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WONDERS OF NATURE
Archipelago Spitsbergen. Nature miracle
"The crown of Europe" is often referred to as this mountainous archipelago, lost in the icy expanses of the Arctic. Some of its islands are located beyond the eightieth degree of northern latitude. Only the north of Greenland and the Canadian island of Ellesmere are even closer to the North Pole.
In the morning fog, sailors sailing from the south to the archipelago, it seems that the contours of the towers of medieval castles appear from the haze. It is the mountain peaks of Spitsbergen, reaching 1700 meters in height, that darken through a gray veil. But then the ship comes closer, the fog clears, and a panorama of whimsically indented black rocky shores topped with white glaciers opens before your eyes. In places, ice tongues descend directly to the sea, breaking off with ledges of transparent blue ice. Narrow winding bays are lined with foamy stripes of waterfalls. And in the depths of the largest bay - Isfjorden - the houses of the capital of Svalbard - the village of Longyearbyen glow with bright red, green and blue cubes. More than a thousand islands are part of the archipelago. True, almost all of them are small, only five of them deserve the epithet "large". These are Western Svalbard, Northeast Land, Edge Island, Barents Island and Prince Karl Land. Svalbard is larger in area than Switzerland and could host two Belgiums on its islands. The archipelago has had several names since ancient times. The Dutch called it Svalbard, the Russians - Grumant, the Norwegians - Svalbard. Modern journalists often call this region the "Islands of Mist". Indeed, Svalbard is one of the most "foggy" places on Earth. Even the famous African Skeleton Coast, the Namib Desert and the infamous Bering Sea for its rain and fog cannot compare with it in this respect. More than 90 days a year (a quarter of the year!) There are fogs over the islands. And in June-October every month there are from 12 to 20 days with fogs. The fogs on Svalbard are so dense that you can't see anything even five paces away. Sounds are muffled, the outlines of objects are distorted, so that it is impossible to recognize even the familiar area. All buildings and large stones are covered with a fluffy brush of frost. In spring, during fog, one can observe an unusual optical phenomenon, which in the language of scientists is called "gloria". The low polar sun casts long shadows of objects on the veil of fog and low clouds, which are surrounded by a rainbow outline. The famous polar explorer Amundsen, who made an emergency landing on an airplane in the ice north of Svalbard, describes the glory as follows: From the board of the ship going to Svalbard, from afar you can already see the intricately jagged peaks of the mountains, for which he was given such a name (Svalbard - in Dutch "Sharp Mountains"). This name was given to the archipelago by the Dutch navigator Willem Barents, who discovered it in 1596. True, in fairness, it must be said that the Russian Pomors, two centuries before the Dutchman, used to sail on their boats to the cold Grumant (as they called the archipelago). One day, four Russian hunters, having landed here for hunting, the next morning did not find their ship crushed by ice. Russian Robinsons lived on Svalbard for six years before they were rescued by another Russian ship that accidentally entered the islands. After Barents, many famous sailors and explorers visited the archipelago. Hudson and Chichagov, Nordenskiöld and Nansen, Amundsen and Rusanov laid their routes here. But the main contribution to the study of Spitsbergen, no doubt, was made by the brave coast-dwellers, who for five centuries had mastered the harsh islands. Until now, on the map of the archipelago, you can find the Russian Islands and Russkaya Bay, Mount Admiral Makarov and Cape Ermak, the Rusanov Valley and Solovetskaya Bay. The uniqueness of the nature of Svalbard is determined by the fact that one of the branches of the warm North Atlantic Current, the continuation of the Gulf Stream, approaches its western coast. The heated waters through the fjords penetrate deep into the islands and warm them. In February, the frost here does not exceed fifteen degrees, and the average annual temperature on the islands is six degrees above zero. (And this is at latitude XNUMX!) Therefore, the coast of the islands in summer is covered with a green carpet of tundra, full of bright colors. Purple saxifrages, yellow polar poppies, blue forget-me-nots and purple carnations delight the eyes of the inhabitants of Logyir and other Svalbard villages: Barentsburg, Pyramiden, Ny-Ålesund, Longyearbyen and Sveagruva on a long polar day. And the snow fields on the slopes at this time in some places turn pink - due to the appearance of microscopic algae on them. The wide valleys that go high into the mountains are filled with glaciers here. Their silent, dirty white rivers slowly (usually at a speed of a meter a day, no more) move towards the sea. At the confluence of glaciers in the fjords, the ice slides into the water and breaks off. This is how icebergs are formed. In some Valleys, where glaciers end before reaching the shore, short but turbulent rivers flow from under them, the longest of which is only 48 kilometers. In winter, they all freeze to the bottom. The mountain peaks of the islands, eroded by glaciers, take the most fantastic forms. So, Mount Skansen resembles an ancient fortress, Mount Tempel is an