Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

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6 am Monday and the Noorderlicht is calm as we anchor with a glacier off in the distance. On a chart of 1950 this same glacier reached four miles further out to sea from our anchor point.

Our epic urban journey of planes and hotels finished last night and the joy of being truly Arctic and on our own resonated throughout us all. Downloaded Ice maps show a 20% reduction of Arctic ice this year but most of this is in the Russian Arctic basin and the Northwest Passage of Canada. Off the Eastern Greenland coast the ice has advanced south driven by a summer of northerly winds blocking, we feared, our entrance to Scoresby Sund. The arrival of Ko de Korte, our expedition guide, brought good news. Yes there is 20% ice covering the entrance of Scoresby, but it is old ice, very dense and he thinks it is navigable. So now there is no plan ‘b’, we sail this afternoon crossing the High Arctic Atlantic, chase south along the sea ice and in 5-6 days we should be able to enter our point of destination.

David Buckland.

P.S. Yesterday in Longyearbyen airport we met the returning Youth Expedition. Full of stories of adventure and life changing activity, such a glorious team on young people hungry to continue their study and work within the Climate Change arena. It was a very emotional ‘crossing of paths’ and we all applauded their success.

If the first day of our voyage is at all reprensentative of the trip to come-and I have every reason to believe that it will be-then I’m going to have a lot to learn about expressing awe. It’s a simple exercise to take something finite and describe it in great detail; it’s terribly more difficult to forge an account of something as massive and moving as this place. But we must try.

Flying from Oslo, our crew was collectively jolted from the weary fatigue of travel (this correspondent tallied up six airports in the 36 hours prior). The sense of shared bewilderment of 20 relative strangers upon landing in Longyearben was nearly as stirring as the scene into which we touched down.

A beautiful day blessed our arrival-not common for this place, according to David-with a mat of clouds keeping temperatures comfortable, if still below freezing. A jaunt through town yielded the group many a precious souvenir score-mugs were purchased, a couple of savvy travelers posted cards, and a run on canvas shopping bags (branded with the ubitquitous Longyearbyen polar bear, who we fortunately never met in the flesh) impressively left the local supermarket sold out.

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I’m counting Sunday as day 1 of our voyage. After a long 24 hours of travel we made it on-board the Noorderlicht in one big, sprawling group, plus luggage. I was up all night squeezing my final few hours of good, reliable internet access in Oslo. Stupidly. Now I’m exhausted, but finding energy to talk to the rest of the crew on flights and waiting rooms rather than catching up on sleep. We flew through Tromso with it’s dry, red hillsides, then on to Svalbard which was vast and beautiful from above. Black/grey earth and highlights of snow, mountains, ridges and bays. Everyone was completely awestruck. Amy and I rapidly tag team photographed as we descended into Longyearbyen. It’s a different world up here, a different sort of place.

Onto the Noorderlicht and our luggage together looked so excessive, littering the upper deck. Longyearbyen  sits fairly uncomfortably in it’s landscape, with the look of a small border town. Mining, science/teaching and tourism are the main industries here. Each year around half of it’s 2000 strong community move on and are replaced. We cleared the town out of Longyearbyen canvass shopping bags, had a drink at the Wham playing sports bar, then headed back to the boat where we set off straight away to moor overnight 4 hours sail away, near Trygghamna. As the sun set we were all on deck to watch a postcard pink sunset with a vertical band of light cutting up into the sky. Beautiful, but apparently warning of bad weather ahead. Hmmmm not so beautiful.

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After a long day, and many months of preparation, we’ve all made it to Oslo and the Greenland Voyage is finally away. Tomorrow morning we fly out direct to Longyearbyen where we take over from the Youth Expedition and board the Noorderlicht. The current ice maps for our route are “interesting”. What this means for us we’re not sure at the moment. Our first step tomorrow is to analyse the latest satellite information available, and I’m sure we’ll be posting more about it soon…

Finally managed to cast an eroded piece of glacial ice, something that Heather and I have wanted to do since we first saw them, but found difficult due to the nature of the materials. Any casting material needs to be warm to set and ice melts when a warmer substance is placed on it. This time using snow print wax (used to lift footprints or car tyre tracks from snow by the police) seems to have done the trick; it forms an insulating layer between the ice and the warm plaster mix. This mould is now sitting over the washbasin in our bunk with a small hole at its base through which the melting ice is dripping. I’ll bring back the negative form to the UK and then hopefully be able to cast this into glass; rendering permanent something so transient.

