Ocean Life
Filming in the Arctic Night
The remote archipelago of Svalbard, home to the world’s northernmost year-round research station, lies deep inside the Arctic Circle. Although it’s technically a territory of Norway, it sits halfway between that nation’s borders and the North Pole. It’s an unlikely destination for filmmakers based in Miami, Florida—but in winter 2023, producer Alexa Elliott and her colleagues at South Florida PBS found themselves in the thick of the Arctic winter.
The group traveled to Svalbard to film an episode of Changing Seas—a documentary series about marine science and ocean exploration. This time, they followed WHOI biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser and her graduate student, Kharis Schrage, as the pair studied the behavior of plankton in the far north.
During the Arctic summer, when the region experiences 24-hour daylight, these tiny plantlike creatures at the bottom of the food web thrive on photosynthesis, and as they reproduce, they create a bountiful food source for the rest of the ecosystem. Exactly how those organisms fare during the dark winter, when the Arctic descends into constant night, is a bit more of a mystery, however. “What happens to those organisms when sunlight is absent?” Meyer-Kaiser wondered. Do they simply die off? What happens to the rest of the food web?
“For decades it was just kind of assumed that everything stops in winter, and there’s no food,” Meyer-Kaiser said. “It’s not well-studied as a result.”
Meyer-Kaiser is chipping away at some of those questions. With the PBS team in tow, she and Schrage cruised the dark waters of Kongsfjorden—the body of water that abuts the research station—deploying an underwater camera, taking sediment samples, and pulling plankton nets behind their small research ship.
Fear for the Gear
In more temperate regions, filming this kind of work is old hat, said producer Elliott, but in the extreme conditions of the Arctic Circle, there are more than a few logistical challenges. Getting all of the camera, lighting, and audio gear needed to film a professional TV documentary to Svalbard in the first place, for example, was a major hurdle. Under normal circumstances, the amount needed even for a relatively small production can fill an SUV, but the only available transportation to the research facility—a small propeller plane run by the Kings Bay company, a former mining group that morphed into Svalbard’s de facto flight service—has a strict 20-kilo (45-pound) weight limit per ticket.
“Luckily, we were going in the low season for air travel, we worked with Kings Bay to buy extra seats so we could bring more gear—but we really had to pare things down to the bare essentials,” she notes.
Even if the team was able to get their gear into the remote settlement, she said, there was no existing guarantee that it would work properly in the bitter cold. In order to manage that risk, the PBS crew had to start planning which equipment to bring months in advance.
“Our director of photography, Sean Hickey, even reached out to Sony, who makes the cameras we use. After meeting with their engineers and talking to another camera operator who regularly works in arctic conditions, we were able to figure out how to keep the cameras in working shape,” Elliott said.
The team eventually determined that keeping camera batteries heated—and putting each camera in its own custom-sized down “jacket” would keep it warm enough to use in the punishing conditions of a Svalbard winter. Videographers also kept one dedicated camera inside a lab at the nearby Ny-Ålesund research center to ensure that that it remained at room temperature and wouldn’t fog up or be damaged by condensation when returning indoors to film interviews.
Smooth Sailing At Last
After landing at the research center’s small airstrip, however, it became clear that fate was on PBS team’s side: their small mountain of film gear had arrived without a hitch, and the weather conditions improved throughout their trip—rising from a low of -17°C (1°F) to a relatively balmy 0°C (32°F).
Elliott was also pleasantly surprised by the research center’s facilities: despite its remote location, the year-round campus contained all the amenities needed to keep international scientists (and filmmakers) comfortable for weeks on end.
“It’s pretty impressive. In addition to having fully-equipped labs, the food is incredible, there’s an on-site gym, a hot tub, and a sauna. For being so far north, the infrastructure is amazing,” notes Kharis Schrage.
As the 10-day expedition progressed, adds Meyer-Kaiser, the researchers and film crew became an integrated team, with Elliott and her camera operators rolling constantly to record the scientists’ fieldwork without getting in the scientists’ way.
“At first, we were a little concerned they would slow us down or ask us to act things out like a reality show. But towards the end we hardly even realized they were there,” Meyer-Kaiser said. “I would love for all my colleagues to know what a positive experience it was. We need more people telling these sorts of scientific and environmental stories—so I hope from our experience that other researchers are motivated to accommodate a film team like this one.”
The finished episode, Life in The Dark: The Polar Night, premiered on air and online June 28, 2023, and is currently available for streaming on YouTube.
