Randa Abdel-Fattah
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And honestly, I hadn't even heard of Svalbard before talking to Atusa.
But you've likely heard of Svalbard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately.
President Donald Trump reasserted in the new year that the United States wants Greenland.
Like Greenland, Svalbard is involved in the race for the Arctic.
Being near the North Pole makes it an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and download data from satellites.
New shipping routes are buried under the ice that climate change is rapidly melting.
And buried in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources — copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements — used in all kinds of technology.
But there's also something that makes Svalbard weird.
Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders.
Svalbard is part of the Kingdom of Norway.
But everyone from Indian climate scientists to Russian coal miners to Thai hikers are welcome.
Some might call that a fantasy.
And the story of how Svalbard ended up that way gives us a window into how the world of nations and passports, a world we take for granted as reality, came to be.
And what it means to exist outside it.
In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Svalbard while on a tourist cruise with his family.
Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan.