The Town Where No One Is Born and No One Is Buried

You've seen the headline: the Arctic town where dying is illegal. It's not true. No law in Norway bans death — the town's church and its governor have both said so. But the truth is stranger than the myth: in Longyearbyen, at 78 degrees north, no one is born and no one is buried. The cemetery stopped taking new coffins in the 1950s because the frozen ground preserves bodies instead of letting them go, and the hospital has no maternity ward, so mothers fly about a thousand kilometres to Tromsø weeks before their due date. This is the story of a town that life and death both pass through, but neither stays — and of the ground underneath it all, which is now warming. Chapters: 0:00 The myth, corrected 0:47 At the top of the world 2:37 Permafrost: the ground that makes the rules 4:40 No births, no burials 6:11 Life inside the rules 7:30 The Seed Vault 9:13 Pyramiden, the town the ground already took 10:51 A warming ground 11:58 The headline was wrong Sources: Governor of Svalbard (Sysselmesteren) regulations; Svalbard Church statements BBC 2008 "Why Dying is Forbidden in the Arctic" (myth origin) Kirsty Duncan 1998 exhumation (1918 flu reconstruction) Visit Svalbard / NordGen Seed Portal (vault statistics) Guinness World Records (Pyramiden most northerly ghost town) Norwegian Polar Institute Cruise Handbook (Pyramiden) Music: "Cold Arctic Ambient" by Lux-aeterna — Pixabay royalty-free music (pixabay.com/music/arctic-ambient-441447/) #DarkGeography #Geography #Svalbard #Longyearbyen #Arctic