Svalbard, Rocks and Ice, July 2024

It has taken me over a year to get to an emotional place where I can post about my trip to Svalbard. It was profound and life altering.

The first step in the process is to sort thru the thousands of photographs. Remove the absolute rubbish. Decide which ones are about moments that are personal, and those that may be interesting to other people. It is like deciding which of your children you want to show off.

I have decided to split them into three piles. Rocks and Ice, Plants and Animals, and People and Trip Notes.

All of the photos are my own. Please let me know if you are going to use them elsewhere.

I have added a few notes. If you want to just look at the photos, click on any one and you will see a slide show at the bottom. There are a couple of very amateurish videos. They will not show up in the slide show, but I think they are worth looking at.

Svalbard is a group of islands belonging to Norway, but you reach them by plane from Helsinki.

It is about as far north as one can get and stand on dry land.

Most people experience them by cruise ship.

It is hard to explain just how small we are, but this picture of one of the zodiacs gives some perspective.

My trip was via a small Quark ship, the Ocean Adventurer. More about that in the third post

Most of our landing were fairly accessible for me.

This was one of the more difficult. But I pushed myself.

This particular shot shows how very small we humans are in the surrounding.

This shot is of a glacier, taken from the zodiac.

We went from clear sky to this in about 20 minutes. I took it just as the zodiacs were getting recalled because weather can change fast. Really really fast.

This is just a hunk of ice pulled from the water. But in a photograph, it becomes an art piece.

This is a huge ice field on Nordauslandet. I cannot describe how huge it is.

There are so many waterfalls from the top. Each one of those layers represents centuries of snow fall.

For perspective, at the bottom is a black line where the ocean undercuts the ice. A zodiac would fit into those ice caves, those tiny indentations at the bottom of the ice field.

Those dark stripes are mostly volcanic, mostly Iceland

The freezing causes the rock to split into these layers.

Here that volcanic ash is imbedded in the iceberg.

I am fascinated by the sunlight thru the icebergs.

Just another glacier.
These will be gone in a couple more years.

The ice flows down hill. The ocean undercuts the ice and eventually it breaks off forming icebergs

Just to the left of center is a place with fresh, blue ice
This is where the glacier calved forming a new iceberg.
We had the honor/luck to see that break off.