Kind: captions
Language: en
come take a walk with me around longe
bin that's the largest town on the
Norwegian islands of
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spard parts of it may look
familiar
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but make no mistake this place is
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different at 78° North it is just 800 M
or 1300 km from the North
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Pole
and with over 2,000 permanent residents
it is the northernmost real town on
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Earth there are only 50 km of Road
including the small Streets between
houses so people get around the island
mainly on
snowmobile in fact there are more
registered snowmobiles than
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residents
anyone leaving town is required to
travel with a gun and someone who knows
how to use
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it because the islands are also home to
polar
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bears
the average daytime high is below
freezing for all but 4 months of the
year and from the end of October to
mid-February the sun doesn't rise at
all this is the long polar
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night living here is tough
this past December an avalanche in town
destroyed 10 homes which used to be here
killing two
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people so how did this cold remote ice
cover archipelago come to be
inhabited well the hills around town are
rich in coal deposits that have been
mined for over a hundred
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years the coal was transported to the
port via a series of aerial tramways
some of which remain today though they
are no longer
operational
Cole is a reminder that spard was not
always an arctic ice World 360 million
years ago it was actually in the tropics
just north of the equator a swampy area
it was covered with the precursors to
Modern ferns which were much larger than
they are today reaching 10 to 30 m in
height this vegetation was then covered
in mud and sand and submerged under the
sea over time it turned into the coal
deposits that in the 20th century
brought miners from Norway Russia and
the
US most of the coal mines have now
closed and the economy is gradually
shifting towards tourism Education and
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Research
tourists take trips on snowmobiles and
dog
sleds there is a University Center in
spard which offers semester courses in
biology physics and
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geology and up on the side of a mountain
is the falar global seed Vault but
that's a story for another
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time the locals tell me that interest in
the region from different nations is
increasing as the globe warms and Arctic
Ice shrinks trade routes are opening up
across the
North and spard is strategically placed
between North America Asia and
Europe so one day in the future fallard
may no longer be as cold cold or as
remote as it once
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was but for now it is a reminder of how
through our Ingenuity people can live in
even the most inhospitable of
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places
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h
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[Applause]
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for
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h
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oh