Alex Hartley (born 1963) is a British artist whose work addresses complicated and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward built environments and landscapes.
Hartley's artwork was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's Sensation.
With Black Dog Publishing, he produced the architecture/climbing crossover book L.A Climbs in 2004, and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh published a monograph, Not Part of Your World to coincide with his solo festival exhibition in 2008.
In 2004, whilst participating in a Cape Farewell Arctic expedition, Hartley discovered Nyskjæret, an island about the size of a football field, in the archipelago of Svalbard, a Norwegian territory in the Arctic Ocean. The island had been revealed from within the melting ice of a retreating glacier and Hartley was the first human to stand on it. He originally called it Nymark (meaning 'new land') and the Norwegian Polar Institute has since recognised the island as Nyskjæret and included it on all maps and charts subsequent to its discovery.
In September 2011 he returned to the island with permission from the Governor of Svalbard to declare territory from the island a new nation called Nowhereisland. As part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the new nation of Nowhereisland, a floating island, made the journey from the Arctic to Weymouth on the Jurassic Coast and on to Bristol. The island arrived in Weymouth on 25 July 2012 to coincide with the sailing events of the London 2012 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Paralympics.
Svalbard, previously known as Spitsbergen or Spitzbergen, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. North of mainland Europe, it lies about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed in size by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya. The largest settlement is Longyearbyen on the west coast of Spitsbergen.
Spitsbergen is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway in the Arctic Ocean.
Bear Island is the southernmost island of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago. The island is located at the limits of the Norwegian and Barents seas, approximately halfway between Spitsbergen and the North Cape. Bear Island was discovered by Dutch explorers Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerck on 10 June 1596. It was named after a polar bear that was seen swimming nearby. The island was considered terra nullius until the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 placed it under Norwegian sovereignty.
Svalbard and Jan Mayen is a statistical designation defined by ISO 3166-1 for a collective grouping of two remote jurisdictions of Norway: Svalbard and Jan Mayen. While the two are combined for the purposes of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) category, they are not administratively related. This has further resulted in the country code top-level domain .sj being issued for Svalbard and Jan Mayen, and ISO 3166-2:SJ. The United Nations Statistics Division also uses this code, but has named it the Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands.
Longyearbyen is the world's northernmost settlement with a population greater than 1,000, and the largest inhabited area of Svalbard, Norway. It stretches along the foot of the left bank of the Longyear Valley and on the shore of Adventfjorden, the short estuary leading into Isfjorden on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the island's broadest inlet. As of 2002 Longyearbyen Community Council became an official Norwegian municipality. It is the seat of the Governor of Svalbard. The town's mayor is Arild Olsen.
Operation Gauntlet was an Allied Combined Operation from 25 August until 3 September 1941, during the Second World War. Canadian, British and the Norwegian armed forces in exile landed on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago, 650 mi (1,050 km) south of the North Pole.
The Svalbard Treaty recognises the sovereignty of Norway over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, at the time called Spitsbergen. The exercise of sovereignty is, however, subject to certain stipulations, and not all Norwegian law applies. The treaty restricts military uses of the archipelago, but it is not demilitarized. The signatories were given equal rights to engage in commercial activities on the islands. As of 2024, Norway and Russia make use of this right.
Pyramiden is an abandoned Soviet coal mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard which has become a tourist destination. Founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was closed in 1998 and has since remained largely abandoned with most of its infrastructure and buildings still in place, the cold climate preserving much of the infrastructure left behind.
The Norwegian Polar Institute is Norway's central governmental institution for scientific research, mapping and environmental monitoring in the Arctic and the Antarctic. The NPI is a directorate under Norway's Ministry of Climate and Environment. The institute advises Norwegian authorities on matters concerning polar environmental management and is the official environmental management body for Norwegian activities in Antarctica.
