Jäätee, the ice road to Kärdla in the island of Hiiumaa, Estonia

After the Viking era, as part of the Hanseatic League, Estonia has been occupied by Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany and lately Russia; permanently threatened, divided, fighting for independence, Estonia obtained it briefly between 1918 and 1940, then finally since 1988 - it's hard to believe how the country managed to keep its own language and national identity.

Being a small territory, Estonia is also hampered by geographic features - over 800 islands !  1500 lakes! What terra firma, is most of Estonia just water ? On the other hand, those islands and lakes and forests around are the most precious nature of the country. The largest islands, Hiiumaa and Saaremaa, need to be interconnected between them and with mainland. In Winter, that part of the Baltic freezes into a large pack ice, thick enough to allow traffic; this route over the ice across the sea is called Jäätee :

"In wintertime roads appear over the frozen surface of seas, lakes and rivers in Estonia. On these freeways , there is nothing but whiteness as far as the horizon, perhaps a fringe of dark conifers in the rear-view mirror, and total silence. This makes for an eerie driving experience on the route that runs for 26 km from the port of Rohuküla on the mainland coast of Estonia across the Baltic Sea to the island of Hiiumaa. "

" Here, on Europe's longest jäätee, there are a few markings to follow. A car spins along in the track made by previous vehicles, passing an occasional traffic sign or guided by large juniper branches, 'planted' upright like trees growing magically from the snow to indicate the edges of the road ."

"During the journey, which can take at least an hour, the traveller watches the cinematic view play through the windscreen, and it might feel as if they are driving off the edge of the world. A good soundtrack is recommended."

" It is both a relief and a disappointment when Hiiumaa's coastline appears, a faint shadow in the far distance. The meditative skyline and the slim silver jäätee are soon replaced by salted tarmac and slushy roundabouts, and all the messy dockside infrastructure of tollgates and Portakabins, streetlamps and telegraph poles.

Ice roads are open only during the hours of daylight, and even then snow flurries may decrease visibility. The road is a shortcut, as the crow flies, but no one should rush it - or slip into a dawdling dream. Drivers must keep to speeds of between 25 km/h and 40 km/h - the lowest limit is important. No stopping is allowed. This is a precaution against changes in the car's rate of progress causing wave under the ice; if such a wave accumulates it can be strong enough to crack it. "( ...)

    from Nancy Campbell, "Fifty Words for Snow"

                                                 

Hiiumaa is a flat island, with nothing remarkable except a few old windmills of a type you seldom see elsewhere.

Kärdla is the main village, with a museum.

The old fire station, now tourist office.

Kärdla street in winter.

'Pikk Maja', the long house - a museum. 

Finally a warm comfy place: the museum's cafeteria. 

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Inspired by:

Under the stars with Matt Gaw in Arinagour, Island of Coll

I discovered the hebridean Island of Coll while reading Matt Gaw's Under the Stars. I´m giving here a small excerpt of his adventures.

Gaw stayed with his family in Arinagour, the wonderfully named main town, and from there he made night excursions watching the skies.

The treck to the beach near Arnabost, on the machair *.

The greatest revelation comes after a family excursion in the night, crossing the island till the west coast seaside near Arnabost. Suddenly...

"It is the first time too that they have seen the Milky Way. They gasp at its spray of light , and wrestle with the idea of how they can see the galaxy they are in. We try describing it together. Milk spray. Frost. Mould. Sea foam. Salt stains."

"Then the shooting stars begin. I hadn't told the children I was hoping to see Orionids as I didn't want them to be disappointed, but now they ahoop and holler at every flaring dusty streak. Red lights. A tinge of gassy green. We fall silent  between each one and I will the kids to stay interested. In my head I tell them, hold your nerve and let the night take you."

(...) "I think of all the nights I've walked in. The snow, the cloud, the clear skies, moonlight and murk, starfall and dayrise. Each night, whether it contained happiness, wonder, fear or frustration, has been unique; each experience has shown me darkness on a different light."

Great book.

Night falls in Arinagour

One day soon I'll post about the Island of Coll.

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(*) The machair is a low sandy plain formed mainly of seashells and supporting grass cover, often part of a dune system.

World's largest waterfall : underwater wild Denmark Strait

At 67º 46' N, the 280 km wide strait between Iceland and Greenland is an infamous ocean stretch of revolted wild waters and thick blizzards, a route every sailor prefers to avoid. Alistair Maclean wrote in one of his tales:

" (...) along the belt of the Arctic Circle itself, lie the most bitter seas in the world: and no part of it more bitter, more hostile to man and the puny ships that carry him across the savagery of its galetorn waters than that narrow stretch of ocean between Iceland and Greenland that men call the Denmark Strait.

