Personal Beginnings - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 3

Murray(researchers atAberdeen),RobertSwann(afellowstudentatAberdeenUniversity)
and I were working amidst the seabirds of Kongsfjorden.
We were a year late, but I never complained because in the interim summer, I met
Thérèse Ní Ógáin while we worked on either side of a conveyor belt in a smoked herring
factory on the Shetland Islands. Thérèse had a B.A. from University College Dublin and
was en route to an archaeological dig in Brittany.
Our main camp in Svalbard was just outside the small settlement of Ny-Ålesund, but
Robert and I had another small camp at the head of the fjord. In front of our tent lay raised
beaches of shin-high moss, where hummocks of Arctic-alpine flora celebrated their brief
moment in the sun. Amidst the flowers, eider duck females sat with maternal pride over
their young, and in the small tundra lakes, red-throated diver females and phalarope males
imitated their eider neighbours. Above and behind us was a small mixed-species seabird
colony, while immediately to our right was the huge ice front of the merged Kongsvegen
and Konebreen glaciers. Kongsvegen is an outlet glacier, descending at the breakneck ve-
locity (for a glacier) of about 2 metres a day from an upper ice field. With this speed, it is
heavily crevassed and is almost continually calving small icebergs into the fjord. The ice
front was a pandemonium of seabird activity. Our task was to chart the diurnal behavioural
pattern of the kittiwakes (the most common species) feeding in the twenty-four-hour cycle
of sunlight intensity. It turned out that the birds were much more interested in the intensity
of ice calving than they were in the passage of the sun. The glacial front floats on the fjord,
and if there was a correlation with anything, it was with the tidal cycle.
Robert and I were concerned about polar bears and our lack of a gun was considered
by the staff at the Ny-Ålesund research station to be the height of folly. We explained con-
fidently to them that we did not need one, as the experts at Aberdeen had told us that bears
in summer always follow the retreating sea ice with its cargo of seals. After a few mo-
ments of quiet and reflective thought, our sage in Ny-Ålesund responded in that deliberate
Norwegian way: “Ja, that is true, but the bear that stays behind - he is a hungry bear!”
Of course, he was right. On the way north between Nordkapp and Longyearbyen, our ship
made a supply stop at Bear Island, where a radio operator had been killed the previous au-