For the second time since April a polar bear has made its way the 300km from Greenland. Even though it most likely drifted part of the way on an ice flow, in both cases they must have swum tremendous distances over the open Atlantic.

Polar bears are not native to Iceland. Prior to these two incidences there hadn’t been a bear seen in Iceland in 20 years. More details here, and a map.

I updated a previous entry to reference The Good Cop on YouTube now that it is available there.

The above link references an interview with Alan Westaway who directed what I believe to be the first film adaptation of any of writer Magnus Mill’s works. The full 11–minute piece can be viewed for free, but unfortunately only through a custom application. I’m sure this will appear on YouTube at some point. The first minute or so is available as a teaser via flash:

"The Good Cop" is part of the short story collection, once in a blue moon publish by the acorn book company. It's available from Amazon UK but used copies can probably be found in the U.S.

The full text of the story was published online by The Guardian back in April, 2004.

A Russian company will bring tourists to stay at a huge camp near the North Pole. € 10,000 for a 3-day stay:

Currently, the “Barneo” camp located [on] drifting ice flow close to the North Pole point has a 500 people capacity in the period April-May. From next year, the camp will be extended to handle up to 3000 (!?!?!) people.

My God, this is turning into a bigger farce than Mount Everest.

In a related story maybe they won’t be able to stay very long anyway:

The North Pole is at the moment covered only by one-year old ice, all of which will melt in the course of summer.

Igloolik residents are starting to face the inevitable. I put together something on this project before that includes a map.

But nobody knows how the walrus that frequent Foxe Basin will react to the year-round presence of enormous freighters, up to 135,000 tonnes, that could become a daily sight by 2014 if the company’s plans become reality.

Igloolik was the setting for the movie Atanarjuat.

Mills seems to have gone into radio silence since the release of his last book in 2005. Here’s hoping we hear from him again soon.

The article referenced above from The Boston Review explores similar themes to “The Next Slum?” in this month’s Atlantic Magazine.

Is this emerging meme driven by angst from the current housing downturn, or is it the start of a bigger trend? Interestingly, neither article explicitly mentions New Urbanism but both articles hint at forces pointing towards that model.

The Atlantic piece though does include a side-bar reference to the article “Towards a New Urbanism” from 2000. It features and interview with the authors of the book Suburban Nation which I found very illuminating.

A huge iceberg rends itself atwain off the coast of Shackleton’s resting place:

Everyone knows the word “alphabet” itself ultimately derives from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: “alpha” and “beta”. But there are two words in English that most likely have their origin in phonetic runs of letters:

abecedarium [a-b-c-d]: a primer for teaching the alphabet itself.

element [l-m-n]: from Latin elementum, perhaps ultimately from lmn, first three letters of the second half of the Canaanite alphabet, recited by ancient scribes when learning it.

A study shows the northern ice fields of Baffin Island are smaller than any time in the past 1,600 years. There is a podcast by the main author of the paper referenced in the link, Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado, discussing the team’s work here.

I had better hurry up and visit the Barnes Ice Cap.

I’m not sure how I missed this, but one of my favorite books, Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts is/was being made into a movie directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, and staring Rhys Ifans and Ben Whishaw.

Unfortunately though we may never get to see the film as production was suspended due to the tragic illness and death of his wife:

The movie, a black comedy […] was suspended in mid-production last year when Pawlikowski’s wife fell seriously ill, and he stopped work to look after her and their children. Several months later, she died.

“‘The Restraint of Beasts’ is a painful subject,” he says. “We’d shot 60% of the film when I had to stop. The material looks great, like nothing I’ve ever done or even seen before. It could have been really great, definitely original.”

It’s now in the hands of the insurers.

An impressive Google Earth template file that details Shackleton’s famous Trans-Antarctic Expedition. One of the entries in the template links to an entry on this site. For years I’ve seen references to this page in my logs and never understood why. After some searching around I finally stumbled upon the above-referenced link.

It’s the most thorough overview of the expedition I’ve ever seen anywhere and the perfect vehicle for demonstrating the power of Google Earth.

A document written on vellum in an unknown script was discovered in a house in Iceland. The only image I could find showing the text at all is unfortunately a very grainy detail from the online edition of Fréttablaðið: It will be interesting to see if we ever find out more about this. Hopefully the Árni Magnússon Institute will put the entire document online in some fashion so others can take a crack at it. Update.

A great collection of Arctic-related archive material from Canada’s “The Walrus” magazine.

Whether this is truly a landmass or just a transient pile of rubble gathered together by shifting sea ice remains to be seen. See discussion on possibly similar discoveries here and here.

Because the Nares Strait ice bridge that normally forms between Ellesmere Island and Greenland did not form this year, large amounts of multi-year sea ice are free to break up and flow further south. This is opening up the area around the Manhattan-sized ice island that broke off the Ayles Ice Shelf last August.

This is just what the world needs… There’s something unseemly about burning all this jet fuel just to fly around the North Pole for a few minutes. I guess I’m still not used to the fact that places that were once so remote can now be visited on a whim.

A long article describing Canada’s mounting concerns over the melting of sea ice in its Arctic archipelago.

Hamidur Rahmann, who has lived in Germany since 2004, got himself to Qaanaaq, Greenland and then tried to walk across the frozen Davis Strait into Canada. He didn’t make it. There’s nothing in the article that mentions where he actually intended to get to. The nearest land is Ellesmere Island, but there are only a couple of populated settlements there: a research station (Eureka), a military base (Alert) and one small village (Grise Fiord), all over 200 miles away. At any rate, it’s probably best that he was discovered before he died of starvation and exposure.

This is reminiscent of the Romanian who tried to sail to Grise Fiord last year.

“After one 13-day Arctic trek to safety his diary recorded: ‘Travelled over ice, eating biscuits and chocolate, living in snow houses. No particular hardship.’” Bonus for use of the word “hirpling” in the review itself.