Free Republic

Russia said on Wednesday that restrictions imposed by Norway were blocking the transport of goods to Russian-populated settlements on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and called on Oslo to resolve the issue as soon as possible or face consequences. The ministry said that it summoned Norway's Chargé d'Affaires to protest the restrictions, which it said were blocking the transport of food and medical equipment. Svalbard is part of Norway, although Russia has the right to exploit the archipelago's natural resources under a treaty signed in 1920 and maintains a diplomatic presence in the largely Russian- and Ukrainian-populated settlement of Barentsburg.

The stretch between Svalbard and the North Cape of mainland Norway constitutes the Bear Gap, which is the Arctic Circle analogue to the better-known Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap.4 Svalbard’s proximity to the Kola Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya—home to Russia’s Northern Fleet and its nuclear weapons test site, respectively—further helps explain Moscow’s enduring interest in Svalbard. The archipelago’s importance is likely to grow as maritime trade increases in the Arctic. The Pentagon’s 2024 Arctic Strategy notes, “Reduction in sea ice due to climate change means chokepoints such as the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and the Barents Sea north of Norway are...

Operator of what is the world’s northernmost fiber optic subsea cable, Space Norway, has located the disruption to somewhere between 130 to 230 kilometers from Longyearbyen in the area where the seabed goes from 300 meters down to 2700 meters in the Greenland Sea. The error happened on Friday morning, January 7. Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine fiber optic communication cable connecting Longyearbyen with Andøya north of Harstad in northern Norway. The two cables are 1,375 and 1,339 km respectively, and Space Norway informs in a press release that there is good connection in the cable still...

I never get tired of videos like this: Flat Earthers, our beautiful blue garden planet looks awfully round! Here's a longer video: The Fram2 expedition launched on Monday using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Here's the crew: Believe it or not, there has never been a manned spaceflight that orbits around the Earth's poles. In other words, all other manned missions have orbited around the Earth, not over and under it. The mission, funded by Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, is named after the Norwegian exploration ship Fram, the first to complete expeditions to both the North Pole and South...

An undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time. The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and...

In collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), the team is launching the Solar Orbiter that will use Venus's and Earth's gravity to swing itself out of the ecliptic plane — the area of space aligned with the sun's equator, where all planets orbit. From this position, the craft will feast its eyes on the first-ever look of the massive yellow dwarf star, which will provide scientists with better data to predict solar storms more accurately. Solar Orbiter is equipped with a custom-designed titanium heat shield coated with a specific phosphate that withstands temperatures over 900 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing it...