Paper short abstract:

Bear Island is a small uninhabited island in the Barents Sea. Coalmining started in 1916 and the small mining settlement Tunheim was built on the brink of the ocean, abandoned 1925. Investigating this derelict town, this is a paper about an experiment in historical fieldwork of and in the present.

Paper long abstract:

Trying to make sense of how fieldworkers in the Arctic practiced time at the beginning of the 20th century brought me to Bjørnøya, or Bear Island, together with two colleagues. After reading diaries and articles about Arctic scientific and geopolitical history, the ambition was to understand how observing and recording the heritage of Bjørnøya could help understand how the geological and natural times of the Arctic were co-produced with the times of the people studying it in the 1910s and 1920s. Bear Island is a small uninhabited island in the Barents Sea. Coalmining started in 1916 and the small mining settlement Tunheim was built on the brink of the ocean. Connected to the rest of the world only by the seaways, a mining society was established with the purpose of extracting coal - and securing Norwegian presence in the midst of the Barents Sea. Geologists and topographers were important for establishing the knowledge base for these mining activities. In 1925 the mine was abandoned, and the settlement with 1.5 kilometers of rails, two locomotives, 25 houses and the mining machines was left to itself, there on the brink. This decomposing “ghost-town” has a powerful presence, an affective strength that produces a time of decay and a time of absence. My short question is how can the presence of, and presence in, this place help answer historical questions? This is a paper about an experiment in historical fieldwork of the present on the brink of sea and time.