yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Svalbard - The Northernmost Town on Earth


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Come take a walk with me, around Longyearbyen. That's the largest town on the Norwegian islands of Svalbard. Parts of it may look familiar. But make no mistake, this place IS different. At 78° north, it is just 1800mi/1300km from the North Pole. And with over 2000 permanent residents, it is the northernmost real town on Earth.

There are only 50km (31mi) of road, including the small streets between houses. So people get around the island mainly on snowmobile. In fact, there are more registered snowmobiles than residents. Anyone leaving town is required to travel with a gun and someone who knows how to use it. Because the islands are also home to polar bears. The average daytime high is below freezing for all but four months of the year.

Hi. And from the end of October to mid-February, the sun doesn't rise at all. This is the long polar night. Living here is tough. This past December, an avalanche in town destroyed 10 homes, which used to be here, killing two people. So how did this cold, remote, ice-covered archipelago come to be inhabited?

Well, the hills around town are rich in coal deposits that have been mined for over 100 years. The coal was transported to the port via a series of aerial tramways. Some of which remain today, though they are no longer operational. Coal is a reminder that Svalbard was not always an Arctic ice world.

360 million years ago, it was actually in the tropics, just north of the equator. A swampy area, it was covered with a precursor to modern ferns, which were much larger than they are today, reaching 10-30m (33-98ft) in height. This vegetation was then covered in mud and sand, and submerged under the sea. Over time, it turned into the coal deposits that in the 20th century brought miners from Norway, Russia, and the US.

Most of the coal mines have now closed and the economy is gradually shifting towards tourism, education, and research. Tourists take trips on snowmobiles and dog sleds. There is a university center in Svalbard which offers semester courses in biology, physics, and geology. And up on the side of a mountain, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

But that's a story for another time. The locals tell me that interest in the region from different nations is increasing. As the globe warms and Arctic ice shrinks, trade routes are opening up across the north. And Svalbard is strategically placed between North America, Asia, and Europe.

So one day in the future, Svalbard may no longer be as cold or as remote as it once was. But for now, it is a reminder of how, through our ingenuity, people can live in even the most inhospitable of places.

More Articles

View All
50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers
Did you find your first customer surprisingly? “A cold email? That’s a good question. A lot of calls and emailing on Reddit, actually. We don’t have them yet; we are currently looking.” [Music] “The first one was actually just kind of very crafted cold…
Common and proper nouns | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy
Hello, Garans! I’d like to bring up the idea of the difference between a common and a proper noun. The difference between a common and a proper noun is simply the difference between something with a name and a more generic version of that thing. I’ll giv…
Limits of combined functions: piecewise functions | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We are asked to find these three different limits. I encourage you, like always, to pause this video and try to do it yourself before we do it together. So when you do this first one, you might just try to find the limit as x approaches negative 2 of f o…
Playing Heads Up! with Neil deGrasse Tyson | StarTalk
All right, so Neil, we’re going to play a little bit of a game called heads up. Are you familiar? I’ve seen people do it. If I mess up badly, I don’t want to disappoint you. I don’t think there’s any disappointment in just like playing a game with you. …
Kat Manalac's Whale AMA
We usually let the startups in each batch decide when they want to launch. Um, so most of the startups in the winter ‘17 batch haven’t announced yet. But, um, there is one female founder who has announced her company. Um, it’s called Simple Habit. It is a…
The Lighthouse Keeper | Khaffeine, an audio journey by Khan Academy
[Music] You wake to the sound of crashing waves swelling and breaking against the breakwaters outside your home. They have a rhythm to them, a rhythm you’ve grown accustomed to like a heartbeat. They build, swell and crash, build, swell and crash again an…