Fossil Relics
Rúna Magnússon
Artwork part of ‘Structure’ (Issue 14)
The Artist
Rúna Magnússon is a polar ecologist and permafrost researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She has Dutch and Icelandic roots, and she is fascinated by polar ecosystems that are tough yet delicate, hard and icy yet soft and mossy. She also loves abandoned places and traces of the past in landscapes, sunlight shining through leaves and feeling immersed in nature. Find her photographs, linocuts and drawings at www.runamagnusson.com.
The Science
Old cable cart systems surround the settlements of Svalbard. Once used to transport coal from the mines to the harbour, they have now become historical monuments[i]. They watch over my team’s research sites close to Longyearbyen, where we experimentally mimic future climate extremes in permanent plots on the tundra[ii]. We then compare processes like permafrost thaw and plant growth between the treated and unaltered “control” sites. By now Svalbard is the most rapidly warming place on earth[iii], and we have to ask ourselves how unaltered our control sites really are. Monumental fossil structures remind us of this irony every day.
The artwork shows remnants of fossil (infra)structure in the landscape. These wooden cable cart towers are very characteristic for Svalbard, and interesting structures in themselves, but they also represent the broader infrastructure and economy related to coal mining that were essential in Svalbard's history and settlements. It also represents an enormous contrast and irony, now that Svalbard has become the most rapidly warming area on the planet and a focal point for environmental research in cold regions. Linocut is a perfect medium to capture this; contrast rich black and white images, resulting from the process of carving structures into linoleum.
[i] Per Kyrre Reymert (2013). Longyearbyen - From company town to modern town. Governor of Svalbard, Environmental Protection Department. ISBN: 978-82-91850-42-9. https://www.sysselmesteren.no/contentassets/bc51823074cc440f90894ba798f26a82/gamlelongyearbyen_eng__120114.pdf
[ii] Find project info, collaborating institutes and (in the future) data on Research in Svalbard: https://www.researchinsvalbard.no/project/a2960000-1219-0a01-39d2-08da0b200c42/project-info
[iii] See for instance Rantanen et al. (2022). The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Communications Earth & Environment, 3(1), 168. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00498-3
Copyright statement. This work is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license