Longyearbyen

And, um, Svalbard, which is how I got to the North Pole.

We fly to a place called Longyearbyen, which is the capital of Svalbard.

From there, we took a Russian military plane up to a place called Barneo at 89 and a half degrees north.

And from there, we took a Soviet era Russian helicopter to to the north pole it was fucking awesome but svalbard we got stuck there for 10 days because uh the ice runway at barnio like busted so they had to like you know fill it and uh so we got stuck in svalbard which ended up where they feel it

Jacob was an avid outdoorsman, and loved to ski, snowboard, and snowmobile.

He and his friends were from Prague, Czechoslovakia, and had made their arduous trip to the town of Longyearbyen with excitement.

The expedition he was with had purchased a group package that permitted them to do these activities in the lead-up to and after the solar eclipse.

It was supposed to be like a vacation for them, albeit a cold one.

Curtis signed the next day, and I never asked him why.

They flew us out in May, Anchorage to Oslo, Oslo to the airport at Longyearbyen, the one real town on Svalbard.

A bus carried us along the shore of Adventfjorden, through Longyearbyen, and up the long valley behind it to the mine.

Our driver was a Norwegian kid who had given the tour a hundred times.

He pointed up at the mountain over the airport, where a concrete wedge stuck out of the slope like the corner of something buried.

For The World, I'm Tibi Saisea.

The Norwegian village of Longyearbyen is in one of the most remote settlements in the world.

It's located on the Svalbard Archipelago, a collection of islands way up in the Arctic Circle.

Not an easy place to live, and now there's a new challenge for the 2,600 residents there.

Marjolaine Varey is an expert on permafrost at the University Centre in Svalbard.

She spoke with my colleague Carolyn Beeler about what's going on.

Since February 2025, we've received a notice from the local council to not drink the water straight from the tap in Longyearbyen.

Why? Yeah, so this is actually an issue that we're investigating here at the University Centre in Svalbard.

We reached him in Ottawa.

The remote village of Longyearbyen, Norway, is one of the northernmost settlements in the world.

It was once a mining town.

Now it's one of the fastest warming places on earth.

The local government is working with scientists to find a new sustainable source of drinking water.

Marjolaine Veret is a permafrost expert.

We reached her in Longyearbyen, Norway.

Marjolaine, I think people who maybe even have never visited Norway have this idea that every inch of it, every corner is pristine.

I reminded Maddy where her coat was.

Pavel Wader's home is along the coast to the west from Longyearbyen.

And after I explained that was where Maddy was going to Yeshi, I watched their progress on her feed.

I initially pattern-matched his house as a radio shack or repeater.

Wooden buildings now surrounded the crumbling concrete and rusted metal of the original buildings, many having fallen entirely into ruin.

These post-collapse structures extended out into the sea as jetties and moorings for the dozens of small ships that were docked here.

I recognised them as scrapper ships, traders that would regularly sail into Longyearbyen harbour and set up a market right on the dockside.

This must be some kind of trading post.

Residents of a remote village in Norway that is one of the fastest-warming places in the world have been told they must no longer drink tap water due to heavy metal contamination that scientists have linked to the thawing permafrost.

Longyearbyen.

in the archipelago of Svalbard, gets its main drinking water supply from a 1.5-mile-long dammed lake called Istamen, or Ice Pond.

Higher temperatures as a result of the climate crisis have thawed permafrost, leading to newly exposed bedrock leaching metals into the pond.

Longyearbyen, 800 miles from the North Pole, is warming at between 5 and 7 times the world's average rate, with autumn temperatures rising at up to 4 degrees Celsius a decade.

The contamination of water sources in Longyearbyen could be a foretaste of what is to come for Arctic communities.

Google has felled an estimated quarter of a million trees across 815 acres of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland.

The tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a data center.