This is a photo I took in April of 2004 in Resolute Bay. I was there with the film crew for our NOVA show, and they wanted the iceberg as a backdrop for their interview with Roy “Fritz” Koerner. They’d had Koerner bring an ice core from the Greenland glacier from which he had just returned, and his protest that standing in front of bay-ice with a core from a glacier might be misleading was ignored. He certainly looked the part of an arctic personality, with a narrow, grizzled face that could have stood beside an old photograph of Amundsen. He remained remarkably cordial throughout his interview, despite the cold and the fact that the producer kept having him re-do his lines to hit the specific points she was looking for.

The next day, which was our last, I came out by myself on a skidoo, looking for this berg, but I never found it. The tracks of the last day had been blown away in the arid, icy wind (the day’s high temp was minus 20), and there was no ariadne’s thread to be followed through the ice labyrinth.

Strange to think that all this may someday be gone, that Resolute Bay might be ice-free most of the year, and a berg of this sort melted long before it ever reached it. People ask me what it was like, how terrible the cold must have been, how isolated to be at a spot hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement. I tell thim it was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

-- RussellPotter