We see the world in different ways and read her messages with hearts and minds. At times the stimuli received are too complicated to synthesize. Here, in the ice, all is reduced to simplicity. And yet, in spite of that, it is still difficult to tell others back at home just how we feel. Limited to a few words, what should we say?
Tweets from far above the Arctic Circle.
I am amazed by the beauty around me, the stark emptiness of the place, paradoxically teeming with life, complex and bent on survival. - #Aimee# Grosvenor Teacher Fellow
The protection of the environment should be given supreme authority. How does a nation get to that place - #Ellen# Grosvenor Teacher Fellow
Glacial ice shines blue, grey and shades of white. The ice cap’s face rises out of silvery water like a call to action. - #Cristina# Grosvenor Teacher Fellow
There was a freedom about the day, a sense of peace. There was no plan and no specific goal. We stared far off or examined the details of what was nearby. Sunshine glistened on the midnight-blue sea and reflected from diamond-like crystals on the ice floes in the drifting pack. We shifted the giant puzzle pieces mentally, matching polar bear tracks on one with those on another that had fractured and rotated away. Pressure ridges bisecting one surely once were connected to those found on a different platter. Ringed seals littered the largest plates, each poised at the lip of a breathing hole, set for a quick escape. Bulky bearded seals seemed to prefer to lie along the edges of smaller floes from which they could easily roll. Even a walrus mother and her very tiny offspring seemed content to simply drift with the currents and wind.
Austfonna’s fractured face stretched along the south coast of Nordaustlandet as far as one could see. Although evidence of its activity could be found in the newly exposed cerulean blue ice and circles of expanding brash, it too seemed to have taken a break and simply sat radiating peace and beauty.
Evening on the clock finds us at the edge of the last remaining fast ice in Bjornsundet. Although it has the consistency of slush, seals still dot the surface between dark pools and channels. In the distance a polar bear mother “parks” her cub as she hunts. Another lone animal stares wistfully down through the porous ice. Soon the food will be gone with the disappearance of the ice and the bears too will move on. The still black waters mirror the sky so exactly that one would be hard pressed to tell which is up and which is down. Mesmerized, we absorb the beauty of the night and carry the memory forward in our hearts and minds.
- Karen Copeland, naturalist; Aimee Lampard, Cristina Veresan, and Ellen Taylor, Grosvenor Teacher Fellows.
