If the battery-electric car will soon dominate personal transport, can a journey into the Arctic Circle be the ultimate retort to range anxiety? On the way there, is Norway as much of a breeze for electric driving as its EV-leader status suggests? And, more prosaically, what does the fastest car Kia’s ever made feel like to drive? Can it be an effortless grand tourer – even at the top of the civilised world? This adventure can’t provide answers to the biggest questions but it does allow us to explore some smaller ones. Perhaps the shift to electric cars will help us hurt it less perhaps it won’t perhaps it’s too late perhaps there’s still hope. In the event of war, floods, fires or lack of resources to keep seeds alive, its depositors can withdraw crop seeds to begin again. The other side of Longyearbyen, built into a sandstone mountain overlooking the town, above the worst-case scenario for sea rise, is the Global Seed Vault: a Norway-funded global food security back-up, containing 1.2 million crop samples – the largest collection of crop diversity on earth – securely deposited from gene banks all over the world. Increased rainfall caused a fatal avalanche overnight at Longyearbyen in 2015, destroying homes close to a hillside. The winter season ends two months earlier than it did in the ’70s and it’s becoming wetter as well as warmer. Temperatures have risen by 4✬ in the last 50 years. Scientific studies indicate Svalbard is the fastest-heating place on the planet. ‘It happens every time I’m here,’ says the boat’s captain. This glacier-crumbling process – calving, it’s called – is natural but it’s occurring more frequently than it used to.
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