From the far-ranging Vikings of a thousand years ago to the time of the modern Icelandic fishermen, ships have sailed through this narrow passage, but they sailed always at their peril, only when necessity dictated, and they never lingered long, never a moment more than they had to. No man, no ship, has ever waited there from choice, but, at rare intervals, some few men and ships have had to do it from necessity."

For once this strait was a historic site: during the 2nd World War, in 1941, there took place the legendary interception of the strongly armored battleship  Bismarck, the nazi super-weapon to blow up the naval supply convoys protected by older and less efficient British battleships. 

On that day, there was ice on the ocean to the North and a deep fog to south, but the sea was quiet enough.

The battle started unlucky for the British side: HMS Hood (above), a battlecruiser of almost 50 000 tons, was shattered and sunk by the first artillery shells, probably due to her flawed positioning facing the German ship. A disaster. Another Navy battleship, the Prince of Wales,  still fired some shells, failing most of them, and narrowly escaped with severe damages.

Bismarck in the blizzard, firing.

Well, it happens that after all some three of those shells did badly strike the Bismark, and the damage done caused fatal loss of speed and steering capability;  under Churchill's order "- sink the Bismarck !", the German warship, chased along a southernly route, was finally terminated by Navy torpedoes off the coast of Brittany. A shameful dishonor for the German pride, and about 4000 lives lost in this battle only.

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So, what about the waterfall? Denmark Strait  is a unique geological site. There are several waterfalls beneath the ocean surface, falling to the sea floor, and much higher than those on land; but this is the largest on the planet, whatever its kind - an unthinkable colossus, over 2 miles downfalling !

This waterfall is 160 km wide and falls almost 3505 m to the bottom of the ocean ! The flow rate is 3 to 5 million cubic meters per second, awesome.

Sailing out southwards through the Irminger Sea at 67º 46' can be as dreadful as the Drake Passage south of Cape Horn.

 

The Danes call it Grønlandspumpen, Greenland's Pump.

Now, the scientific explanation. A huge drop in the ocean floor and the warm surface current flowing northwards over the deep frigid current flowing southwards cause the slide of massive volumes of water downward along the slope, over 4000 times the volume of Victoria Falls.

As it occurs beneath the ocean's surface, the massive turbulence goes undetected for the common sailor.

Fed by warm northwards currents IC and NAC, two reverse cold overflowing currents, DSO e ISO, precipitate down the canyon southwest of Iceland.

NAC - North Atlantic Current
EGC - East Greenland Current
DSO - Denmark Strait Overflow
NIIC - North Icelandic Irminger Current
IC - Iceland Current
ISO - Iceland/Scotland ridge Overflow

Nearest settlements: Isafiordur and Sudavik (Iceland), Ittoqortoormiit (Greenland).

Point Nemo, the absolute nowhere land on Earth

There is abundant information on the web about Point Nemo. Still I found that publishing a short and nicely informative post  might be of interest, and surely it has to do with Ultima Thule. I had promised the year of 2021 would not be finished without a new post, so here it is.

The  designation Point Nemo, a tribute to Captain Nemo, was assigned to the most inaccessible place on the planet, the most distant from any access by land; more precisely, this is the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.

That place's location is on the Pacific Ocean, more than 2 700 km equidistant of three islands:  Ducie Island, an atoll in Pitcairn archipelago, (British territory); the island of Motu Nui (part of the Easter Islands); and Maher Island off the coast of Antarctica. All are minuscule and uninhabited.

Motu Nui

Point Nemo was found in 1992 by the Croatian surveyor Hrvoje Lukatela using geospatial software, with which he modelled the ellipsoid form of Earth; he obtained then a greater precision locating the three equidistant points: "the location of three equilateral points is quite unique, and there are no other points on the Earth’s surface that could conceivably replace any one of those", he wrote.  

But if Point Nemo is over 2 700 km from any other place on Earth, that means the nearest human beings at times are astronauts aboard the I.S.S. ! When the station's orbit passes over those coordinates (48° 52.5′ S, 123° 23.6′ W), they are only 416 km far up, in a vertical direction.

Is there any form of life at Point Nemo?

In 1997, a NASA oceanographic team registered a mysterious sound less than 2000 km east of the site. That caused great commotion and some fear. The sound was named "Bloop"; it was stronger than what blue whales make, it was ultra-low-frequency submarine noise of great amplitude. Soon the fear arose of an unknown marine monster, or even a terrible new soviet super-submarine!

In the end, the team found its real nature: the underwater echo of great icebergs crashing and tearing in the Antarctic Ocean's depths. No horrendous chimera, as the Cthulhu suggested by Lovecraft.

Point Nemo is placed inside the South Pacific Giro (Gyre) , a large system of rotating oceanic currents, which is also the greatest oceanic desert, a region quite hostile to sea life. Ultraviolet radiation is extreme there, and water quite stable, reaching surface temperature around 7°C at Point Nemo. 

