crumbling ecosystems and vanishing polar ice as you travel aboard a research ship to go beneath the frozen Arctic Ocean and then sail aboard a Norwegian icebreaker to get up- close-and-personal with a polar bear.
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Scientist examines teeth of young male polar bear in Svalbard, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Methane and methane hydrates may be the key to Norway’s next big energy boom. With oil and coal on the decline, Prime Minister Erna Solberg announced earlier this year that her country would be transitioning away from oil toward gas in the future. At the CAGE institute (Center for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate), scientists are exploring some of Norway’s largest reservoirs off Svalbard where a slight rise in temperature could thaw and unleash a methane hydrate monster. Trapped semi-frozen beneath seafloors worldwide, methane hydrate is a sleeping giant that can expand 160 times its icy volume when changed to gas– exciting news for oil companies, but terrifying for climate scientists. Global reserves of hydrate-bound methane have been estimated as high as 10,000 gigatonnes—twice the world’s total petroleum, natural gas and coal reserves combined. This article about a recent cruise with a CAGE team explores the past, present and future of methane research.
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Scientist monitors seafloor methane seeps aboard research ship in Arctic Ocean off Svalbard, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Sailing aboard a research ship off the west coast of Spitsbergen at 79° North last month, I marveled at our main cargo on the aft deck: two golf-cart-sized crafts that looked like NASA probes bound for planetary exploration. These, however, were headed for inner space, not outer space, designed to set down on Earth’s continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean 500 miles north of mainland Norway. Like the New Horizons spacecraft streaking past Pluto two weeks later, the seafloor landers would be monitoring planetary chemistry, particularly methane, to glean a better understanding of how that substance, 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, might affect Earth’s future climate. At nearly half a million dollars each, the new landers were commissioned by Norway’s CAGE institute (Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate) for more than a mere fly-by. Their year-long missions: track the fate of methane bubbling from the seafloor and help determine whether it poses a serious climate-change threat.
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Deckhand on research ships lowers science station to seafloor for one-year monitoring of methane seeps in Arctic Ocean off Svalbard, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Hot on the heels of my piece in Scandinavian Review about the joyful Sami Easter Festival comes a more serious look at the difficult future that Sami reindeer herders face in the wake of climate change. This is the first of four articles I am producing in the Norwegian Arctic during my one-year fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
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Reindeer stranded in lowlands by early snows feast on feed pellets in icy field outside Tromsø, Norway. © Randall Hyman
As mentioned in an earlier post, I came upon one of the most unknown and colorful Easter festivals in all of Scandinavia while covering the impact of climate change on Sami reindeer herders last April. Read about it in this summer’s issue of Scandivanian Review.
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Colorful hem of traditional Sami costume in Kautokeino, Norway. © Randall Hyman
With students graduating across Norway this month, the last day of school can be bittersweet, especially when it means the last day of a school’s existence. This coming June 18th, Andrine Klausen will finish middle school on the small island of Ingøya off the north coast of Norway, and the graduation ceremony will be special for two reasons: Andrine is the last student left on the island and the school will be closing its doors forever.
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Andrine sets off to fish cod with her teacher and mother after school in Ingøya, Norway. ©Randall Hyman
Bridge of icebreaker. © Randall Hyman
After the Sami Easter Festival in Finnmark, I traveled aboard the Norwegian Coast Guard’s crown jewel, the KV Svalbard icebreaker for three weeks. Our primary mission: chisel our way north of the Svalbard archipelago for 180 nautical miles to 83° North latitude, leading the Norwegian Polar Institute’s research ship, RV Lance, and leaving it locked in a frozen berth from which scientists are tracking the natural drift pattern of the polar ice pack as well as monitoring marine life and chemistry beneath the ice.
Research ship in ice. © Randall Hyman
It took most of a week to reach our destination and several more days to weave our way back out of the frozen maze, breaking through ice as thick as two meters when natural channels shut closed due to winds and tides. April is usually the month of maximum sea ice coverage in the circumpolar north, but the winter pack ice barely extended as far south as where I found it in late summer during “ice minimum” in August 2013 aboard the RV Lance, just north of Svalbard (see Thin ice: Uncharted waters of climate change).
Scientists in helicopter. © Randall Hyman
Sedated polar bear. © Randall Hyman
After reaching open waters again, we pushed our way into some of the archipelago’s most uncharted recesses, docking amid fjord ice each night to serve as a stable helicopter platform for polar bear scientists. On the final morning, a polar bear ambled across the ice past our ship and laid down beside a seal hole, patiently awaiting dinner. After scientists darted him with a sedative, they worked quickly taking blood and fat samples, measuring its girth and length, and pulling the the tiny vestigial tooth behind its canine to count “rings” in the tooth and determine age.
Coast guard initiation. © Randall Hyman
Throughout our journey, the crew of sixty men and women– most on a mandatory year of military service– practiced maritime skills and onboard emergency response, from firefighting to first aid. Those on their first tour above 80° North had to prostrate themselves on a block of ice before King Neptune to be doused by buckets of icy seawater.
Trappers in hut. © Randall Hyman
The biggest surprise of the trip was visiting a young couple living off the land in an old trapper’s hut tucked deep in a remote fjord. After a bone-rattling hour of snowmobiling across fjord ice to reach their hut, I came up the hill to discover that the woman, there in the middle of nowhere, was a friend, Ragnhild Røsseland– someone I had met in Svalbard two years earlier when she worked for the archipelago’s park service as a biologist. (see Sysselmannen: Svalbard guardians)
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Icebreaker 500 miles from North Pole. © Randall Hyman
Kautokeino, Norway. © Randall Hyman
As part of the first leg of my four-part, year-long Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship project, I am focusing on climate change effects on the Sami reindeer economy. The first week of my 5-week journey was spent at the humble village of Kautokeino (cow-too-cane-o) in Finnmark County of Norway’s far north.
Festival reindeer racing. © Randall Hyman
The town boasts one hotel, two churches, thousands of colorful folk costumes and one of the most improbable Easter festivals in all of Scandinavia. After slumbering through the Arctic winter’s constant darkness, Kautokeino comes alive each spring amid the vast whiteness of Scandinavia’s Lappland region for a magical, four-day reawakening called the Sami Easter Festival. Townspeople emerge from snow-laden homes in ornate finery of blue, gold, red and silver to attend three nights of elaborate folk and pop concerts, reindeer and snowmobile races, and to celebrate Easter.
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Women dress in traditional Sami outfits at Easter morning service in Kautokeino, Norway. © Randall Hyman
Arctic climate change and vanishing sea ice is producing strange and unexpected consequences. Hungry polar bears, denied sea ice and a platform for hunting seals, are turning to eating omelets in the traditional breeding grounds of ground-nesting seabirds. A single bear can raid fifty nests and consume 200 eggs in an hour and a half. As bears adapt to this strange new world, scientists are proving resilient, too, as described in this article I published yesterday in Science Magazine‘s online news feed service ScienceNOW:
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Emaciated polar bear searches for dinner on lonely isle in Svalbard, Norway. © Randall Hyman