The Arctic Town That Stopped Burying Its Dead

Longyearbyen's cemetery is a thin row of white crosses on a slope below the old Mine No. 1, with 44 names on it and no new ones since 1950. The closure wasn't ceremonial. After Norwegian researchers checked the older graves and found that bodies dating to the 1918 Spanish flu were still recognizably bodies, the town stopped accepting them.

This is the part that gets misreported. Death itself is not illegal in Longyearbyen, despite a 2008 BBC headline that has since circled the internet. What's true is narrower and stranger: there is no functioning burial option in town, and people known to be terminally ill are typically flown to mainland Norway. Cremated remains can be interred with government permission. A coffin in the ground cannot.

The reason is the soil. Longyearbyen sits at 78 degrees north on permafrost that, in places, is harder than concrete. The ground does freeze and thaw, but only the top meter or so: the so-called active layer. Anything buried inside that layer gets pushed back toward the surface every spring as ice lenses form and shift. Anything buried below it never warms up enough to rot.

In 1998, a team led by Canadian researcher Kirsty Duncan went to the cemetery to exhume seven coal miners who had died of influenza in October 1918, hoping their lungs might still hold viable virus. Ground-penetrating radar found the coffins exactly where the markers said they would be. The disappointment came at a depth of about 30 centimetres: the coffins were sitting in the active layer, not the deep permafrost the team had assumed. They had been thawing every summer for eighty years. No usable virus came out of the dig.

The town keeps the cemetery as it is, fenced and signposted, with no new arrivals. The old crosses lean a little more each year as the ground beneath them moves.