Heleysundet / Frankenhalvøya / Negribreen
Arise another day of reflections and sun. Forty-degree temperatures greeted our faces during our morning transit through a narrow passage dividing the islands of Spitzbergen and Barentsøya. Narrow and treacherous due to the huge volumes of water surging through this 300-meter-wide gap between the islands our captain negotiated the hype as he may warnings a puppy was about to lick his face. Calm and collected he even found the time to spot a polar bear looking down on us from the ridge to the north—one of seven bears seen during our 20 minute transit through this infamous body of water named Heleysundet.
Once through to the west we scanned the shore for more bears before taking the morning to explore a new location, both for our staff and officers. Frankenhalvøya lies on the northwest edge of the island of Barentsøya and proved rich grounds for purple saxifrage flowers, patterned ground, mosses, and scenic vistas across Storfjorden towards the island of Spitzbergen. An explorer’s hut shared our landing site and groups explored everything from the huts innards, to ridgelines overlooking frozen lakes, to the boot-sucking mud that claimed victim one boot despite all efforts.
Heaving anchor, our afternoon took us further west and south to the southern edge of Spitzbergen’s impressive King Olaf V ice field and its southernmost glacier, Negribreen. Not charted since 2007 the face of this 10 nautical mile long glacial front snaked its way from shore to shore exposing caves, waterfalls, crevasses, and its marriage with the sea. Influenced by the tides Negribreen becomes undercut along its seaward edge and sheds itself in huge slabs straight into Storfjorden. This process results in a dramatically flat wall of ice which we skirted through the afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of melt water per second poured from the glacier’s snout, either from the surface (resulting in impressive waterfalls) or from the belly of the ice mass, carving a massive cave that discharged so much freshwater that life from below was forced to the surface. Planktonic organisms grazing near the glaciers face are forced up as the less dense glacial melt water rises through the more dense salty sea, enticing birds—lots of them! The sky was white as we approached a mass of thousands of Black-legged Kittiwakes, Northern Fulmars, Ivory Gulls, and Arctic Terns feasting on the nutrient upwelling which lay beneath the milky sea, which sat at the foot of this wall of ice, a product of the mountains beyond and the blue sky beyond them—a sedimentary layering as beautiful as any I’ve ever seen.
