Welcome to life at 78 degrees north, where harsh weather, a remote location and stunningly beautiful landscapes have created one of the most fascinating towns on earth.

Longyearbyen is the capital of the Svalbard archipelago, high up in the Arctic Circle, and its residents live in the world’s most northerly town.

It spends four months of the year in the darkness of the polar winter, where temperatures can fall to minus 30 degrees, and another four months under the glare of the midnight sun.

It’s a fascinating, unique and welcoming place, made habitable — just — by warming gulf stream currents that raise temperatures enough to let people survive here 1000km from the North Pole.

The 2600 residents across the archipelago are outnumbered by the 3000 polar bears that also call it home.

Venturing outside the 5km town boundary without a gun, and a person who knows how to use it, is against the law due to the polar bear threat.

You can’t be born there — it’s just too far away from specialist medical care if something goes wrong.

You can’t die there — the elderly must go to mainland Norway due to a lack of aged care facilities.

And if you do die, you can’t be buried there — it’s too cold for bodies to decompose, so unless you want to be cremated, your final resting place will not be on Svalbard.

LIFE ON THE EDGE

An open-door migration treaty means Longyearbyen’s 2168 residents hail from 51 countries. People can stay as long as they have a job. No unemployment benefits are available on the island. And most of the houses are owned by the employers, so you really need a job to get a house.

Lisa Dymbe Djonne, 31, is a maths, food and health teacher at Longyearbyen’s only school, which has 260 students from grades one to 13.

She arrived in 2016, looking for a change in her career and her life.

“I wanted to go on an adventure,’’ she said.

“To do something totally different. They were looking for teachers and I applied. It’s a very popular place to work, there were a lot of applications.

“I didn’t think I was going to get the job but I did and I wasn’t sorry.’’

Originally from a small mountain town in Norway between Oslo and Bergen, she was no stranger to snow and ice.

But Svalbard’s wild beauty was a revelation even to her. At weekends, she and a group of girlfriends load up their snowmobiles and head for remote cabins, where they soak up the pristine environment and watch the eerie green of the Northern Lights snaking across the sky. In summer, when the icy fjords melt, they do the same thing, but in boats.

“I still remember the first time I saw the sun, it was amazing,’’ she said, recalling her first polar winter and its 24 hours of darkness. “Even in the darkness it was beautiful.’’

News Corp visited Svalbard in late February as the sun began to edge over the horizon again, not quite reaching the town, and casting a blue light across the snow-covered peaks.

“I just saw the sun on Saturday, it’s indescribably beautiful. It does something to you. I started to cry,’’ Lisa said.

She finds the midnight sun of summer more difficult.

“You come to May, June and the sun is always up and it’s very hard to sleep, very hard to get a rhythm of the day. It’s very beautiful but it’s weird.’’

FRONTIER FEVER

She knows she is committed to Svalbard because she just bought a new snowmobile. She lives in Longyearbyen’s red zone — the area that’s so prone to avalanches, residents who live there are evacuated by the governor several times a year. Others were moved out permanently after a fatal avalanche in December 2016.

“Some of us get evacuated when the government tells us to go,’’ Lisa said.

“This fall we were evacuated a couple of time.’’

As part of her teaching requirements, Lisa had to obtain a gun permit in order to escort her students outside the town boundaries.

“I’d never owned a gun in my life,’’ she said.

She applied for a permit, which is a simple process for those with a clean background and no criminal past, and bought an old World War II Mauser military rifle, once owned by the Germans, which still has a Swastika carved on it.

“It’s very reliable when it gets cold,’’ she said.

“I practise two times a year.

“All teachers have to have them when we take the kids out on trips.’’

And like all Svalbard residents, Lisa has had encounters with polar bears, the protected, and revered kings of the Arctic. She’s seen them twice.

“They’ve told stories of polar bears walking in the streets. There was a polar bear in the city last year.’’

Lisa agreed people left their doors open to provide a haven in the event of polar bear attacks, although this was highly unlikely in town.

“I also think people leave their doors open because it’s a community based on trust,’’ she said.

WILD THINGS

While she’d never handled a gun before moving to Svalbard, Lisa is now so proficient she’s got a hunting licence, and like every other resident, is allowed to shoot one reindeer a year.

The school gets a permit for two, and on the first day of the school year every autumn, the teachers take the kids out hunting. Once the reindeer is down, the students remove its skin, butcher it, and prepare it for the cooking pot.

