The scientist beside me – a French Canadian wearing Blundstones – is visiting Svalbard to study permafrost. We’re at 78 degrees north, surrounded by a monumental landscape of iced peaks and dark valleys hewn by Arctic glaciers, so she’s come to the right place.

It’s early summer and the snow is in retreat, leaving giant zebra stripes of ice on coal-black mountains circling Svalbard’s main settlement of Longyearbyen, a former mining town. The temperature is 4 degrees, and the sun seems to shine from everywhere and nowhere. The midnight sun will disappear, now and then, behind this towering mountain chain. But it will never actually sink beneath the horizon.