It took five days of travel, including 23 hours of pure flight time, to reach our staging area in Billibino, Chukotka—a remote community of about 5,000 that supports regional mining and hosts the world’s most remote and northern nuclear power plant. Set along a confluence of rivers in rolling foothills covered with birch and larch forest, the area is quite striking in its autumn colors. Overnight temperatures have already dropped to just below freezing, but the black flies have yet to fully recognize the change in seasons.
We still have a four-plus-hour helicopter ride to reach the Island, including a significant hop across open ocean, but for now, we wait. Wrangel Island is a strict Nature Reserve and is considered a sensitive border region for security purposes, so we need special permits before we can continue. Luckily, we also need to sort our field gear and buy food for up to six weeks on the island, so the extra time on the mainland will be well spent.
Language is definitely a challenge for the two monolingual Americans on our team (myself and Eric), but with help from our Russian colleagues, friendly and patient people along the way, and the magic of Google Translate, we seem to be doing just fine. Local stores are small, but well-provisioned. Across Russia, you can see rapid modernization together with classic infrastructure from the 1960s. Even here in remote Siberia, you’ll see massive concrete buildings that appear rather daunting from the outside, but are quite cozy, modern, and functional on the inside. As with my last trips, the people are warm and welcoming to visitors, and we’ve already been asked to speak at the high school English class while in town.
With some luck, we will get the weather needed to make our final jump so we can begin our fieldwork soon. At this latitude, winter is indeed coming.
Dr. Eric Regehr is the principal investigator of the Wrangel Island study; for more information, contact him at eregehr@uw.edu. In 2019, primary funding was provided by the University of Washington, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Polar Bears International (thanks to the generosity of the High Point Community Foundation and Salesforce), the Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve, and the All-Russian Research Institute for Environment Protection. In addition to Regehr, fieldwork was conducted by Ulyana Babiy (Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve), Stanislov Belikov and Angelina Gnedenko (All-Russian Research Institute for Environment Protection), and Geoff York (Polar Bears International).