Nordaustlandet

The Island of Ice

Nordaustlandet covers about 14,000 square kilometers, making it larger than Cyprus or Crete. Of that area, roughly 75 percent is permanently ice-covered. Two enormous ice caps — Austfonna and Vestfonna — dominate the island, with Austfonna being the largest ice cap in Europe outside Greenland. There are no settlements. There are no roads. There are no airstrips. The entire island is protected as Nordaust-Svalbard Nature Reserve, one of the largest protected areas in Europe.

You reach Nordaustlandet by expedition vessel rounding the northern tip of Spitsbergen and crossing Hinlopenstretet, a strait that can be blocked by sea ice even in midsummer. The crossing is often rough. In good ice years, expedition ships can penetrate the fjords on the island’s western and northern coasts. In difficult years, they stand off and admire from a distance.

The Ice Margins

The encounter with Nordaustlandet is mostly an encounter with ice at the margins of things. Austfonna’s eastern and northern edges calve into the sea in ice cliffs that stretch for kilometers, and the calving produces icebergs of a size uncommon elsewhere in the Svalbard archipelago. These drift westward and south, melting slowly in the slightly warmer waters. I saw one that was the size of a large building and had been in the water long enough to develop a peculiar submarine architecture: a visible underwater shelf extending outward from the above-water mass, pale green in the dark water.

The ice cap interior is mostly inaccessible and largely unexplored by non-scientists. Expeditions do cross Austfonna on ski — a serious undertaking requiring full crevasse rescue equipment and weeks of time — but the casual visitor stays at the margins. The margins are enough.

Hinlopenstretet and the Bird Cliffs

The strait between Spitsbergen and Nordaustlandet is one of the premier wildlife corridors on Svalbard. The nutrient upwelling at the meeting of Atlantic and Arctic water masses supports enormous fish populations, which in turn support the largest concentrations of seabirds in the archipelago. The Alkefjellet bird cliffs on the Spitsbergen side of the strait — technically just outside Nordaustlandet — host an estimated 60,000 Brünnich’s guillemot pairs. The cliffs are basalt columns, hexagonal and regular enough to look architectural, packed from base to visible summit with nesting birds.

I visited Alkefjellet in late July and the smell reached us before the cliffs came into view around the headland: an intense ammonia-fishy-salt compound that’s not unpleasant in the way that something terrible is unpleasant, but that is completely overwhelming. The noise builds the same way — first a general roar, then individual voices within it, then the understanding that you’re hearing tens of thousands of birds simultaneously and your brain has given up trying to parse individual sounds.

The Few Who Go

What Nordaustlandet offers that almost nowhere else does is the experience of a landscape at its own scale, indifferent to human frames of reference. The ice cap doesn’t care about your viewing position. The calving cliffs will collapse whether or not a zodiac is nearby. Polar bears here have rarely encountered people and respond to the boat with unmixed curiosity rather than the mild habituation you see around Longyearbyen and the western fjords.

Lia stood at the bow as we passed the northern coast in flat grey light and didn’t say anything for a long time. When she did, it was: “This is what the planet looks like when it’s minding its own business.” That felt right.

When to go: July to mid-August, when Hinlopenstretet is most likely to be ice-free and the bird cliffs are in full activity. Even in these months, sea ice can block access; all expedition operators build in route flexibility. September sees the season closing quickly and ice conditions becoming unpredictable.