SUMMARY

In Svalbard, the northernmost human habitation and the fastest-warming place in the world, observing polar bears provides lessons in why it’s important to safeguard the Earth’s last wild places

I almost abandoned my Arctic adventure before it even started. Friends and family heaved a sigh of relief. Many thought my decision to swerve off to Svalbard, one of the northernmost permanently inhabited places on the planet, instead of attending a conference in Oslo, was unwise. At my age (I am only 67!), careening off alone in winter on a snowmobile, looking for the most dangerous land mammal… crazy-or so they thought.

That’s not why I nearly did not go. lsfjord Radio Hotel in Spitsbergen (the old name for Svalbard), where I had planned to stay after I flew into the Arctic Circle from Oslo, was inaccessible. It had lost all its snow in the third week of April, long before it should have. There are very few roads in Svalbard for vehicles. Snowmobiles and dogsleds are the usual mode of transport but they need ice, which has been melting faster over the past few years, making parts of this archipelago unreachable. Most tourists tour the islands on cruise boats in the summer months.

Climate change has impacted the polar regions the most. In just two decades, the glaciers of Slavbard have lost about 5% of their mass, largely, it turns out, due to warmer oceans rather than rising temperatures. At roughly 310 cubic km, this is enough meltwater to raise global sea levels by roughly 0.75-0.8mm on its own.

Not so far in the future, this sea rise will adversely affect every part of the planet.

My guide asked if I was willing to go towards the open Arctic Ocean instead. The east of Svalbard is colder and wilder, with no Gulf Stream to bring warm relief. There was plenty of ice there, with massive glaciers flanking sheets of sea ice and a tad better chance of catching polar bears. There would be no comfortable hotel-we would camp out on the top of Domen Mountain. Gently, he explained that the toilet would be two walls of ice, two holes in the ground and two Styrofoam seats, 50m from the tents.

I remained undeterred though my imagination spun wildly with all that could go wrong. Packing for Arctic temperatures, which fall to minus 20 degrees Celsius with wind chill, was itself an adventure. My survival suit would keep me dry and afloat even if I slipped into an icy hole.

As I boarded the flight from Oslo to Svalbard, after a more than usually tight hug from the husband, a general anxiety crept over me. I had felt the same two months before, on my trip to the Third Pole in the Himalayas. This was a natural fight or flight response that has safeguarded humans for millennia. Too many urbanites and digital citizens have lost fear of the untamed wild. This trepidation was my protector, and should be held with respect. So I kept my fear close to me, and stayed close to my fear.

The Arctic landing was white and smooth. At a latitude of 73 degrees, it did not feel as cold as it should have on the tarmac. “It’s been a devastating year, way too warm,” said the woman who greeted us at the airport. “Most houses here are built on stilts because of the permafrost underneath. But it is melting early and unevenly, putting our homes at risk.” It was a repeat of my recent experience in Ladakh, where unprecedented rain is making traditional mud roofs cave in. In that high-altitude desert, where snow leopards roam and blue sheep graze, there is unscientific tree planting, changing age-old weather systems.

We had a stopover at the old coal mining town of Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in this Norwegian protectorate. People don’t need special visas or permits to come to Svalbard, though some new constraints are coming in, and this little town has people of more than a hundred nationalities, most of whom know each other. There is zero crime.

On a drive that afternoon along the Advent Bay, we spotted a huge walrus, flopped unmoving on the stony shore, no doubt stuffed with clams, blissfully unafraid of curious humans. Here and there, snowy reindeer nibbled peacefully at new shoots of grass, evoking memories of Christmas.

On the cragged hillocks abutting the shore, the first little auks had already arrived for the breeding season from the north-east of Iceland. Chasing these laughing, flying black-and-white birds were Arctic foxes, like Pomeranians dressed up with bushier tails. Winter-hungry, they darted swiftly among the rocks, hoping to surprise a bird. Snow buntings, Svalbard’s only songbirds, hopped around carefully, while gulls sailed boldly overhead, and eider ducks bobbed on the calm grey water. So much life thrives where humans struggle to survive.