“The teacher shoots the reindeer and the kids do the rest, of course with a guide,’’ Lisa said.

“We find somewhere, no dry tundra, some rocks, make a fire, pots and pans, cook it with salt and pepper.’’

The older students aged 13-18 years take part in this yearly ritual.

“The rest of the meat comes back to school and it has to hang for 10 days or so. Then we take it inside and make a stew with it.’’

It’s a surreal experience, but one of many Lisa has come to embrace.

“There are so many things I never thought I would experience.

“Being afraid of polar bears. Driving on sea ice. Sleeping in a tent. So many Northern Lights.

“There are over 40 different countries here and everybody talks about the town as very warm and welcoming.

“It’s easy to get friends, it is a warm and inclusive society.

“But if you start to feel alone I think you would feel very alone. Because it’s so far away if you’re not born or raised here.’’

ULTIMATE ESCAPE

Jason Roberts, 49, was a stockbroker in Melbourne before he made the move literally all the way across the world to Svalbard in the early 1990s.

Now, instead of sweating on the movements of the ASX, he’s sweating on the movements of polar bears across the ice.

As a wildlife cameraman who has worked extensively with legendary broadcaster Sir David

Attenborough, Roberts has become a self-taught expert on polar bears and their movements, and can spend up to six weeks living on the ice to capture three minutes of usable, edited footage.

“I left economics because of a lust for adventure, more than anything,’’ he said, from his studio and office on the waterfront in Longyearbyen.

Born and raised in the western Victorian district in the hamlet of Hexham, near Mortlake, Roberts never really made the decision to swap stockbroking for polar bears — it just unfolded after he assisted on a shoot as a cameraman, and fell in love with the polar environment.

“I never planned to move to Norway. It just happened. I moved here under the treaty,’’ he said.

The Svalbard Treaty is an agreement between a range of countries including Australia to allow its citizens to live and work freely on the archipelago.

There are believed to be seven Australians there, including Roberts, who also used his polar experience to open a film production services business, helping documentary-makers, film studios and TV producers film in the extreme conditions.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

The British TV drama Fortitude is currently filming on the main island of Spitsbergen, and Roberts has also worked on the James Bond movie Die Another Day, and movies The Golden Compass, Far North and Deep Blue, which were all filmed there.

He’s spent many months working for David Attenborough on programs such as Blue Planet, where his vision of polar bears is broadcast around the world.

“I never said ‘I’m going to go out and become a polar bear expert,’’ he said.

“It was not a desire to explore the polar region as such.’’

It started when a science show asked him to help out with an underwater camera, and he never looked back.

In hindsight, he thinks his interest was always there — the monthly arrival of National Geographic magazine at the family home when he was a boy was always a highlight.

“It’s very specialised, wildlife filmmaking,’’ he said.

“I work in planning and shooting.’’

He specialises in location, species and technique, and like many in the industry, has no formal qualifications in biology or filmmaking.

“A lot of people are self-taught. It’s a passion industry,’’ he said.

“The first time I went out I had no f*cking idea about polar bears.’’

His years since have taught him where to find them, and how they behave. And yes, there’s been some close shaves.

“Thirty years dancing with polar bears, you get the occasional hiccup,’’ is all he will say.

“Polar bears are one of the only land mammals that will actively hunt a human.

“Most of the time we are not a target species and they’re making a mistake.”

ICE BLUES

Roberts also helps equip and manage luxury yachts traversing polar waters, and works extensively in Antarctica, visiting there more than 50 times, a huge journey from one end of the earth to the other.

“I travel up and down like taking the tube to work,’’ he said.

“Tromso, Oslo (both cities in Norway), Europe, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Bluff on the New Zealand south island.

“It’s about as far away as you can get from Longyearbyen.’’

Roberts said Attenborough was a “pure gentleman’’ and that he had worked with him for almost 30 years.

He said his series such as Frozen Planet and Blue Planet had done more to teach the world about wildlife and the environment that almost anything.

“No child hates wilderness or nature but as we grow into adults, some people lose that,’’ he said.

“Blue Planet reaches across cultures and languages.

“Wildlife documentaries, if done properly, have an enormous reach. You can dub it into any language. Any culture in the world will be interested in it.

“Hundreds of millions of people worldwide see it — Japan, Australia, France, Finland, Norway.

“In India I was it advertised on a billboard.

“In New York I went to the premiere of Blue Planet … we’d been on location for months, and here we were in Times Square, people were rushing everywhere, my brain went back to the northern corner of the island. Sometimes it’s a bit emotional.’’

