Top of the world, centre of a crisis

The Arctic Circle had seemed extremely remote and no more than a curiosity until I came across British filmmaker Temujin Doran's documentary, North, about a decade ago.

- ROHINI NILEKANI

The Arctic Circle had seemed extremely remote and no more than a curiosity until I came across British filmmaker Temujin Doran's documentary, North, about a decade ago. It’s shot in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, about 1,300km from the North Pole and among the northernmost places where people live, which makes it quite a novelty. It’s also one of the places where climate change was first recorded; as early as 1918, a scientist took temperatures as well as recorded tales of warmer winters and disappearing glaciers from hunters, fishers and whalers, research whose importance was superseded by the demands of the Cold War and the race t