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This is a sub-page about my trip to Svalbard.
I guess I watch too many natural history programs. When the chance came to visit Svalbard, I needed no persuading. But when I told friends where I was going, I usually got blank looks. "You're going WHERE?" Few people have heard of it, it seems. Which is a pity!
I thought people knew what and where Svalbard is. Maybe I should have said "going to Spitsbergen"? (The traditional name for the archipelago, and still the name of the main island.) (But it didn't seem to help, when I started trying that.)
Svalbard is north of Norway. A long way north. Sixty percent of the distance from Oslo to the North Pole. Well within the arctic circle. (^_^) There's a diagram later which explains further.
You may know that in olden times, when map-makers had a bit of an embarrassment on their hands... when they didn't know what was present on a place on their maps... they sometimes put "here be dragons".
Just how extreme this trip was began to become clear to me when I started my usual pre-trip research.
Google Maps couldn't tell me much. Instead of seeing people washing cars on driveways, this is what the "satellite" view was showing me for the "big town", where about 2000 people live. There are about 600 more people scattered across the rest of the archipelago to complete the population of this Norwegian territory.
I'm told you "can't" be born here or be buried here. The latter is, of course, easier to enforce than the former, but when the doctors get it right, and I suspect they work hard at it, expectant mothers go south when it is "time".
Which is ironic, when you think about it. In common with much of the high latitudes, the summer with it's long days (no sunset from about 19 April to 23 August in Svalbard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun)) is one of the world's great "nurseries", with millions... billions?... of birds flying in, to raise young in these relatively predator-free lands.
Which brings me back to "here be dragons". Well. Not dragons, perhaps... but there is a good chance of seeing polar bears if you visit Svalbard. So maybe Google maps should "go with" "Here be polar bears"... until they can arrange better images of the stunning geography of the place?
Here's the whole of Svalbard.
(From http://www.archipelago.nu/index.htm)
Map's scale: The vertical dark blue bar, lower right, is about 111 km long, or about 69 statute miles, or exactly 60 nautical miles.
The longest diagonal you can draw is about 280 statute miles long... about the distance from New York to Portland Maine, or a little less than London to Edinburgh. (Ironically, it is almost exactly the distance from my home to Newcastle, where I recently went on a special weekend trip special in several ways.)
Travel "disturbs" your complacency. Being so close to the north pole, and a conversation with one of the senior officers of the ship, woke my consciousness to some matters of global geometry. The vertical dark blue bar (lower right) is one degree of latitude high. One degree of latitude, anywhere, is 60 nautical miles. Handy, as degrees are divided into 60 minutes, so a minute is one nautical mile.
The horizontal blue bars (upper left, lower right) show one degree of latitude... note that the length of one degree nearer the north pole is less than the length of one degree nearer the equator.
"A" is where Longyearbyen is, the town where most of the people of Svalbard live, and where we started and ended.
The map to the right was kindly provided for us by Linblad. It shows our route. As I said a moment ago: we started at "A" on the map above, and sailed clockwise around the archipelago.
New York, London and Svalbard are not all on the same longitudes, of course, but the diagram shows how far "up" the globe each is...
omn: Our Most Northerly excursion, 80° 56.2' North
NP: North Pole
AC: Arctic Circle
NYC: New York City
Equa: Equator
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Page WILL BE been tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. Mostly passes. There were two "unknown attributes" in Google Translate and Google+ button code. Sigh.