Bear Island, Svalbard, Norway
Last night we left the main island cluster of Svalbard to begin our journey back to the south, to warmth, trees, and civilization. Wherever we might be at this time next year, our minds will go back to solitary polar bears and heaps of walrus on the beach of Nordaustlandet; to tiny tundra flowers and immense glaciers emerging between the sharp mountain peaks of Spitsbergen. In the heat of summers to come, our minds will conjure up blue icebergs. That is the Polar Fever!
Between Svalbard and the north coast of Norway is the remote island of Bjornøya … Bear Island. It is unoccupied but for a Norwegian weather station at the north end. We arrived off of Bear Island for an early morning encounter with fin and humpback whales, their numbers testimony to the productivity of these cold seas. We left the whales and headed toward Bear Island, shrouded in a dense fog—not unusual here where warmer water of the Norwegian Sea meets the cold water of the Barents Sea. We entered Surhamn (South Harbor) by radar and the sixth sense of our experienced mariners. The fog faded to reveal the vertical cliffs of sedimentary rock, in places 1,000 feet high, that make Bear Island the ideal habitat and one of the most important breeding areas for cliff-nesting seabirds. (There are roughly a quarter of a million pairs of common (below) and thick-billed murres, and tens of thousands of pairs of kittiwakes.) We boarded Zodiacs for a cruise along the cliffs, gazing up in awe, and passed through the natural tunnel known as The Pearly Gates. And then, with the fog engulfing Bear Island once again, we departed for the south.
