Jan Mayen

Jan Mayen








All images here are from the excellent website created by the people living on Jan Mayen. Click through the list of links on the extreme right and learn a lot about this exotic Norwegian island between Iceland and Svalbard, Greenland and Norwegian mainland. The Mapping Authority collect GPS and sea level data from this island in the middle of the North Atlantic. The placement is perfect for climate change studies. On the island there has been a meteorological station for ages and it is also a Loran C site. Learn more about that by browsing through this website.

It is most certainly a very special place to work, isolated from the rest of the world most of the time. Landing there with a plane is not obvious even though there is a landing field. The fog and clouds cover the island very often. According to the CIA (!!!), Beerenberg, the tall white mountain you see on the images, is the northernmost active volcano on this planet.

As on Svalbard, carrying a rifle is a necessity as you risk meeting polar bears. In fact some of my colleagues had to wait for the polar bear doing an inspection of the plane before they could take off...:-)

Wild life!



This is a map of the Loran C stations in the North Atlantic. Jan Mayen is the northwest point there.





This post is dedicated to Paul :-)



Photo: Vidar Teigen

Edit: This is how Jan Mayen looks like in the summer at 4 o'clock in the morning. Paul wanted this. If you want to go there, you might have to wait 4 month for a reply. The only way to reach the island as a tourist is by ship. They explicitly say on the website that they are NOT equipped to entertain tourists.