But it's very cold.

E ven starting through the lens of my telephoto camera at a polar bear, I couldn’t get my mind off the tiny community where I’d started my journey. Longyearbyen, the largest city in a far-north archipelago, has a year-round population of 2,500, surrounded by mountains, fjords, and glaciers.

I was onboard the Aurora Expeditions ship, the Greg Mortimer , in the midst of the Arctic sea ice just north of the semi-autonomous island group called Svalbard, which is nominally part of the Kingdom of Norway. Even in summer, it was near freezing at this latitude of 83 degrees north, just a few hundred miles from the north pole.

We’d spent several days frolicking in the islands of Svalbard itself—visiting the even smaller community of Ny-Ålesund, a clustering of acc

See Full Page