HEART AND HEARTH

Roberts said the people of Longyearbyen made it one of the most special communities in the world.

“The town is not 2000 people but it feels like a town of 25,000, 30,000 people.

“There’s 11 restaurants, four pubs, five or six hotels and it’s hard to get into any of them. Tourism is busy all year, there’s always something on.

“We have heads of state, well-known people coming through. Martha Stewart was just here.

“To me central Victoria is more remote than here.’’

Officially a state of Norway, Svalbard is run by a governor, or sysselmannen, who is appointed, not elected, and is the chief bureaucrat, chief of police, and the final arbiter of life on the island.

It’s location halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole ensured it was an isolated

community until 1975, when the airport opened.

While it’s still weather-dependent, flights arrive most days from Norway, and in summer, a Russian company runs trips to the North Pole.

It’s the base for the global seed vault — the doomsday cave storing millions of samples of the world’s seeds as a back-up against a catastrophe — and has a small library, cultural centre, specialised university campus, one grocery store, one church, and a hospital.

While it was originally settled by people hunting whales and seals more than 100 years ago, coal mining was its first big industry, and the Russian invaded in World War II.

Now, coal mining has given way almost entirely to tourism, encouraging visitors to try dog-sledding, snowmobile riding, and safaris to catch a glimpse of a polar bear, Arctic fox or reindeer. Giant cruise ships now call in summer, tripling the population.

A community of about 450 Russians remains at the old mining town of at Barentsburg, accessible only by snowmobile or boat, depending on the season.

In a quirk from its old mining days, residents can buy unlimited wine at the grocery shop, but only limited rations of spirits and beer. This is because the old mine managers used to drink wine, while the miners drank beer and hard liquor, leading mine bosses to develop a quota system which remains in force today.

MEDIC ALERT

John Aksel Bilicz arrived at the Svalbard Hospital as nurse manager in 2004, and has been the

manager for the past five years.

He said the northernmost hospital in the world saw some unique medical issues including frostbite and polar bear victims.

“Most of it is ordinary, everyday things, infections, broken legs and arms,’’ Dr Bilicz said.

“Car accidents? Not even one in a year. But snow mobiles, it was double last year.

“It had been 40 (accidents requiring hospital treatment) every year and then suddenly it was 80.

“A combination of more tourists and the weather — if the snow if soft, you’re fine. If not, you fall and break your leg.’’

Di Bilicz said there were no injuries from polar bear-human interactions from 2004 until 2009, when a local man was attacked.

“A young guy was taken by a polar bear, it pulled him out of his tent. His friend was able to shoot the bear so he survived but it took two hours by helicopter to get there,’’ he said.

“There was the British schoolboy in 2011, a young boy died and four other were very severely injured.’’

Horatio Chapple, 17, of Salisbury in the UK, died and two fellow students and two trip leaders were injured, when the bear attacked them on a school camp.

In May last year, a Russian guide died after he and five others fell through the ice into a fjord during a snowmobile expedition.

Dr Bilicz said minor frostbite was another common problem, with tourists taking their gloves off to take photographs.

“We have four doctors, six nurses, three nurse anaesthetists and three theatre nurses. I am an extra nurse,’’ he said.

“We do very little surgery now.

“And we don’t want births here.

“The last baby born here was in 2011.’’

Dr Bilicz said it would take a minimum of six hours to get a mother and baby to Tromso, on mainland Norway, if something went wrong during a birth, so pregnant women were moved to the mainland for the last stage of their pregnancy.

Elderly people needing care were also moved to the mainland.

“We don’t have aged care. This hospital can’t keep people for very long,’’ he said.

FRAGILE LIVES

The hospital has a GP clinic, and mans the rescue helicopter.

The local ambulance is staffed by people with first-aid training.

Medicines arrive by plane twice a week from Norway, and doctors videoconference with colleagues in Norway on major illnesses and injuries.

The hospital also handles any of the very rare deaths that do occur, and transfers the bodies to the single-room mortuary attached to the church.

“We don’t allow burials but we do allow cremations,’’ he said, adding that the cremations took place on the mainland, but the ashes could, in recent years, be returned to Svalbard.

Dr Bilicz said an ordinary day at the hospital would be like any other GP clinic, but could quickly change if there was a snowmobile or other accident.

As well, the transition from polar night to spring seemed “unsettle’’ people.

