December 2025
I have something a little bit different for December, it is the true story of a young Arctic fox, who was observed for several months moving only in small circles on their home on Spitsbergen, an island on the Svalbard Archipelago. The fox was near to a glacier, most probably where she was born. Then the researchers monitoring her recorded the fox bounding across one third of the Arctic Circle to Ellesmere Island Canada via Greenland, a distance of 4415 km. The fox would have crossed paths with other wildlife and natural phenomenon that have been carefully documented independently by researchers. So this month's note is piecing together these details to give a little sketch of this unfamiliar and revealing place and to finish off the year I made a card to download showing the fox's journey as a simple game.
Satellite data shows the fox began to explore at the start of March 2018 when the North Polar sea ice is at its widest. The cold is the effect of the Earth's tilt away from the Sun almost completely in previous months so that the faint light comes from below the horizon or from the aurora chemical reactions in the atmosphere, this cold reverberates through the ice bridging Arctic circle lands. The separate isles of the Svalbard Archipelago fuse as the growing ice fills the gaps of brine water and the multi-year ice grows thicker. Within the salted sea water a beautiful thing happens, through the pressure and extreme cold affecting the complex salts in the sea crystals of cryogenic gypsum form, some forms are fine needles, some large and solid, some are entangled in algae filament, from hyaline and matt, the crystals are a world of their own, all within the Nansen Basin North of Svalbard.
The fox headed North to an ice-free coastal shore on the 11th March 2018 around Raudfjorden and then after adjusting her path she hit open water again near Woodfjorden on the 16th March. These fjords would be home to Arctic krill, a darting and nimble crustacean that has been studied in nearby fjords because of the krill's delicate sensitivity to light. Throughout the world species of Krill follow a daily migration up and down the water column. At the water's surface the krill feed on photosynthesising plankton and then they experience the deeper waters of the seabed with their own gentle bioluminescence running the length of their bodies. This vertical migration is thought to be in response to the daily cycles of sunrise and sunset however during the Polar Night these fjords and their inhabitants experience only twilight, and so it is unclear if the migration is present in these tiny Polar creatures. Researchers found that indeed there was vertical migration where the krill, sensitive through their bodies and in particular their eyes to the most subtle of light changes around the polar twilight, travel through the full spectrum of the sea's light and life forms. The Arctic fox changed direction at this point, crossing the Northern part of Spitsbergen from West to East, where, on 26 March 2018, she met ice-covered sea for the first time and left Spitsbergen. The sea ice forms a solid running ground for the few animals with the endurance to cross it and the rewards are potential of greater genetic spread for their species. The fox's route turned Northward and then Westward on this ice sheet, towards North Greenland which she reached 21 days on the 16th of April 2018.
As the fox crosses Northern Greenland she would encounter, in the extreme frost, spouts of the Arctic willow or Salix arctica which typically grows to only 15 cm high in this setting but spreads, extremely slowly, to form a carpet and this willow would be simply flowering. The catkins of the female Arctic willow are fluffy white and tipped in red and they can have hundreds of individual flowers and the flowers can produce many minute seeds in fruit capsules that split in two at the top, each half recurving. The Arctic willow shrub can survive the winter of extreme cold and grow at the first signs of warmth each year, a characteristic that makes it unique to other tree-life.
From Greenland the fox circled upwards to Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, arriving on the 10th June 2018, just 76 days after leaving Spitsbergen. What would it be like, here, at the fox's journey end? On Ellesmere Island, the Northern most Island in the Canadian Archipelago, the fluffy Arctic bumblebee or bombus polaris would be pollinating newly grown yellow Arctic poppies as they turn towards the sunlight. The Arctic bumblebee has a thick coat of hair, more so than other bees and makes insulated nests to protect themselves from the winter temperature drops. The ocean ice that bridged the land to make the fox's journey possible is slowly retreating and the crystals that formed from the complex sea salts through the extreme pressure and cold of ice formation are melting back into the ocean with the exception of crystals of cryogenic gypsum that form lasting shards that remain solid as they fall through the sea, taking marine snow to the sea bed with them.
As promised here is the card in PFD format to download showing the fox's journey as a dot-to-dot game. Enjoy!