1. by Gwendolyn Lawrence

2. In June 2014, I traveled with my family to Svalbard, Norway, for a Lindblad Expedition onboard the National Geographic Explorer. My journey to the Arctic Circle changed my view of the world around me, particularly of plants and animals. Before the trip, I thought of wildlife as big and majestic, or cute and cuddly. On my expedition, I learned that not everything on this earth is how we expect it. I learned to look more closely at the environment and to pay attention to more details around me. When you start to look closely at the world, there are a lot of exciting surprises!

3. Beluga Whale Beluga whales are a very interesting kind of whale because they have no dorsal fin (the fin on top of a whale that helps them swim straight). When they chase fish, they are shallow-water whales. They are able to swim right under the ice without bumping a dorsal fin on the ice above. Humpback Whale Humpback whales are in a group of whales that have no teeth; instead, they have baleen. Baleen is a brush-like or bristle- like substance that helps them eat krill. They use their baleen to sift the water out, while keeping the krill in.

9. Because of the midnight sun in June, the birds are busy nesting twenty-four hours a day. The fox is attracted to the nesting cliffs because it means that there is lots of prey for the fox. We saw an Arctic fox by a rock face that was covered with birds. The Arctic fox often eats birds and birds’ eggs.

13. The walrus is a pinniped with impressive whiskers, too. In fact, walruses have hundreds of whiskers. Peering closely through binoculars, you can see the walruses move their whiskers individually or all together. They use their whiskers to find food. They eat mostly clams and cockles, but some will eat seals. They dive up to two-hundred-fifty feet. Male walruses weigh more than three thousand pounds, which is as much as a car, and are about eleven feet long. The tusks of male walruses measure about three feet long; the tusks of female walruses are approximately two feet long and are more slender than those of males. Walruses love ice; they use their tusks to pull themselves up onto ice. Walruses have one pup every two years. The Atlantic Walrus

14. People hunted walruses heavily in the 1900s. At Kapp Lee on Edgeøya island, where we saw four male walruses resting on the beach after a long swim in the open waters, we also saw a vast walrus graveyard on the permafrost. In the twentieth century, walruses were hunted close to extinction. But today, thanks to new laws against walrus hunting, the walruses have made a dramatic comeback.

15. Plants can grow in surprising places in the Arctic—they can even grown in the Arctic desert. A desert is not necessarily a hot and sandy place; it is a place without a lot of water. The desert we visited on Svalbard had huge mounds of rocks, some sparse plant life, ice, and snow. We belly slid penguin-style down a mound of rocks that had layers of snow on it. We even had a snow fight and found a reindeer skull buried under ice. Some plants have taken refuge on carcasses and bones of slaughtered walruses. Bending down low over the bones, we spied purple saxifrage (pictured here), nodding saxifrage, Svalbard poppy, net-leaved willow, Arctic buttercup, mosses, and lichen all growing in little mounds among the bones. The mounds help flowers grow by giving all flowers a chance to catch sunlight.

16. I could not take the ammonite fossil back home with me, because it is important on an excursion to leave everything the way it is. However, I brought home my memory of the fossil as the most special of my many Arctic discoveries. It was exciting to uncover the reindeer skull, but my most thrilling discovery of all was an ammonite fossil. I was hiking across the Arctic desert, when something blue caught my eye. I thought this was strange because most of the rocks were yellowish or orange, but there was something blue on one of the rocks. I picked up the object and peered closely: it was a fossil! I brought it to the geologist, who identified it as the fossil of an animal called an ammonite. This fossil is probably around three hundred million years old. That means it is older than the dinosaurs!

18. DISCOVER!