ancient Indian temple, and Mount Pyramid looks like a stack of giant neatly folded hay bales. The most famous mountain - Tre Kruner - has three peaks. Their names: Svea, Nora and Dana - symbolize the brotherhood of the three Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The truncated pyramidal contours of the three peaks are colored with clear horizontal stripes of yellow limestone and red sandstone. Ancient Scandinavian legends represented Svalbard as a gloomy country of cold, darkness, snow and ice. The Vikings believed that this is the most inhospitable land in the world. But it's not fair. Compared to other Arctic islands such as Ellesmere or Severnaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land, Svalbard looks like a real oasis in the icy polar desert. It is inhabited by three thousand people, mostly scientists and researchers of the North and, oddly enough, miners. Coal deposits were formed here hundreds of millions of years ago, when Svalbard was one with Europe and its climate was incomparably warmer than today. Now Russian miners, in agreement with the Norwegians, are engaged in coal mining here. But life on the islands can be found not only in human settlements. Reindeer and arctic foxes, nimble rodents-lemmings and white partridges are found here. A snowy owl circles silently over the valleys, and in the summer thousands of migratory birds fly here: ducks, geese and swans. Most of the noise and splash on the coast. With a warm current, flocks of cod and herring, halibut and haddock come to the island, followed by seals: harp and sea hare. On the pebbly beaches under the rocks, fanged walruses arrange their rookeries, and in the open sea you can often see fountains of whales. There are still many of the latter in the waters of Spitsbergen to this day, although whaling fleets have hunted in these places since the time of the Barents and Hudson. Most of all are white whales and killer whales, but the famous narwhal unicorn is also found. The head of this whale ends with a sharp two-meter bone outgrowth, similar to a horn. They say that Ivan the Terrible had a staff made of a beautiful, twisted narwhal horn (probably brought by Russian coast-dwellers from Grumant). Comes to the islands and the main hunter for seals - a polar bear. The largest predator of the polar basin is now under the protection of the law and is not at all afraid of humans. Sometimes meetings with him end sadly for polar explorers, especially on distant islands. And it happens that desperate radio messages like the following fly to Barentsburg or Longyearbyen from researchers working somewhere on the Prince Charles Islands: The musk ox, brought here in the 1920s from Greenland, also took root in the archipelago. The herd of these mighty squat ungulates, covered with thick and long hair, to the ground, has grown noticeably in recent years, since there are no their main enemies - wolves - on Svalbard. In severe winters, female musk oxen hide small cubs under their belly, where in any snowstorm it is warm and cozy in a canopy of wool. Now there are more than a hundred musk oxen in Svalbard, but in the beginning there were only 17. The decoration of Svalbard is its wonderful bird colonies. Tens of thousands of kittiwakes, guillemots, guillemots, fulmars, puffins and cormorants rumble and bustle about on tiny ledges of sheer cliffs that break off to the sea. And predatory burgomaster gulls soar above the rocks, looking for prey. There is enough fish in the sea for both seals and gulls, especially since near the western coast, even in winter, under the influence of a warm current, the border of floating ice forms a deep bend, like a bay with ice shores facing north. In the old days it was called Kitolov's Bay, since it was here that the whaling center was located. In other winters, there is no ice at all off the western coast, and Isfjord is covered with ice cover only for a month and a half. However, the North is the North, and from October to February polar night reigns over Svalbard. Nevertheless, the archipelago does not become a "country of eternal darkness" at this time. In clear weather, it is illuminated by the moon. As the great polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote, And in December-January, in frosty weather, auroras blaze in the sky. Against the backdrop of a flaming sky, light patterns of the most fantastic kind appear, continuously changing their shape and color. You can stand for hours, forgetting to put on your hat, in the bitter cold, unable to take your eyes off the amazing play of colors in the cold sky. Words are powerless to describe this truly grandiose spectacle. What a pity that at this time there are no tourists on the islands! Because of the mere opportunity to admire the celestial flashes, it would be worth coming to Svalbard in winter. I have often had the opportunity to communicate with people who have visited this distant archipelago. And all of them could not forget its severe beauty, dazzling white mountain peaks and the blue surface of the fjords, the deafening hubbub of bird colonies and the modest charm of tundra flowers, the greenish-transparent walls of coastal glacial cliffs and the colors of the northern lights ... And when winterers, returning to their native land, set sail from the shore, they traditionally throw old boots into the water from the ship - as a sign that someday they will return to this icy, but beautiful land. Author: B.Wagner
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