The dinner menu offered reindeer, seal, salmon, and whale steak. Licensed hunting is allowed here. I ordered cabbage.

Day blended into night without darkening skies in this season of perpetual daylight, and soon it was time for the real adventure to the east. Getting dressed in five layers to snowmobiles in sub-zero temperatures took almost an hour the first time. Imagine what the first hunters to settle on Svalbard must have experienced, well before modern insulated clothing.

Off we went to seek the polar bear. The stop-and-go, 8-hour journey riding pillion on a snowmobile was simply exhilarating. All around us was a continent of snow, fjords and glaciers glistening in the sun, giant clouds stooping to confuse the horizon and lifting to reveal clear skies. A white wonderland dotted with the irregular browns of jagged mountains that couldn’t hold the ice. How could any life possibly survive here in this intoxicating barrenness?

“It is unlikely you will see polar bears in the two days you are here, said my guide Piet, regretfully shaking his head as my snowmobile driver Chris nodded. “Please don’t raise your expectations. Just enjoy whatever is.” Not 2 hours after landing, we had already seen so much. My heart was nearly full. So I nodded obediently, all the while praying for more.

Soon enough, we spotted some seals, sunning next to their holes. They raise their heads rhythmically and comically every few seconds to look around, ready to escape into the deep cold waters below if a polar bear were to come by for a meal. Seals need to come up for air and must always keep several open holes, free of ice, for their survival.

We then reached a ragged bird cliff, where hundreds of northern fulmars had come up from the south for the breeding season, their warm cacophony shattering the frozen silence.

We drove down the Hayesbreen glacier, which is part of the second largest glacial system in the archipelago. We stood below layered walls of ice, formed over thousands of years, clicking cameras shifting the solid silence.

Climbing on to a plateau overlooking valleys and ranges blanketed in shades of white, we stopped for a picnic lunch. Astride a snowmobile in minus 10 degrees Celsius, boiling water poured into a packet of freeze-dried beans and squash had never tasted better. The mind expanded with the belly to devour the dazzling view, infinitely fulfilled.

We finally reached the East Coast, driving dizzily fast across the frozen ice reaching the Arctic Ocean. A few startling bumps made me grateful for my yoga training as I leaned in and away from edgy slopes. Stopping to gape in wonder, we did a quick scan for polar bears.

Just then, Piet called out, “There’s something out there in the distance. One big, two small.” Could it be the mother and cubs they had seen earlier? Our binoculars disappointingly revealed three dark shapes. We needed yellowish white.

Let’s go check anyway, we decided. Piet took a last look at the ice behind as we started moving.

“I think it’s a bear,” he whispered. A magnificent male appeared as a dot on the horizon, pale yellow fur moving closer and closer across the ice. You think you know how big your first polar bear will appear, but they are even bigger-1,500 kg of muscle and blubber, nonchalantly cruising at 6km an hour.

We stayed with this animal at a safe distance for hours. We watched him dig furiously around an abandoned hut, and leave disappointed. When we checked later, the bear had pulled out a whale bone the size of a door, probably 200 years old, from the whaling era.

We decided to turn back to check out our earlier sighting. Just then, Chris shouted, “Good God, there is another bear!”

Sure enough, another powerful male in all his white glory, shuffled across the ice towards us in perfect golden light, gracing us with his incredible beauty.

Except that he was heading towards our makeshift camp. Keeping in mind laws that forbid humans to go closer than 500m to a bear, our guides expertly drove around the relentless bear, creating a barrier between his path and our safety. He seemed to understand. After a bit of head bobbing, the bear took another route.

For a moment, we stood still, mesmerised by the shifting light. Christiane Ritter, one of the first women to winter in the archipelago, describes it best in her never out of print 1938 book, A Woman in the Polar Night: “I divine the ultimate salvation before which all human reasoning dissolves into nothing.”

The sun swung low in the sky, though it would not set in this season. Reluctant as a child called back for dinner from the playground, I found myself outside the tiny tented camp, a wisp of smoke billowing out of the makeshift kitchen. Welcome home, said the East Camp team, bringing tears to my eyes. How many audacious hunters, trappers and travellers over the past 300 years, might have longed for such words when they had to set down for a rest in this forbidding land.

