You're Not Allowed to Die Here

[Music] I'm allowed to hunt a reindeer every year so the 24th of August 4 o'clock in the morning me and the dog start walking from the bottom of the valley after 2 hours on my left side there is something white oh it's a polar bear it's two polar bears so the mother just looking at me too just became a nice feeling something to dream about I'm happy for the memory of the polar bear which followed me the whole day they have a connection with the nature the connection which we lost and that's why we are here I think here you have nothing between you and the spirits of the world hey you have to bend your head because there is something bigger than you much much bigger what it is I don't know I know only it is an iamb I think most people are here looking for some sort of adventure like coming to a place where they've never been before where they may have seen these beautiful pictures of the arcade or something which has kind of inspired them to come up here but they're just here to experience this is raw nature they say that when you hit by the bug the polder bug you never leave hit by the polar bug that's an interesting choice Awards we traveled way up to longer B n from Los Angeles looking for a different kind of polar bug [Music] fun facts at 78 degrees latitude longer BN is the northernmost city in the world and in this moment I'm likely the northernmost David during our six day stay the amount of sunlight in a day will have reduced by over 90 minutes like a season and fast forward as the Arctic prepares for a long polar night [Music] and climate change said the Arctic to defrost which could potentially bring buried but not quite decomposed matter like the bubonic plague back in the circulation but more on that in a minute I don't think I'm allowed to be buried here why not because the permafrost and you will come up and say hello again after about ten years so these are irons run temperature monitoring instruments we're measuring ground temperatures here this is one of our freezer rooms there we go this is permafrost from 47 meters depth so it's quite a ways below the surface if this is the ground surface below this you have the permafrost and the permafrost is the zone which remains frozen throughout the year so it's like the permanently frozen ground permafrost forms in places like this really high in the world and if there's excellent of preserving things I mean it preserves organic material plants ice so when you put something in the permafrost you're essentially putting them into a freezer but what happens when that freezer breaks and things start to melt apparently even the most advanced apocalypse bunkers aren't safe from climate change the massive vault was buried under the Arctic permafrost to safeguard seeds in case of war or natural disasters but warming temperatures near the pole melted the ice and flooded the entrance to the vault what is this seed vault exactly they like to refer to the seed vault is the ultimate insurance policy against agricultural disaster they preserve seeds that are endangered for various reasons potentially because of global warming have you heard the rumor that it's illegal to die here I have heard that rumors I can see why up here it's not a place where they would want burials some the bodies are preserved forever essentially so that could create all sorts of problems bodies popping up out of the ground would be a little bit strange [Music] Inge and Falak Dillo her delegate up hello for further than CSS Henry carefully animal unit of the weight from the embraced the other and stage and a smoke yet the cemetery here is very special because there is turned right you can't dig very very very deep here so when there was a big Adem akin nineteen hundred and eighty they had to bury people here at home there was a Spanish flu outbreak in Vanya bin and seven miners died and they were buried in the graveyard their bodies are very very low in the ground because of the permafrost if this organic material is to thaw due to changes in permafrost temperature then it suddenly become significant I'm not sure if there's an ancient leg that's buried in the permafrost that may be [Music] the interesting about plague is not gotten people think it's gone but it's not actually it's it's still in Asia Africa North America I mean if you go out to like the Four Corners area in Arizona New Mexico Colorado Utah they're still plagued there and people get plague nearly every year and anthrax epidemic is wreaking havoc in Western Siberia seventy-five years after the most recent outbreak and scientists believe a thawed reindeer carcass may be to blame anthrax is interesting because it's it's a bacteria I was able to form the spore that lasts for a very long time in the environment well you freeze it and it could last forever so we're not exactly sure where the anthrax came from this there it could have been from ten years ago or a hundred years ago a thousand years ago if you put influenza out on us on a surface on some table it doesn't tend to last very long maybe a day or two and still infectious but freezing it for a long time without a lot of temperature variations it actually seems like it survives pretty well up north where there's a lot of birds who carry the flu so a lot of the flus we get are spread by Birds it's actually not inconceivable that these birds are going to be picking up these older strains of flu and bringing them back into circulation there are sort of all of these feedback loops in the Arctic which work together in a sense and so climate change is important for permafrost settings because there's a fair bit of organic material which is incorporated into the permafrost and so if this organic material is to thaw due to changes in permafrost temperature and it suddenly becomes available for these sort of microbes and things which are living in the soil to act on and produce greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or methane so from the climate change perspective it's a problem when you first seen these landscapes you never forget that people are afraid of permafrost melting the climate changing things with vanish money would disappear a house would disappear friends with maybe disappear the only thing you have is memory [Music] we went too long near bien to find out why it's supposedly illegal to die there and found out you just shouldn't be buried there because as the permafrost melts more greenhouse gases will further accelerate the changing climate making permafrost less permanent and perhaps some well-preserved contagions will emerge from the frost like tiny zombies returned from a long nap or maybe one of these doom and gloom climate docs will actually inspire action but probably not [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Atlantic

Views: 928,237

Rating: 4.6369548 out of 5

Keywords: Longyearbyen, the atlantic, svalbard, svalbard global seed vault, svalbard winter, longyearbyen norway, norway documentary, weird film, short film, short documentary, weird documentary films, permafrost, plague, MEL Films, burial, tundra, arctic tundra, climate change, winter, polar, northern lights

Id: lyrjDpkX6nA

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/NaturalPotpipes]

Good luck stopping me once im dead!

[u/sarai00]

Okay well this is weird wording, but a common one. You are allowed to die here, they just have to transport your body to the mainland for burial. Source: I live in Longyearbyen

[u/TwinsiesBlue]

For a series with this premise watch “Fortitude” Amazon Prime Video, it has two seasons so far

[u/-Kaiser1401-]

Sounds like putting your dead body on a burning ship isn't too unreasonable after all....

[u/JohnGillnitz]

Similar thing going on in northern parts of Russia. Permafrost is melting and giving reindeer anthrax. They are throwing journalists in jail for reporting about it because the oil industry makes mad bank up there.

[u/Gangreless]

Anyone else think digging up ancient viruses is both fascinating and super cool yet terrifying at the same time?

Like, I want them to do it so we can see learn what kind of viruses used to kill us. But at the same time, please don't release something of Bubonic proportions.

[u/Onetap1]

It's in Spitzbergen. They exhumed the bodies of some miners somewhere in Spitsbergen, to try to retrieve samples of the 1918 Influenza pandemic virus.

No intact virus had survived, the permafrost wasn't as perma as they'd hoped.

[u/odhinnplays]

Fortitude.

[u/Embowaf]

I was on a cruise ship that stopped there!

There was not a ton to do. We walked around the town. There was a grocery store with a stuffed polar bear. I climbed a hill with was difficult as the ground was mossy and wet.