Beyond the Frozon Horizon- Life at the top of the world by Nicola Penfold
Nicola Penfold writes books with the environment and eco-messages at their heart. In her latest, Beyond the Frozen Horizon, she needed to do some research about Svalbard and its wild surroundings. She writes about her findings for us below!
Beyond the Frozen Horizon – life at the top of the world by Nicola Penfold
Beyond the Frozen Horizon is set in Svalbard, a remote archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole. I haven’t ever been, but I’ve loved finding out about it. It’s one of Europe’s last great wildernesses. A place of snow-covered mountains and blue glaciers; icy fjords and grey rocky beaches; pristine snow fields and orange moss and lichen covered tundra. It’s land of the polar bears. In summer, there’s the midnight sun, but in the approach to winter, when my book is set, the sun rises above the horizon for less and less time each day. The stars seem very close. The northern lights, the aurora borealis, are a magical, mythical light show in the sky. Most birds, and some seals and whales, leave for warmer, lighter places, before the darkness and plummeting temperatures of deep winter.
I chose Pyramiden, an old Russian coal mining settlement, as the main location for my story. Once a Soviet utopia, where whole families lived, it’s now a ghost town, home to just a couple of caretakers, and visited by curious tourists and roaming polar bears.
Beyond the Frozen Horizon is set in an optimistic future. The world has taken great strides to address the climate and biodiversity crisis. As 13-year-old Rory, my main character, discovers in her trip to Svalbard however (a trip of a lifetime – flying is a rare thing in my future world), the Arctic landscape is still reeling from past wrongs. Svalbard’s been plundered before: whaling, walrus hunting, trapping for polar bears and arctic fox fur, coal mining.
In our time, wildlife in Svalbard is recovering well since hunting was outlawed. Yet the future of this incredible place is, like all polar regions, precarious. The world is heating up. The ice is melting.
Some of the amazing winter wildlife I wanted to introduce readers to are:
Svalbard reindeer – a subspecies of reindeer, with shorter legs, necks and ears, to better withstand freezing temperatures. Once hunted almost to extinction, numbers have risen, though the reindeer are vulnerable to climate change. In winter, they nudge snow aside to eat the lichen underneath. As rain replaces snow, the rain then freezes and the reindeer can’t get through the ice to reach their food.
Arctic foxes – these cute animals are smaller than red foxes. Classic Arctic foxes are brown in summer (like the tundra) and white in winter (like snow). Rarer blue foxes, like Kaiku in my story, remain a beautiful charcoal blue-grey all year round.
Polar bears – these formidable hunters outnumber people on Svalbard. Their Latin name Ursus maritimus means sea bear and their lives are entwined with the sea ice, from which they hunt, travel on, mate and make dens for their young.
Svalbard rock ptarmigan – the only bird to remain on the archipelago year-round. Like their predators, the Arctic foxes, the plump, well insulated ptarmigans are brown in summer and white in winter.
Bowhead whale – bowheads are the longest-lived mammals on earth, living over 200 years. They spend their entire lives in Arctic waters, and have huge triangular skulls, to break through the ice. They’re slow swimmers and have the greatest number of songs of any whale. Bowheads were almost wiped out by commercial whaling in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Numbers are recovering, but it’s a slow process given their long-life spans, and the time it takes them to reach adulthood.
Whales are a natural climate solution. Whale poo feeds large blooms of phytoplankton at the surface of the oceans, which in turn absorb carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Furthermore, when a whale dies naturally, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and the carbon in its body is locked away for hundreds of years. We must protect these incredible creatures and allow numbers to go on climbing. Whales are important for all life on planet Earth.
Beyond the Frozen Horizon is published by Little Tiger and is available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.