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Images: Dan Harvey with ice before casting (above) and casting the ice on the deck of the Noorderlicht (below).

Just found an image I took in 2004 of the glacier at the end of this fiord and have compared this to an image taken yesterday -hopefully these will be posted on web, the difference is obvious. Things here are changing fast! When outside day or night at least once or twice an hour you hear the noise like distant thunder as massive chunks of ice peel of the glaciers, the Kongsvegen glacier we were told is now moving at a rate of 2 meters a day!

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Kongsvegan glacier photographed in 2004 during the Cape Farewell voyage.

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Kongsvegan glacier photographed in 2007, during the Cape Farewell Youth Expedition.

I have been experimenting with inks on a cut block of ice reveling the small tubular holes that run deep within them like blood vessels. Will try tomorrow to push this work further and would love to understand the science behind these capillaries.

Had a great time hunting for the right block of ice on the second try we managed to lift it onto the small boat, felt far too heavy for the vessel but managed to get it back to harbor in Ny Alesund and then with the help of another crane from a lorry managed to lifted it up onto the quay – a beautiful piece of ice. Wanted to finally carve a clear ice lens but it has been so warm here that whilst carving its been cracking in the warmth, hope tonight to be able to pour water over it so that it becomes clear again then tomorrow if it is sunny… we’ll see if it will burn something….

If not I´m planing to set some ice on fire so stay posted for some flaming ice pics. of one sort or another.

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Liam Frost
Musician (UK)

“It feels so weird when I play solo now,” says reluctant superstar Liam Frost, of Liam Frost and the Slowdown Family. In fact, the actual name of the band is a little more complicated “I do honestly feel like it is just The Slowdown Family now. I always did want to be in a band.”

“It just so happened, it started off as The Slowdown, and then we got some more band members, so it became The Slowdown Family. And then I lost some band members, and it felt stupid calling myself The Slowdown Family when it was just me on my own, so I used my own name. But then I got a band back and I was just on the verge of getting signed and we settled on Liam Frost and the Slowdown Family.”

Liam signed to Lavolta Records at the end of 2005, soon after a tour with kindred spirit Stephen Fretwell, and quickly put out the gorgeous ‘She Painted Pictures’ EP, which was quickly snapped up by those in the know. A four week residency in Manchester and London in January and Febraury 2006 proved to be a sold out success story and was quickly followed by a debut UK tour in May. Summer 2006 saw Liam and the band spreading the word with numerous festival dates and special one-off shows with Elbow at Somerset House and Snow Patrol at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Singles The Mourners of St Paul’s and The City Is At Standstill have also been released over summer 2006 and both can be found on the debut album Show Me How The Spectres Dance from September 11th. The album was produced by Danton Supple (Coldplay, Doves, Morrissey) and casts the net wider than the typical singer-songwriter album; it shows off exactly the kind of level Liam and The Slowdown Family are working on.

Combining northern grit with a psychedelic imagination; personal tragedy with black humour; a strong, centrifugal solo artist with the strength and unity of a big band; Liam Frost and The Slowdown Family will confound expectations at every turn. “At the gigs”, says Liam, “there is an element of the singer-songwriter fans, we do get that. But we also get the emo kids as well. I actually think we’re as much of an emo band as anything else.”

The only thing you can say for certain is that you’ll be floored in an instant.

www.liamfrost.co.uk

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Vikram Seth
Writer (UK/India)

Vikram trained as an economist. His first novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse describes the experiences of a group of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy, won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). He is also the author of the novel An Equal Music and the biography Two Lives, as well as Beastly Tales, a book of ten animal fables in verse, which includes the ecological tale ‘The Elephant and the Tragopan’.

“People need to know about what is being lost, and I think it is an inspired idea to get sculptors or writers or photographers or other artists to come on what is largely a scientific expedition.”
Vikram Seth