If you ask a Svalbard local what they most look forward to each year, you might be surprised by the answer. In Longyearbyen, the northernmost year-round settlement on Earth, many people eagerly anticipate the polar nights that pitch the Arctic archipelago into darkness. These long, dark winters have a way of bringing the community closer together. For nearly four months (the dark period starts at the end of October and doesn’t end until mid-February) the town of Longyearbyen appears as a string of lights in a frozen river valley along Advent Fiord.

Located far north of the Arctic Circle, at 78 degrees north, Svalbard’s glaciers, wildlife and rugged Arctic terrain draw explorers, scientists and tourists from all over the world and at all times of the year. One such pair of adventurers, Sunniva Sorby and Hilde Fålun Strøm, launched their nine-month Hearts in the Ice (HITI) project with the ambitious goal of overwintering in a remote hunter’s cabin (called Bamsebu) on the shore of Svalbard’s Van Keulen Fiord. They are halfway through their stay and are busy gathering environmental data and performing other research as part of citizen science projects for organizations such as NASA and the Norwegian Polar Institute.

“We are in total darkness here at Bamsebu,” Sorby and Strøm wrote in their weekly log in mid-January. “Dark, save for the brilliant display of the night sky, fast-moving satellites, shootings stars and those many magical auroral displays that feel like they shine just for us.”

Likewise, there is no doubt that Svalbard’s climate, which paints the landscape in broad strokes of ice, snow and dramatic skies, inspires anyone who visits. The archipelago is considered subpolar because of its proximity to the North Pole, about 1,300 kilometres away. Such climates experience long, cold winters and cool, mild summers.

In the winter, Svalbard’s temperatures can dip to -30 C, while summers rarely break 10 C. Nevertheless, that is considered relatively warm for the latitude, and is due to the West Spitsbergen Current (a branch of the Gulf Stream) bringing warmer waters from the south and moderating the climate. The opposite happens in the north of the archipelago, with the East Spitsbergen Current pulling in cold Arctic waters. When these two currents mix in the Barents Sea, fog is a common sight. Svalbard doesn’t get much precipitation, except in the form of snow during the colder months.

Those who visited Svalbard only a decade ago, however, might not recognize it today. With the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, Svalbard is undergoing changes that are impacting its wildlife, landscapes, ocean, glaciers and urban settlements.