The crew prepared delicious hot lentils for supper, which we consumed sitting on the floor around a furnace. Soon, a stretcher was unfolded and a sleeping bag spread over. “Sweet dreams,” said Chris. “Cover your eyes. Do not step out without calling out; someone will be up watching out for bears.”

We were to set off back for Longyearbyen after another day on the coast, but the weather had other plans for us. A snowstorm set in as we were sleeping, the winds howling and the loose tent flaps tapping an uneven beat. The furnace gave up at some point, and I was grateful for the miracle of modern sleeping bags.

We hastily packed up everything after breakfast. Our camp team would dismantle the tents and the toilet after us to leave no trace behind.

The snowfall in the light, bright morning felt warm to my face. Until we got on to the snowmobiles, that is. Cold drafts whipped past my helmet and neck warmer, despite the wall of Chris in front of me. The storm enveloped us in mists that reduced visibility to zero. Hoping to outrace the weather, guided by GPS, we sped at 60kmph over glaciers older than human memory. I ignored my panic and simply surrendered to the void. Such white-outs were what I would imagine during my meditation sessions. Now that visualisation would become memory.

A couple of hours later, we were suddenly out in open fields of snow, the sky glittering and the mountains shimmering with a light perhaps found nowhere else on the planet. We stopped at lofty sculptural ice forms carved from broken glaciers, halted to gasp at frozen waterfalls, played “Spot the ptarmigan”, as the stunning black-and-white birds merged into the snow patched mountains.

Small huts dotted the landscape, made just from Siberian driftwood. Nothing decomposes in the Arctic, everything is preserved. These huts were used until recently by those with Spitsbergen Mania, as the madness that draws humans here is called. Precious stories are still shared of the many ships and men lost to this brutal environment. They seem to deter no one.

FAR-REACHING IMPACT

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The ice melt I witnessed is a major driver of global sea-level rise and other climate shifts that affect many parts of the globe, including India. Earlier, research was focused on atmospheric surface temperatures as the main contributor to the glacial melt. Yet recent evidence suggests that warming sea waters accelerate the melting of polar ice sheets much faster than scientists expected. As these hidden processes, which happen at the underside of the glaciers, have been underestimated in past reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global sea levels are now projected to rise faster and more unpredictably. Low-lying cities on India’s 11,000km coastline housing around 360 million people, could be inundated decades earlier than anticipated.

Take Mumbai, for example. By 2100, the local sea waters may rise as much as 50-100 cm. Without adaptation measures, this will wreak havoc on India’s most important commercial hub. What is of equal significance is that Arctic-driven changes in atmospheric circulation are affecting weather patterns. A recent Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology study links declining Arctic Sea ice with a westward shift and intensification of the Indian monsoon, boosting late-season rainfall over western India, and leaving central parts of the country with dry spells. Less ice in June and July in Svalbard means stronger rainfall in Mumbai or tidal flooding in Surat in September and October.

These polar disruptions will cause other structural risks in India. More than 50% of our arable land depends on rainfall, and predictable monsoon patterns.

Unseasonal drought followed by unexpected deluges can destroy crop yields. Warming seas also affect fishing and marine livelihoods. Staple fish like the Indian sardine and mackerel are moving deeper into the ocean or moving northwards in the Arabian Sea to flee warming waters. The temperature rise also affects the biological clock of many species, resulting in egg decay before hatching. Aquaculture and shrimp farming is critical for India’s seafood export revenues. Rising sea levels bring saltwater into marine estuaries, destroying the fragile ecosystem, bringing disease and die-offs.

As part of its adaptation strategy against polar ice and permafrost melt, India conducts year-round research to build predictive models for agriculture and water resilience planning at its Himadri Station within the leased facility at the international research settlement in Svalbard. Food security has been a major focus for India, and decades of progress could be reversed with the climate risks posed by the ice sheet melt far away in the Arctic.

