The Arctic, in Color

As promised, I am back with more pictures of the far north, this time in color. As you would expect from a world of glaciers and snow, there is a lot of blue. What I find interesting is the amount of variation. It comes in all shades and intensities. Sometimes it is subtle, such as in this blue-green water, milky from glacial flour.

Sometimes it stands out in stark contrast to its grey surroundings.

It can have a crispness to it.

The blue can be eye-poppingly intense,

and seemingly everywhere on sunny days.

There are also many browns in the arctic. I love the rich browns of this bearded seal (which I should note was an incredibly patient model).

In this scene ruddy brown rocks make glacier blue look brighter.

Humans have left their own colorful marks on Svalbard, as at this old mining site where the hut's wood has a greenish hue.

This photo gives you an idea of the hut's setting.

Uphill from the hut stands a pile of disused rusty red equipment.

Birds bring a lot of color to the arctic, though generally in small doses, such as the pale yellow collar of long-tailed skuas,

and bright orange feet and beaks of puffins.

Glaucous gulls have yellow beaks,

as do kittiwakes.

Then there are the brilliant, almost neon colors of things that seem to be lit from within. Surrounded by snow, ice and bare rock, purple mountain saxifrage really stands out.

 The brightness of mossy tundra hints at its promise as a source of sustenance for wildlife

My favorite is the vibrant aqua of glacier ice which makes icebergs seem almost as alive as the wildlife.

My needlework project for this trip was appropriately colorful: a fair isle practice piece. This is in preparation for eventually knitting a fair isle sweater for myself. My difficulty is getting the tension of the two yarns just right so that the fabric lies flat and even. Here is a view of the piece at my hotel in Longyearbyen, the starting point of our trip. 

For most of the trip the piece sat untouched on a shelf in the ship's lounge, where my shipmates probably got sick of looking at it, but I did get a lot done on the flights home.

The patterns are from "Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting," an excellent source of history, techniques, patterns, color and more, for anyone interested in Fair Isle.

I'll be back soon with photos of wildlife from Svalbard and of the colorful town of Longyearbyen.

The Arctic, in Black and White

My recent experience on and around the arctic islands of Svalbard was a bit like watching The Wizard of Oz, one moment everything was black and white, and the next all was in vivid color. In this post I explore the former; in the next I will address the latter. Note that although this is about black and white, all of the images in this post are actually color photos. I simply was recording a world that, at least on some days and under certain conditions, was predominantly black and white.

Prinz Karls Forland (Prince Charles Foreland)

Coming from the unrelenting sun of a Texas summer, I found the natural coolness of blacks, whites, and grays refreshing. More importantly, the monochrome world made me see differently. Without hue, I had to look to shape and line, value and contrast for interest. Svalbard offered no shortage of interesting scenes. The largest island, Spitsbergen, meaning “pointed mountains” lives up to its name. We saw hundreds of peaks, their shapes highlighted in snow and ice. This pair of little peaks was noteworthy because of their crazy lava-lamp like reflections in water disturbed by our zodiacs.

After our windiest night (which, given that we were above the Arctic circle in late June, was "night" only by convention, not by amount of light) I awoke to to see this little schooner that had sought shelter in the same fjoird as we, and for a moment thought I had been transported into another century. The bit of blue glacier ice seen adjacent to the schooner's bowsprit makes me think of old black and white portraits with color-enhanced cheeks, lips and eyes.

Even some of the wildlife is naturally black and white. For example, these little auks, also known as dovekies, are entirely black and white (and endearingly plump).

Arctic terns, in contrast to the round little auks, are sleek and streamlined, thoroughly modern-looking birds. They are also fiercely protective of their nests, and make a huge fuss, including flying at your head, if you get too close. I am cheating a bit to include them here since they have red beaks, but my image of them is mostly a whir of white and grey, so they have earned their place.

On the other end of the size spectrum from little auks and terns are the whales. On our first night out, as we cruised north from Longyearbyen, we spotted over half a dozen humpback and blue whales, their spouts easily seen in flat water, lines of fins and flukes fluid as the inky water in which they smoothly appeared and disappeared.

Humpback whale fluke

And then, of course, there are polar bears, referred to by some as great white bears. What is it about polar bears that fascinates us so? Perhaps it their whiteness, a color we associate with purity and innocence, in contrast to the ruthless reality of the hunting on which their lives depend, but which is anything but innocent.

Note that polar bears are not actually white, but rather a yellowish color. When sleeping on-shore among the rocks they can easily be mistaken for just another boulder.

This final image of the front of a glacier is from a sunny day, but taken in the shadow of a tall peak, and so was very grey. The layers and fractures record year after year of snowfall and the constant compaction and flow that define a glacier.

In my next post I will return to full color, and share some recent needlework. See you soon.

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