Having spent an unfeasibly long chunk of my writing life in the Antarctic, I had always been dismissive of its northern counterpart. There is no continent in the Arctic; the collar of land around the pack ice is owned (how vulgar); and people live up there. But you now can’t open a paper without reading baleful news about the melting of the far north, so I thought I’d better go and see it, while it was still there.

The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is the only place in Europe where you can see polar bears in the wild. Strung out between 74 and 81 degrees north (thereby far above the Arctic Circle), two thirds of the land-mass is under a permanent duvet of ice, so visitors are obliged to sail around the coast, making forays to land where possible. When I did it, I saw how wrong I had been about the Arctic. Milky skies, frozen prairies, unclimbed mountain ranges shattered with fjords and a lively parade of wildlife. This might be on a different scale to the Antarctic, but it’s equally bewitching.

Starting from the main village of Longyearbyen, my ship, a retired ferry, skirted north along the west coast of Prins Karls Forland, past characteristically Svalbardian pointed mountains divided by gullies of deep soft snow (Dutch navigator Willem Barents named the largest island Spitsbergen, “sharp mountains”, when he sighted it in 1596). It’s hard to bunk down when it’s still daylight at 4am and the scenery never stops coming at you.

There were plenty of Svalbard reindeer on the mountainsides in grey-brown and white summer camouflage, and no shortage of Arctic foxes, bearded seals and swollen bull walrus. As for the birds – it was startling to see species familiar in dowdy British winter coats resplendent in summer plumage. Grey phalaropes in Arctic carmine, snow buntings transformed from dusty slate into dazzling black and white, golden plovers with refulgent summer breast feathers. But like everyone else on board, I was out for polar bears, the poster boys of the far north.

Some of the hundreds of glaciers decanting out of Svalbard calve all summer, and as we cruised the fjords we grew accustomed to the distant, lingering boom of skyscrapers crashing into water. When we were able to get close to a glacier snout in a tender, we switched off the engine and listened to the frazzle ice and bergy bits: a fizzy, symphonic combination of gurgle and pop. These splintered islands are far north of the tree line, but certain plants outwit the permafrost – Arctic battlers that blossom in the short burst of summer. The wet, springy patches between moraines are sprinkled with mountain sorrel, purple saxifrage, snow buttercups and cushiony pyramids of moss campion. Walking ashore after a Zodiac landing, the Arctic seemed to be throbbing with life. If you’re under snow from September till May, you need to grow a lot in the short burst of 24-hour light. Even migratory birds have to hurry. A barnacle gosling grows 7mm a day after hatching in Svalbard in June.

When a katabatic wind rushed down from a glacier, Antarctic memories sprang to mind. But we averaged 6C (42F), which isn’t really cold if the sun shines and you have the right gear. The North Atlantic warms the west coast of Svalbard, making it ice-free for most of the summer, which is unique at these latitudes. As a result, the place was a magnet for the old explorers setting off for the North Pole when it was still the geographical grail. One evening we passed the rusty anchor pylon from which Roald Amundsen took off in 1926 in the airship Norge and got all the way to Canada, floating right over the fabled pole.

Landing at Magdalenefjord in the northwest, we were assaulted by Arctic terns, most graceful of northern latitude birds but a monumental menace when they take a swipe at your head. There was once an oil rush here – whale oil: 1612 marked the beginning of systematic whaling in Svalbard, and shiploads of chancers raced north in pursuit of the Greenland right whale. The brick try-works on which whalers boiled blubber are still in place, as are 130 graves, ghostly in the fine pale sand. By the end of the 17th century the whales were gone from the fjords, hunted almost to extinction. The business moved out to the open sea, and Svalbard lost its preeminence in the industry.

Sailing away from the dead whalers, I saw my polar bears: a mother and three cubs. One cub stood on its hind legs, forearms raised and staring intently for some minutes into a gully. It was outlined against a china-blue glacier wall, and wraiths of pearly cloud threaded the peaks above. But the next day thick low stuff came down, and everything went out of focus.

The archipelago is approximately the size of Ireland, and there are more bears than people. One of three small settlements, Barentsburg on the east coast of Grønfjorden is a Russian-owned coal-mining outpost with more than a whiff of the Soviet era. Five hundred people still wrest coal from its ice-locked seams, but Barentsburg is a memorial to more populous times, even down to the monolithic concrete accommodation blocks colonised by black-legged kittiwakes. Alongside the bust of Lenin the miners have painted murals of blue-eyed, lantern-jawed heroes of the motherland, fists raised against the tundra. Outside the settlements, the human footprint on Svalbard is confined to the odd trapper’s hut. Trappers have not been allowed to catch polar bears since 1972, but they still take Arctic fox in their valuable white winter coats. Halfway along Kongsfjord we tied up at Ny-½lesund, where the air has a mineral tang. Since a catastrophic accident closed the coal pits in 1963 Ny-½lesund has functioned as a multinational scientific research station. Climate scientists have been harvesting data on the glaciers at the head of the fjord for 40 years. All are in retreat: the mighty Middle Lovenbreen has lost 12.3m in average thickness since 1977. Natural internal dynamics do their work, but studies indicate that these glaciers are melting superfast as a result of anthropogenic activity in lower hemispheres.

The adverse effects of human development crop up remorselessly when one looks at the scientific papers coming out of Ny-½lesund. I talked to Geir Wing Petersen, a Norwegian bio-chemist who has been working in Svalbard for upwards of two decades. “We are now finding brominated flame retardants in polar bear cubs and glaucous gulls’ eggs,” Petersen told me as we walked over the alluvial plain among bleached beluga vertebrae. “Pollutants tend to be stored in fat, and as polar animals need to eat more fat than those in lower latitudes, they are more susceptible to pollutants.” An arrow of male eider duck headed towards the eastern mountains. “The Arctic is supposed to be pristine,” Petersen added ruefully. “But it’s becoming a sink for industrial and agricultural pollutants from the south.”

Forty-five years ago Rachel Carson kick-started the environmental movement with her bestseller Silent Spring. In it, she warned an unsuspecting world that man-made chemicals had been found in animal and human tissue. She said we had to stop. That was in 1962. When will we learn?

Sara Wheeler is the author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica.

Need to know

Sara Weeler travelled with Hurtigruten (020-8846 2666, www.hurtigruten.co.uk). Spitsbergen Polar Encounters voyages next year set sail from June to August and cost from £1,195pp. This includes one night at a hotel in Longyearbyen with dinner and breakfast, and four nights aboard the Nordstjernen. Flights are extra (from £665 return), and can be booked through Hurtigruten, or arranged independently.
Reading: Spitsbergen: Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, Jan Mayen by Andreas Umbreit (Bradt, £14.99).
Useful website: www.svalbard.net.

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