THE LAST SURPRISE

On the final evening in Longyearbyen, I had a request: Could we see beluga whales from the bay? “Not at this time of the year,” said Piet, though I could see the small cruise boats already lined up for the summer. “But I will take a look, for you,” he said. In a minute, he uttered his first curse: “Holy s***, there’s a white beauty right there!”

And so, the belugas graced us with their hypnotic sea dance, domes cresting and sinking in the grey-blue waters against an iridescent sky.

The plankton they feed on were building up in the bay, and soon hundreds of belugas would provide unending pleasure to the thousands of tourists to arrive to shores where barely 3,000 people live.

How much tourism is too much? Back in Oslo, after unloading my winterwear and my fear, I read that the Norwegian government has recently limited the number of ships and passengers, with special rules to protect the flora and fauna of the fragile archipelago. The great north has suddenly emerged as a destination of choice for wealthy travellers. There is worry that overtourism will engulf the ecosystem.

That made me examine my own motivation and privilege. Should everyone with the means go wherever they can on the planet? In her later years, Ritter said, “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone. Then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.”

Would she say that today? Probably not. Stronger policies, laws and resolve might be needed to secure our planet’s bio resources. In my defence, I can say this for certain: my short, wild adventure of a lifetime has made me ever more committed to the conservation of our biodiversity, and to carry the stories so that more people can fall in love and rise in awe at the magnificence of our planetary home.

Insuring food for the future: The Global Seed Vault

The very first stop we made in Svalbard, even before checking into the hotel in Longyearbyen, was the Global Seed Vault, cut deep into a mountain of ice and black rock. Launched in February 2008 by the Norwegian government and managed in partnership with Crop Trust and Nordic Genetic Resource Center, it is the world’s largest secure seed storage, holding over 1.3 million seed accessions-each a unique genetic fingerprint of a crop variety-with room for millions more.

To think that the future of human food may rest within its vaults filled me with awe and gratitude. Its fac;ade rising like the prows of the cruise ships dotting the coastline, the Global Seed Vault is made of black steel that will turn red over the years, like the changing landscapes of the Arctic itself.

Spitsbergen Island in Svalbard was chosen for its low tectonic activity and permafrost. There is no small irony in the fact that the very coal once mined locally is among the forces threatening that permafrost today. This makes the preservation of seeds all the more vital: plant breeders will need access to a vast range of genetic diversity to develop new varieties suited to a warming world of more droughts and more pests.

Duplicate seeds arrive from around the world as insurance. There are roughly 1,700 gene banks globally, but many deposit extra copies at here. When political crisis struck Syria and destroyed local stores, scientists were able to reclaim their seeds from the vault and begin again. No wonder it is also called the Doomsday Vault.

Three-fourths of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species. Maize, rice and wheat account for nearly half the calories consumed by humans. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of varieties of each crop.

Before India’s Green Revolution, 100,000-200,000 varieties of rice were in circulation-though accounting for regional synonyms, scholars believe 110,000 distinct varieties were cultivated. Today, only 6,000-7,000 survive. India’s own seed vault sits at Chang La in Ladakh.

In October 2024, ICRISAT-an agricultural research institute in Hyderabad-deposited 2,950 seeds of 56 species, including pearl millet, sorghum and 28 wild relatives of the peanut, nine of which were new to the vault. It was part of a deposit of 30,000 new samples from 23 institutions in 21 countries.

Even in their dormant state, seeds are not truly inert. Pathogenic microorganisms-microbes and fungi-travel with them, and their microbiome continues to interact with its environment despite the -18° Celsius temperature in the vault. Research is underway to understand the significance and risks of these organisms, which will be unleashed alongside the seeds when they are finally needed.

The exchange of seeds has long been central to community farming, but industrial agriculture shifted toward ownership and patenting. Norwegian law prohibits the storing of genetically modified seeds, but some environmentalists worry that the vault could serve the interests of global elites in a future crisis.

Yet farmers world over have joined the project with open hearts. In 2017, Peruvian farmers deposited their sacred potato seeds, singing and dancing as they said farewell to their “endangered children.” Art soon followed-and today, an abandoned coal mine hosts the Svalbard Seed Cultures Ark. Both art and seeds continue to come to these icy shores as messages of hope and trust.