Carsten Peter

Sep 12, 2023 | nationalgeographic.com | Nadia Drake |Carsten Peter |Chris Gunn

As I thumb the throttle on my snowmobile, it skitters and glides across a sea of snow and ice. In the dusky twilight, the landscape is painted in shades of ethereal blue. I’m heading back to town after spending the day crisscrossing a frozen fjord, one of many in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a cluster of mountainous islands in the high Arctic where auroras often dance overhead and narwhals, belugas, and walruses patrol the seas.