A blizzard night in a hut on Svalbard

You're in a red sleeping bag on the bottom bunk of a small wooden hut on Kongsfjorden, on Svalbard. It's 2.40 in the morning and it has been dark all day, because it's the polar night. A blizzard is throwing snow at both little windows. The stove is still warm with the kettle on top, and your socks and gloves are drying on a line above it. Through one window the red light on the weather mast comes and goes in the snow. Through the other, the next hut's window glows yellow.

What a winter night up here is like

The hut sits where Svalbard's research village really is. Ny-Ålesund, on Kongsfjorden, is a centre for international Arctic research and environmental monitoring (Kings Bay), and 11 institutions from 10 countries have permanent research stations there. The settlement itself is owned and run by the company Kings Bay (Kings Bay, history).

It's a small place, and smaller in winter. A station briefing for visiting scientists gives the population as 35 in winter and up to 180 in summer, and puts the village 107 km from Longyearbyen and 1,231 km from the North Pole. It is a radio-silent village too: you turn off your phone, Bluetooth and wi-fi, down to the wireless mouse (AWIPEV station briefing, 2015). So at 2.40am there's no phone glowing in the bunk. There's the stove, the wind and the snow.

The polar night

In Longyearbyen, the main town, the polar night lasts from 26 October to 16 February, and from 11 November to 30 January there's no daylight at all. Polar night is declared when the sun lies more than 6 degrees below the horizon (Arctic Norway). By midwinter, 2.40 in the morning and 2.40 in the afternoon look much the same from the bunk: dark outside, the mast light blinking, the stove glowing.

Svalbard's winter storms

Svalbard sits where cold Arctic air meets mild air from the south, and the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services says that makes unstable, stormy weather common, especially in winter, when the highest wind speeds usually come. Svalbard Airport, Ny-Ålesund and Hopen get 50 to 60 days a year with a wind of at least a strong breeze, and somewhere between 20 and 40 extreme cyclones, the storms sometimes called weather bombs, cross the Arctic North Atlantic each winter (Climate in Svalbard 2100). At Svalbard Airport, MET Norway measured a near gale (14 m/s) or more 2% of the time over the year, and 4% of the time in winter (MET Norway, 2017).

The 45 mph wind in this scene is a gale, which the Met Office defines as 39 to 46 mph (Met Office). With snow it makes a blizzard: in the Met Office's words, moderate or heavy snow with winds of 30 mph or more, cutting visibility to 200 metres or less. When the wind lifts snow that has already fallen, that's a ground blizzard (Met Office).

How cold it gets

February is on average the coldest month at Svalbard's weather stations (Climate in Svalbard 2100). MET Norway's figures for Svalbard Airport put the average winter temperature, December to February, at -15.0°C for 1961 to 1990 and -11.8°C for 1986 to 2015 (MET Norway, 2017). It is warming fast: the record there, which starts in 1899, shows 0.35°C a decade over the year and 0.46°C a decade in winter, and there are significantly fewer days with a mean temperature below -20°C than there were (MOSJ, Norwegian Polar Institute). So the scene's -18°C is a properly cold night for a Svalbard winter now, and the hut's stove is earning its keep.

The rifle on the hook

On Svalbard, anyone travelling outside the settlements must carry suitable means of scaring off polar bears, and the Governor of Svalbard also recommends carrying a firearm. Inside Longyearbyen's settlement area, carrying a loaded firearm is forbidden (Sysselmesteren). Ny-Ålesund's station rules go the same way: rifles are compulsory outside the village and are kept unloaded inside it, and every building except the shop is left open, so anyone who meets a bear can get indoors (AWIPEV station briefing).

That's why the parka and the rifle hang together by the door. Nobody goes out to read the mast without both.

Field notes

The real place behind the scene: who lives there, the wildlife they share it with, and a few things worth knowing. The same notes open from Field notes in the player.

• Who lives here

  On 1 July 2026, 2,504 people lived in Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund, 889 of them from outside Norway. Another 419 lived in Barentsburg and Pyramiden, and 10 at Hornsund. (Statistics Norway)

• Polar bears

  In August 2015 there were an estimated 264 polar bears on Svalbard itself and 709 more out on the pack ice, 973 in all. The whole Barents Sea population was put at about 2,650 in 2004. (Aars and others, Polar Research, 2017; MOSJ, Norwegian Polar Institute)

• Reindeer found nowhere else

  Svalbard reindeer live only on Svalbard. There are around 22,000 of them. (MOSJ, Norwegian Polar Institute)

• The walrus came back

  Walruses were protected on Svalbard in 1952, when only about a hundred were left. A 2018 survey estimated 5,503 in the Svalbard area. (MOSJ, Norwegian Polar Institute)

• The other half of the year

  The dark ends in spring. In Longyearbyen the midnight sun lasts from 19 April to 23 August, and the sun never sets. (Visit Svalbard)

• Seeds in the mountain

  Outside Longyearbyen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is cut into solid rock. It opened on 26 February 2008 and now holds 1,417,799 seed samples from 135 depositors. (Svalbard Global Seed Vault; About the Seed Vault)

• No burials in the permafrost

  Dying on Svalbard isn't against the law, whatever you may have heard. But nobody has been buried in a coffin in Longyearbyen since 1950, because bodies keep in the frozen ground; the dead are taken to the mainland. Urns could still go in, and the old cemetery closed in 2017 after a landslide nearby. (Polar Journal, 2020)

Somewhere else tonight

If you'd rather have rain than snow, there's a crew cabin on a North Sea oil platform in a gale. Every place is on the map.