Operation Zitronella, also known as Unternehmen Sizilien, was an eight-hour German raid on Spitzbergen, in the Svalbard Archipelago, on 8 September 1943. The battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, plus nine destroyers, sailed to the archipelago, bombarded Allied-occupied settlements in Isfjorden and covered a landing party. Six Norwegians were killed and 31 were taken prisoner; sixteen Germans were wounded, one dying of his wounds.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from around the world, conserved in gene banks. This provides security of the world's food supply against the loss of seeds in genebanks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, war, sabotage, disease, and natural disasters. The Seed Vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement among the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen).
Nymark was the name that artist Alex Hartley gave to a small island he discovered in the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, a Norwegian territory, in 2004. It is officially named Nyskjeret by the Name Committee for Norwegian Polar Regions. It is a small island in the Barents Sea, 500 miles off the coast of Norway. It emerged from the now melted portion of a retreating glacier and is around the size of a football field.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The climate of Svalbard is principally a result of its latitude, which is between 74° and 81° north. Climate is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as the average weather over a 30-year period. The North Atlantic Current moderates Svalbard's temperatures, particularly during winter, giving it up to 20 °C (36 °F) higher winter temperature than similar latitudes in continental Russia and Canada. This keeps the surrounding waters open and navigable most of the year. The interior fjord areas and valleys, sheltered by the mountains, have fewer temperature differences than the coast, with about 2 °C lower summer temperatures and 3 °C higher winter temperatures. On the south of the largest island, Spitsbergen, the temperature is slightly higher than further north and west. During winter, the temperature difference between south and north is typically 5 °C, and about 3 °C in summer. Bear Island (Bjørnøya) has average temperatures even higher than the rest of the archipelago.
Operation Fritham was an Allied military operation during the Second World War to secure the coal mines on Spitsbergen, the main island of the Svalbard Archipelago, 650 mi (1,050 km) from the North Pole and about the same distance from Norway. The operation was intended to deny the islands to Nazi Germany.
The economy of Svalbard is dominated by coal mining, tourism and research. In 2007, there were 484 people working in the mining sector, 211 people working in the tourism sector and 111 people working in the education sector. The same year, mining gave a revenue of 2.008 billion kr, tourism NOK 317 million and research 142 million. In 2006, the average income for economically active people was NOK 494,700, or 23% higher than on the mainland. Almost all housing is owned by the various employers and institutions and rented to their employees; there are only a few privately owned houses, most of which are recreational cabins. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to live on Svalbard without working for an established institution. The Spitsbergen Treaty and Svalbard Act established Svalbard as an economic free zone and demilitarized zone in 1925.
Novelists, screenwriters and filmmakers have set their works in Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic, the northernmost part of Norway yet closer to Greenland. Such works often make use of its Arctic climate, polar bears, isolation and the natural beauty of its dominant glaciers, mountains and fjords.
Camp Morton was a coal mining encampment on Spitsbergen island in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway. It was located on the northern shores of Van Mijenfjorden, near the sea entrance. It was part of an effort by British investors and entrepreneurs to extract resources from Spitsbergen, at that time open to various nations' claims for development.
Nowhereisland was an artwork by artist Alex Hartley, produced by the Bristol-based arts organisation, Situations. Nowhereisland was an ‘Artists Taking the Lead’ project, funded by Arts Council England as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
The Ny-Ålesund Town and Mine Museum is a museum located in Ny-Ålesund, a town on Spitsbergen, the central island of the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. While some sources claim that the more well known Svalbard Museum holds the position, the museum is the world's northernmost such by virtue of Ny-Ålesund's position to the far north of the regional capital Longyearbyen.
The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a facility for data preservation, located in the Svalbard archipelago on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It contains data of historical and cultural interest from several countries, as well as all of American multinational company GitHub's open source code, in a deeply buried steel vault, with the data storage medium expected to last for 500 to 1,000 years. It is run as a profit-making business by private company Piql and the state-owned coal-mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK).