Icy waiting latitudes

By Flavia Tomaello, https://flaviatomaello.blog/, Instagram @flavia.tomaello

Have you heard pieces of music that have very long silences before the explosion? Entire bars of tense calm that the ear can barely bear, until finally something bursts fortissimo and justifies all the previous waiting. Composers know it, prolonged stillness makes any sonic explosion that comes later more brutal. Something similar happens in certain landscapes, territories that remain motionless for entire decades, accumulating forces under a surface that seems dormant, until one day all that contained energy is suddenly released and rewrites the map.

Svalbard preserves several of these geological silences, and this day of Swan Hellenic’s Arctic tour visits precisely one of the most famous.

It all starts in Vibebukta, a cove located between Gustav Adolf Land and the Bråsvellbreen ice front, named after the hydrographer Andreas Vibe. From its waters you can see one of the longest ice walls on the entire planet, twenty continuous nautical miles that separate this bay from another neighboring inlet, Kervelbukta.

Bråsvellbreen descends from the Sørdomen glacial dome, within the immense Austfonna cap, over a distance of forty-five kilometers until it merges with the ocean. For decades it barely moved, or at least that’s what the scientists who studied it from afar believed. Between 1936 and 1938 that calm ended abruptly, when the glacier staged the largest sudden advance ever documented anywhere on the planet, pushing its front almost twenty kilometers in just two seasons and projecting a tongue of ice ten kilometers out to sea. Geologists calculated that that outburst covered around six hundred square kilometers of previously ice-free terrain, a figure that still astonishes those who study the erratic behavior of polar glaciers.

Austfonna, the cap that supports such a spectacle, covers eight thousand one hundred square kilometers and is among the three largest continental ice bodies in the world. Its frozen cliff extends for one hundred and eighty kilometers almost without cuts, only interrupted by tiny rock outcrops, a figure that makes it the longest continuous glacial front in the northern hemisphere. Bråsvellbreen contributes thirteen percent of all that mass, and its melting waterfalls are among the most sought-after images by those who navigate these waters.

Already well into the polar night, always illuminated by a sun that refuses to set on these dates, the boat arrives at Torellneset, a promontory located at the southwestern end of Nordaustlandet, the precise southern point of Gustav Adolf Land, just south of the Vegafonna glacier.

The surname that crowns that cape belongs to Otto Martin Torell, a Swedish naturalist from Varberg, initially trained for medicine before turning completely to geology and zoology. Around 1850, being just a young researcher, he applied Louis Agassiz’s then controversial theory of glaciation to explain fossils of Arctic mollusks found on Scandinavian coasts, a pioneering gesture that anticipated much of modern glaciology. Between 1856 and 1859 he toured glacial formations in Switzerland, Iceland, Spitsbergen and Greenland, knowing that he later devoted himself to his own expedition through the Hinlopen Strait and the northern coast of Nordaustlandet, exactly the region where this itinerary takes place today.

In front of the cape also rests one of the busiest walrus colonies in the entire archipelago, enormous animals piled up on pebbles and sand, completely oblivious to the passage of boats, surrendered to a lethargy that also seems to be measured on a geological scale.

Between the waiting rhythm of a glacier that took centuries to decide to move and the name of a scientist who dedicated his life to reading those frozen pauses, this Arctic afternoon ends up composing its own movement, brief among many others, within a score that Svalbard has continued to perform for millennia.

Swan Hellenic It organizes expeditions true to its promise of discovering what usually remains out of sight.

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