The whirling currents block out colder water, richer in nutrients, so the sea bed lacks life, it's the "least biologically active region of all oceans".  Nevertheless, the bacteria around volcanic chimneys allow for a few exceptional organisms, like the blind 'yeti' crab.

The North Pole of Inaccessibility, or Arctic Pole, is located on the Arctic Ocean, 1008 km far from any land (and also equidistant of three islands!), presently at 85° 48′ N, 176° 9′ W, some 100 km away from North Pole. Like the Pacific Pole, it lays in the middle of nowhere.

Going South to Antarctica, its Pole of Inaccessabilty was reached only in 2005 - with great difficulties in spite of modern vehicles -  by a Spanish expedition, 3000 meters high and -40º cold, the innermost place in the continent at 82° 53′ 14″ S, 55° 04′ 30″ E.

The Spanish team had modern technology for the uneven ice.

Before that, in 1958, a Russian Station had wrongly signed the Pole with a Lenine statue. It's still there, looking at nothing, meaning nothing,

Well, these Poles of Inaccessibility have a strong point now: they are places where you surely can use no mask and need not to vaccinate ! 

Have a nice ending of 2021 and a quite better New Year !

Symbister, Whalsay (Shetland), the northernmost hanseatic trading post

This is really an incredible place! Accessible only by ferry, Whalsay Island is one of the most isolated of the Shetlands, far into the North Sea at the latitude of Bergen in Norway.

Why on earth would anyone in the 16th century be interested in a port so far away ? Well, whales first of all. Whalsay = Whales Island *, and the trade with German Hanseatic towns was all about seafare. The Hanseatic post at Symbister, though just a small cabin, was a counter of intense business.

The importance of Whalsay as a seafare island resulted in the establishment of the trading booth at Symbister in 1563: the Pier House (Da Böd) was the counter for the export of dried and salted fish to the Hanse, the alliance of trading guilds that established and maintained a trade monopoly over much of Northern Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries. The trade was done first by way of the League's 'Kontor' in Bergen, then (as illicit trade became the norm) direct with Hamburg and Bremen.

German ships sailed to Symbister and brought their goods - iron tools, seeds, salt, cloth and some luxury items - to barter for dried and salted fish (mainly cod) from the island. This old Hanseatic house was used by the Germans for about five centuries until 1707, when they were forced out by a high import duty raise.

Two centuries later herring was the focus of activity. The peak year for herring catches was 1834, but these had declined dramatically within a few years. Fishing boomed again in the late 1800s and in the mid 1900s, but each time this was followed by decline.

The Pier House in the red circle, at Symbister waterfront.

Today, Whalsay is a thriving community largely because of a relatively new fishing phenomenon: the pelagic trawler. These huge vessels are built for deep sea fishing, and keep their catches fresh over prolonged periods at sea.

The new pelagic fleet mooring at Symbister harbour.

Whalsay Island, Shetlands

The island measures some five and a half miles from south west to north east, and some two miles wide.

The most remarkable historic site here is undoubtfully the Böd, the old Hanse boot now modestly refurbished as a museum. Inside, it tells how ships from Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck sailed to Shetland every summer. The first written trade record dates from 1557.

The brae to the rear is still known as Bremer Strasse.

The museum in the Pier House tells how ships from Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck sailed to Shetland every summer, bringing seeds, cloth, iron tools, salt, spirits, luxury goods and hard currency.

But Symbister and other places like Isbister, Marrister, Brough and Kirk Ness have something else worth to visit. The rest of the island is sparsely populated, there are no precisely defined villages, but nature spots are rewarding.

Symbister, Whalsay

Coordinates: 60° 20′ N, 1° 1′ W
Populstion (island):  over 1000

Symbister is the largest village and port on the island of Whalsay, Shetland. The population in 1991 was 797. The focus of the village is the harbour, which is home to small fishing boats as well as large deep sea trawlers.

The village is overlooked by the granite mansion Symbister House, built in 1823.

Symbister from the sea; the community centre down left, the School and Symbister House top centre.

Symbister House, a Country House from 1823.

This is the finest Georgian mansion in Shetland. Since the 1960s, the House (also called the New Haa) has been used as part of Whalsay High School, providing education to students of age 4–16. On the grounds of the Symbister House an old wooden boat sculpture has been placed.

Down and back from the school, the Heritage Centre is installed in the old Farmers House.

The Community and Heritage centre, for meetings, exhibitions and keeping historic memorabilia.

Kirk Ness, at 60º 22' N, is a small island linked to the north coast of Whalsay by a tombolo, which has been reinforced so a road could run on top of it. Surprisingly enough the only building on the island is a kirk !

This is the only parish church on Whalsay, dedicated to Holy Rood; the original church from 1733 has been remodeled in 1867.

A modest new interior in clear wood.

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* norse Hvalsey or Hvals-øy