There’s something about the Polar Regions. A sort of magnetism, if you’ll pardon the pun. As a small child I listened to my Noggin the Nog cassette tape over and over again. I just loved hearing about his voyage ‘past the black ice at the edge of the world to the Land of the Midnight Sun’. One of my earliest extended writing projects at school was on Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole. Clearly there was something about the Earth's permanently ice-bound extremes that really captured my young imagination.
That attraction apparently still lingers; when I first heard about Norilsk (also referenced in a previous post) there was some of that same fascination. It’s not somewhere I was aware of when I was still living in Russia. The place might be described as a monument to human stubbornness in the face of some of the harshest conditions on the planet. It’s located about 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle and so experiences either perpetual daylight or perpetual night for the majority of the year. Its existence was brought to my attention by this BBC piece in which mesmerising images provide the backdrop to photographer Elena Chernysheva talking with journalist Dan Damon. For more detail and a broader perspective, see also this interview between Chernysheva and Coburn Dukehart for National Geographic’s blog Proof.
Chernysheva's pictures also accompany Ian Evtushenko’s evocative writing in this Calvert Journal Article from last year. His description of growing up there almost made me jealous for a splinter of a split second, even he if didn’t have Noggin the Nog cassettes. The grass is always greener? Well, maybe. However, when talking about Norilsk this is a wholly inappropriate idiom as the heavy industry that dominates the city’s economy has caused so much pollution that virtually nothing grows there. On reflection, I’m happy to admire from a safe distance.
