Flying a drone in svalbard: finding patterns in the ice

Before I even launched the drone, I could hear my "subject." It was punching against Kinfish's hull in what sounded like some kind of arctic morse code. The ship wasn't so much sailing as it was negotiating with the ice for safe passage. But the ice is indifferent, cold, and unmoved by the boat and its passengers presence. Nevertheless, Kinfish soldiered on steadfast against the blows against her metal hull delivered by an uncaring and unrelenting Arctic Ocean. I intended to experience and chronicle this vast landscape.

Even though it was April, it was still quite cold because Svalbard sits at about 80 north latitude, and that matters when flying a drone in the Arctic. The batteries don't do well in the cold, so you really have to be careful about staying close to the ship because a 50% battery can become at 20% battery in these temperatures, and if you run out of power before getting back aboard Kinfish, that drone is going swimming, never to return... I have first hand experience with this. And then there's the numb fingers pressing and pulling the metal joysticks that control this flying camera. No gloves means more tactile sensation and control, but also painfully cold. Anyway, let's go do this.

Flying a drone over landscapes is one of my favorite things to do. There's something really exciting about watching the control screen and seeing the camera gain altitude and you get a real sense of the scale of where you are. Makes you feel really small and almost insignificant.

Making our way through the ice in Svalbard onboard Kinfish

For me, the best part is pointing the camera straight down. The world looks completely different from a top down perspective, and you start to see things in the landscape that you didn't even know were there at ground level. You could be standing next to a river, a glacier, or anything really, and you'd have no idea how it looks from the sky. The patterns and textures you couldn't see on the ground are now visible and it's like art. Once you remove the horizon from the picture you lose an anchor to tell you what you see.

I did this in a place called Svalbard, which is an archipelago near the north pole. It is sparsely populated, and some people have estimated that there are more polar bears there than people. It's remote and cold as hell. It also is like no other place on earth. Example... the main city is called Longyearben, and when you step outside the city boundary, you are required to have a rifle, or at least be with someone who has one. This is to protect you from the polar bears. Also, no one locks the doors to their house or cars because of... the polar bears. You can't give birth here, you can't die here, there's no cats allowed, and the world's northernmost post office is located in the world's northernmost permanent year round settlement, Ny-Alesund. There's also a Russian settlement called Barentsburg, then sun doesn't set between April and September, and it doesn't come up between November and March, there's a seed vault, and it's the edge of the map and covered with snow and ice, which is what I was there for.

This is the post office in Ny-Alesund. I mailed myself a post card from here. Took a little over a week to get to my mailbox

Now I did not know this, but there are actually different kinds of ice, and not talking about cubed versus those little pellets you get at Sonic. First off you got your pack ice. This is free floating ice that moves around with the currents and wind. Then theres fast ice which is attached to the land. Polar bears love both. There's even something called pancake ice.

This is pancake ice. Hundreds of dinner plate sized chunks of the Arctic

You get really compelling geometric shapes and patterns with all of these. You can also fly your drone over a glacier a see amazing aerial glacier patterns, but I'll save that for another day.

One of the really nice things about shooting abstract ice photography in arctic regions like Svalbard is that the water looks black. It's almost as if the ice is floating in a sea of ink. This makes for some really nice black and white high contrast photography.

Flying a drone along the edge of the fast ice

What makes this type of drone photography in Svalbard difficult is launching and landing the drone from a moving ship. It's quite stressful. You pretty much have to launch by hand and the catch it by hand, which is particularly dangerous because that thing has four rapidly spinning blades on it. And you can't just launch it, let it hover, and wait for it to update the home point, one... because the ship keeps moving even though the drone is hovering in place so it's going to run into something or I should say the ship is going to run into it, and two... you sure as hell don't want the drone to return to the home point if it loses signal because a moving ship will have long since moved away from the updated home point.

This photo above that looks like shattered glass is one of my favorite abstract ice photography images. I love that you can't really get a good sense of perspective. Are these huge chunks of ice, or are they small? Am I seeing this from 100 feet up or is this from 1000 feet or more? Who knows. Luckily I took a separate image with the ship in it to give you a sense a scale.

Patterns like this are only seen in the springtime as the vast sheet of ice begins to melt and break apart as winter starts to loosen its grip on Svalbard.

You spend most of your life at human height, five or six (if you're lucky) feet above the ground. At that level the Arctic feels harsh. The wind is in your face, the ice cracking, cold burning your hands. It doesn't care about human comfort or even survival.

But from hundreds of feet above, the same place stops looking dangerous and starts looking like design. The fractured ice becomes geometry. The leads in the water become lines. The chaos organizes itself into pattern, and when on the ship, you're standing right beside it oblivious. That feeling is what draws me places like this.

It really is tranquil when you view this astoundingly vast landscape from the air. The ice while on the ship seems hardened, cold, mighty, and unyielding, when viewed from a distance above becomes delicate, fragile, and almost elegant. When it all comes together it's just beautiful, and seeing it from this perspective gives you a sense of calm, but also some unease as we are reminded that this ice is becoming more and more tenuous.

If abstract Arctic drone photography sounds like something you'd like to do let me give you a few tips. Chances are you'll be on a boat of some sort if you're going to get access to ice like this. That being said, get really good at launching and landing your drone. Especially the landing part. Also, every time you land a drone on the ship, change the memory card even if it's not close to being full. Why? There's nothing worse than getting some great images or footage on one flight only to have the drone crash into the water and losing the memory card. I have several low capacity memory cards and rotate them out. Another thing, it's easy to get wrapped up in taking images with the camera pointing down, and you lose sight of the boat. Rotate the lens up frequently to see where the boat is and that it's not getting too far away. Speaking of the boat getting too far away, you may have to put the drone in sport mode to catch up to it if it's moving. Pay attention to your battery because you need to have enough power to get back possibly at a high speed, and maybe into a wind. In the Arctic, the cold temperature will cause the battery life to fall real fast. Just keep that in mind.

You spend most of your time experiencing a landscape at eye level. Mountains look tall, ice looks solid, and the ground appears unremarkable beneath your feet. Standing on the ship, the pack ice felt immovable — something ancient and fixed that we were carefully threading our way through.

But as the drone climbed, the same place began to change. The ice broke into shapes. The cracks became lines. What felt massive from where I stood became delicate from above, shifting and reorganizing in ways I couldn’t see while I was inside it.

Nothing about the Arctic had changed, but my perspective had.

From a few hundred feet up, the frozen ocean became a pattern constantly forming and breaking apart. The drone didn’t just give me photographs, it also gave me context.

And that’s what stays with me most. Not the cold, not the remoteness, and not even the images, but the realization that sometimes you don’t really understand a place until you step far enough away from it to finally see it clearly.