“I don’t know why,’’ he said.

“Winter is depressing everywhere, not only in the northern countries.’’

The hospital does face another issue most hospitals never have to deal with — avalanches, just a few hundred metres from their door.

“There was an avalanche in 2016. We had one person dead, taken by the avalanche, and another, a little girl, died later.’’

ANGRY ICE

Eva Gromdahl was one of those who survived the avalanche.

The landscape photographer, who works from the Svalbard arts and craft gallery on a hill behind Longyearbyen, was swept away down the hill when the avalanche struck on December 19, 2016.

She was at home, in the house owned by her sister in Longyearbyen, preparing to travel to the mainland for Christmas. It was 10am, in the middle of the polar winter, and pitch dark.

“It was a bad storm, but I like wind and storms,’’ she recalled.

“But maybe two months ago there had been another bad storm.

“The snow was much more wet, it was sticking to the window and it was yellowish.

“I wanted to photograph the car outside and the snow. I just wanted to document it, I thought it was very beautiful, the cars and houses and snow scooters all covered. It was not possible to walk in the street.

“The lights were out but I was used to that.’’

Eva started walking downstairs from the first floor when the house started to shake.

“I understood, in that split second, this was an avalanche, and I just hoped I would not be crushed.

“I didn’t understand the shaking. I looked out in the centre of town, then the house tilted.

“I was trying to figure out was the house tumbling or tilting.

“I remember the slide. I was sailing in the house. I counted the seconds, one thousand, two

thousand, three thousand, I thought we had moved 30 metres.

“I must have lost consciousness or had a blackout, but then I realised I had survived. I had a few bruises. The cupboard and furniture was tipped over and the windows and walls on the mountain side crushed in, the fridge leaning precariously.

“I could walk outside in the dark. I could breath. I was so glad to know I was out.’’

In shock, Eva climbed outside and could see that the avalanche had swept away the houses of her neighbours. Hers had slid 30m down the hill.

“I knew that I was very lucky and there must be some who weren’t so lucky.

“I could hear a boy yelling from up high, screaming at the top of his lungs, and I thought ‘that’s a good thing, he was alive’.

“Two died. A tiny little girl two years old and a neighbour who was a father of four children.’’

Still shocked, Eva tried to get back into her house to find her camera. She couldn’t find it — it was later discovered beneath a fallen cupboard.

She went out to help, and found the little boy, who was still screaming.

“I held him but he didn’t calm down.’’

STAYING PUT

Counselling has help Eva, 63, recover from the avalanche and the loss of her car, house and possessions. She moved to a new place, a few streets from the avalanche zone.

It was another phase in a fascinating life that began at Svalbard in 1954, when she was one of only a few people born there, after her mother Herta hid her pregnancy until it was too late to leave.

“There were a few more (births) back then, maybe four a year,’’ she said.

“In the winter you were stuck and you couldn’t leave.

“There was a period in the 1970s when babies were born here as well.

“I am in a Facebook group ‘born in Svalbard’ and there are 30 of us maybe.’’

Eva’s mother, now very elderly, was a photographer and musician, educated in Vienna, Austria, and still lives there now.

Her father Leif, a miner, was 16 years older than her mother, and died in 1991.

Eva’s early life was unorthodox. She and her mother left Svalbard when she was about six weeks old, taking the ship back to Norway, then moving to Vienna, where her mother moved back in with her parents.

Herta came back to Svalbard the next year and reunited with her husband, becoming pregnant with Eva’s younger sister, Nora.

The girls were raised by their grandparents, then Eva moved to a foster family in Norway. She reunited with her mother when she was 16, when she caught the ship back to Svalbard and worked as her photographic assistant.

“It was the beginning of the ‘70s and I was totally taken by the place,’’ she said.

Herta and Leif had divorced in 1961 and Eva and Nora lost touch with her father, until the Salvation Army tracked him down in the 1980s.

The sisters travelled between Svalbard, mainland Norway and Vienna, and a decade ago, Eva, whose own marriage had ended, moved back permanently to Svalbard. She is close to her three children and two grandchildren, none of who live on Svalbard, and visits them regularly.

She is now curating her parents’ photographs, which give a fascinating look at life on Svalbard in the 1950s.

“It was a very closed society early on, the airport was only opened in 1975,’’ she said.

“My mother had to apply and tell them I was coming.

“It was a company town. You had the state employment such as the church, but most of the jobs were with the mining company.

“I learned so much from the photos.’’