This Arctic boomtown is led by women studying climate change
A small Arctic research station in Norway has emerged as a scientific hub, and it’s home to an increasingly female-led contingent of experts doing some of the planet’s most important studies.
Ny-Ålesund, a small international research outpost nestled among the snowy mountains and icy fjords of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, is one of the northernmost settlements on Earth. During the winter months, it’s a frigid, inhospitable place where the sun never rises, leaving the community’s low-slung buildings bathed in the inky blue darkness of an unbroken polar night.
Despite the harsh weather, Svalbard is unmistakably warming, and at an alarming rate—more than four times faster than the global average. This has caused unsettling changes to its environment.
(Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.)
Take the arrival of helmet jellyfish, thought to have entered these far north Arctic waters about a decade ago. They feed on krill and small fish that native marine life such as cod and herring depend on. Or the continually warming permafrost, which is threatening to release previously locked-in-place carbon into the atmosphere. In Svalbard, the average air temperature has increased by about seven degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1970s; in Ny-Ålesund, it’s now just a few degrees below freezing. Last summer, an extreme heat wave led to extensive melting across the archipelago’s ice caps.
But other shifts are happening in the region too. Dozens of scientists from over 10 countries continue to deepen our understanding about climate change when it’s needed more than ever—and many are women.
(The link between extreme weather and climate change has never been more clear.)
That’s a striking shift for the outpost, where men have historically predominated and haven’t always been particularly inviting. Originally founded as a coal-mining settlement, Ny-Ålesund began its conversion into a research hub in the 1960s after a fatal accident precipitated the end of mining operations. Climate scientist Inger Hanssen-Bauer spent the winter of 1983-84 in Ny-Ålesund, working for the Norwegian Polar Institute. She remembers the isolation she felt as the only woman at the station. “I gradually understood that there was communication between the men, in which I was not a part. And there was no parallel female grapevine.”
Change, Hanssen-Bauer says, has come incrementally alongside the long-overdue rise of more women in science and in areas involving immersive fieldwork. Julia Boike, a researcher with Berlin’s Humboldt University and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, was still among the minority when she began collecting data on permafrost in 1998. Last year, however, she looked around and realized that for the first time, her three-person team was entirely women. The work atmosphere has improved, she says, noting better food and general hygiene. But at the same time, their jobs have gotten harder as a result of the climate change they are documenting. “Rainfall has increased,” Boike says, “and the snow cover period has shrunk.” Diminishing sea ice means Svalbard’s polar bears spend more time on land, making Boike’s fieldwork more difficult; she won’t go to her long-standing research site when the predators are nearby.
(Once, most famous scientists were men. But that’s changing.)
In 2021, photographer Esther Horvath, who specializes in covering scientific expeditions in polar regions, arrived to chronicle the lives of these researchers, hoping to humanize their increasingly urgent work. She began photographing the kind of role models she wished she’d had as a child growing up in Hungary. “I always imagined that I would love to feel this biting cold on my face,” Horvath says. “But I was a girl. I only saw men doing that ... I didn’t even dare to dream that one day I [would] experience it.”
In these photographs, Horvath highlights researchers and staff who make life in the community possible. Each is pictured with something that sustains her or represents her work.
(Welcome to the world's northernmost science lab.)
Bettina Haupt
Former station leader
Scientists collect data from polar locations to understand how the world is changing. The weather balloon Haupt holds typically carries a radiosonde, an instrument that measures temperature, humidity, and pressure. One is released every day at Ny-Ålesund research station, in Svalbard, Norway. Haupt says such research is critical to “our chances to survive as a species in the long run.”
Bodil Haugvik
Community shop manager, Kings Bay AS
Unexpected items make life at the station easier. Haugvik works for the Norwegian state-owned company store supplying residents with toiletries and some essential goods, including warm socks and chocolate. She’s holding a baritone horn, an instrument she learned to play as a child and picked up again recently. Instruments Haugvik purchased have made it possible for amateur musicians at the station to play together.
Susana Garcia Espada
Station manager and engineer, Norwegian Mapping Authority
Observing changes on Earth involves looking up at the stars. Espada stands in the authority’s geodetic observatory office, where scientists track changes in Earth’s shape, gravity field, and rotation. These measures help them more precisely monitor sea-level rise and ice melt.
Charlotte Havermans
Marine zoologist, University of Bremen, Germany
As the Arctic warms, its ecosystems are changing dramatically. Scientists began documenting the presence of helmet jellyfish, a species generally found in more temperate waters, near Svalbard about a decade ago. Havermans stands with a net for sampling jellyfish. She uses environmental DNA to detect the animals in the waters off Ny-Ålesund and models their predicted expansion farther into the Arctic.
Ingrid Kjerstad
Research coordinator, Norwegian Polar Institute
Kjerstad visits Gåsebu, a hut two miles outside of Ny-Ålesund, with her dog Yukon. The half malamute, half husky is one of Kjerstad’s two dogs. He regularly accompanies her on trips away from the station, though, she notes, “he is more interested in small birds than polar bears.” Even if he’s not the best guard dog, she says, Yukon is “still the best buddy.”
Marie Koch
Marine biology doctoral student, Alfred Wegener Institute
Koch, shown with a sampling net containing sea urchins, is researching how warming waters affect the physiology and feeding behavior of the spiny, palm-size omnivores, a key link in the Arctic food chain. “The threat of climate change is ever present,” she says, which “makes it even more important to understand all the tiny parts of this system.”
(At this Arctic science base, life is anything but lonely.)
Esther Horvath has been an Explorer since 2018. The San Francisco-based photographer has traveled around the globe to document the natural world— even the surprising biodiversity found within a single cubic foot.
