Welcome to the most northern town in the world.
The temperature is currently -10 degrees celsius, it's dark for four whole months of the year,
and there are polar bears on the prowl.
But the biggest problem for the people here on Longyearbyen is right beneath their feet.
Midway between Norway and the North Pole, Svalbard is really cold all year round.
What this means is that, during winter, the ground is frozen all the way down to bedrock.
During the summer months about a metre of the soil will melt.
This is essential for plants but unfortunately it makes it really difficult to build on.
The bit that melts is called the active layer, and the bit that doesn’t is permafrost.
When the water in the soil freezes it expands and when it melts it contracts.
This rhythmic pulse, year after year, destroys the stuff built above.
Flat surfaces are especially at risk which is why there is only one real road on the
entire island, and why the airport runway needs to be resurfaced so often.
Building upon frozen ground is really easy, we proved that in Episode One with the Leaning
Tower of Pisa.
However, once you actually try to live in your house things start to subside.
As the heat from inside makes its way into the surrounding soil, the permafrost below
starts to melt.
With different rooms leaking heat at different rates the house sinks unevenly and starts
to crack.
In order to overcome these issues, Longyearbyen is one of the few towns entirely built on
stilts.
These wooden poles extend far into the permafrost in order to provide support for the building
above.
By making the stilts from wood and by including some extra insulation beneath the structure,
heat stays inside the house and permafrost is kept solid.
You might have read that it is illegal to die on Svalbard.
While that makes for a great clickbait title it's also untrue.
Instead you’re not allowed to be buried here.
Or at least not since the 1950s once we realised how things could go terribly wrong.
Burying the bodies is really difficult because the permafrost is so hard to get through.
On top of that, the constant melting and refreezing of the ground pushes the bodies to the surface.
A little ways outside the town is what looks like a wooden stonehenge, created through
the same process.
Locals tell me that this is all that remains of a series of houses which accidentally caught
fire sometime in the 1990s.
Only the portion of the stilts which were below the soil were spared.
Each year when the ground freezes and water expands they get pushed out a little bit further.
Occasionally other things that are best left forgotten have resurfaced.
In 2016 thousands of Russian reindeer were wiped out by a mysterious contagion.
Examination of the bodies found it to be from a strain of anthrax last seen 75 years prior.
Normally when an animal dies it decomposes, taking whatever diseases it had along with
it.
However, when cold temperatures prevent the body from decomposing then its pathogens can
remain dormant.
That worked out fine right up until the unusually warm summer of 2016.
What we think happened is that a reindeer that had previously died of the disease had
thawed out with the extra-high temperatures; infecting a new host from beyond the grave.
A warming planet is bad for everyone, but especially for the people here on Svalbard.
Unfortunately the permafrost again makes things difficult.
The permafrost layer has a lot of organic matter, thousands of years of it stacked up
layer by layer.
Just like with our frozen reindeer, it doesn’t decay.
However, as the world and permafrost heats up due to climate change the process will
resume.
When the organic matter in permafrost breaks down it produces methane gas, which is coincidentally
the same thing that farts are made out of.
To illustrate why that might be a problem I’ve collected three different samples of
gas.
First of all regular old air, next carbon dioxide, and finally methane.
As to how I collected all that methane, well I’ll let you work that out for yourself.
I’m now taking all of the bottles outside to be exposed to the sun for a couple of hours.
As we can see, the methane is heating up faster than the rest of them.
That's because methane is a terrible greenhouse gas; about 800 times more potent than CO2.
Solar radiation impacts the ground and is converted into thermal radiation.
Its this thermal radiation which the methane gas doesn’t allow to pass through; heating
up the entire bottle.
This same thing happens to the planet and is known as the Greenhouse Effect.
As we saw in our experiment, carbon dioxide is nowhere near as bad of a greenhouse gas
as methane is, which gives us a counterintuitive interim solution to this permafrost problem.
Because we can convert methane into carbon dioxide, producing quite a lot of energy along
the way, we could use our methane reserves to produce energy for communities in the far
north.
Or alternatively, we could just blow it up.
Well, that was fun!
But with a little bit more methane and in a darker room...
Svalbard is an incredibly difficult place to build, and yet having just spent a small
amount of time on this island I can see why so many people want to live here.
By combining an understanding of the natural world with an appreciation of engineering
design we can live in even the harshest of environments.
This has been James Dingley from the Atomic Frontier.
Keep Looking Up.