Malmberget, 3rd and 4th of July

This series of posts shares field notes from the study abroad course "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic." The course begins at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then students from the University of Illinois and KTH travel north to conduct research in the Arctic. This blog was originally posted on KTH's Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic webpage.

by Jessica Malmberg and James Buckland

Early in the morning we pile in the car and drive from Dundret to Jokkmokk, just a half hour south. A few minutes in, the car comes to a screeching halt - four or five reindeer are on the road, trotting nervously back and forth, coats molting and hooves clattering on the thin concrete stretch of road.

Reindeer are free-roaming - they are herded, loosely, by region, but they are not fenced in - and these were free-roaming down the road. Our tour guide at the Laponia Naturum yesterday mentioned that they are sometimes hit by cars and then not reported. Instead, we sit and wait for them to cross the road. Then we drive on, a little slower and a little more aware.

Close to Jokkmokk, we drove over a bridge, crossing  Lule river, and suddenly we see colorful paintings. There is a small dam sitting across the river, but the roar of the waters is nothing compared to the brilliant paintings done across their floodgates. In the 1970s, when the dam was constructed, local Sami artists designed their facades - bold red and yellow swathes with symbols and glyphs strewn across them. It is beautiful and very, very strange. The control building above the dam has is colored, as are the concrete buttresses holding up the wall. It doesn’t look like art, but it doesn’t look like a dam either. I think it’s quite beautiful. There is a bitter story behind the dam and the artwork, though. When the plan of the dam was presented, the people of Jokkmokk and especially the Sami people started protesting, since the dam would have a big impact on the Sami village and the surrounding Jokkmokk area.

In Jokkmokk we went to the  Sami cultural museum, Ájtte. It is a phenomenally well-designed and engaging museum, with beautiful art and artifacts, reconstructions and reproductions, informative text and interactive exhibits alike. Our tour guide, a very patient young Sami woman, takes us through some of the main exhibits and talks with us at length about the history of the Sami people - their daily life, their customs and costumes, and the reindeer-husbandry lifestyle. A large portion of the museum follows reindeer husbandry across a yearly cycle, tracking eight seasons for eight stages of the animal’s reproductive cycle. As the reindeer move across Norrbotten, so do the individual Sami families who own them - as they have done for hundreds of years. It is a very beautiful and very engaging museum - we could have spent eight hours there and not seen it all, it was so much.

After having lunch outside the museum we head back north towards Porjus where we are going to have a guide tour in the old hydropower station. Porjus is the first great hydropower station build in Sweden in 1910. It was mainly built to provide the mines and the communities around the mines with electrical power. Porjus is today the 4th greatest hydropower dam in the Lule river, producing 480 MW/year. When arriving in Porjus we are met by a big brick building and a quite big powerplant. Today is the dam’s machinery room underground in the rock so you can’t see so much of the hydropower dam. Just the empty river and the earth dam.

Coming into the reception we are greeted by our guide, Ida. She shows us around the old building, which was the station house at the time of the opening of the hydropower plant. We get to see the old control room with lots of buttons and sticks. In the center of the room is a table placed with two really old telephones, which was how the staff was communicating during the beginning of 1900. Thereafter we took the elevator down 50 meters underground to see the first turbine and generator that was built 1910, at that time only producing 17 MW/year.

At the reception we see that the two Sami girls that we had as guides at Naturrum the day before also guides at Porjus hydropower plant. We would think that Sami people that is reindeer herders wouldn’t want to work part time at a place that have affected their environment tremendously. But this shows the complicated relation between the Sami people and the industrialisation of the Norrbotten area.

After the visit at Porjus we went back to Dundret, Gällivare, to start packing our things for the travel back to Stockholm the next day.

The course came to an end at the 4th of July. We have seen so much, visited various places and driven to many places in rain, walked up the mountains surrounding Tarfala in the midnights sun. But it was time to go south. In the morning we packed our things and had a final discussion regarding the course. Thereafter we headed back towards Kiruna, to fly back to Stockholm. We have learned so much, had so many interesting discussions thanks to everyone who was a part of this course!

Malmberget, 3rd and 4th of July

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Malmberget, 2nd of July

This series of posts shares field notes from the study abroad course "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic." The course begins at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then students from the University of Illinois and KTH travel north to conduct research in the Arctic. This blog was originally posted on KTH's Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic webpage.

by Tina Cheng and Nathalie Pekleh

Our first activity of the day was travelling to New Boliden's mine -  Aitik - in Gällivare. It is the biggest copper mine in Sweden with an area of 7000 hectares. Our guide for the day was Olle Baltzari and he told us a little about his background and his way from a job as a mechanic to a job in the mine. To extract the copper from the waste rocks they use explosives every week and place it in certain areas in the pit and detonates it. The copper ore are then transported to a nearby milling plant to be crushed into smaller pieces. They are able to extract 1 kg of concentrate of copper out of one ton of waste rock. Additionally, small amounts of silver and gold can be extracted.

We learned that the price of copper has dropped. New Boliden is trying to make their operation more efficient by reducing overtime of administrative personnel. However, they are continuing the production with the same capacity as before. We were then introduced to Sofia Lindmark Burck, one of two environmental coordinators working at New Boliden. She told us about her work there and what she was doing at Boliden. Her work involved planning, gathering and analysing data pertaining to New Boliden’s amount of pollution in the nearby environment. She emphasized Boliden’s attempt in lessening its environmental impact by conducting regular tests in nearby water for traces of toxic metals. They are also gathering and analysing data pertaining to dust and noise to make sure the mining activity is not affecting the health of neighbouring communities too much. Even though New Boliden is not required by the Swedish law to conduct some of these procedures, they choose to do it anyway to make sure that the nearby surrounding is out of harm from pollution.

After we received information from the environmental coordinator, Olle Baltzari guided us around the mine in a tour bus. We were (at least I was) amazed by the size of the open pit; it was 1 km across to the other side of the pit. He later took us to the milling plant and showed us the giant mill that grounds the waste rock into smaller pieces. Despite that, we were not able to see the actual crushing; everything was operated in containers sealed shut. On the way back to the entrance of the mine we saw a green healthy looking hill, very much in contrast to the otherwise gray dull looking landscape. Surprisingly, we found out later that it was the place where they brought the sewage waste from Stockholm. The tour ended with a group photo-op at the big shovel machine called 994 and we had a lunch break in the lunch room of New Boliden.

We remembered Olle telling us that most of people working in New Boliden Aitik live within 50 km radius from the pit, and a majority of them have grown up in Gällivare and Malmberget. We wondered if working in an ore mine would be the future for any of us after the ending of this course.

Following lunch, the group traveled to Laponia, a Swedish national park. The area was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 for its outstanding universal values in terms of nature and culture. Due to both of these values being present, it is referred to as a combined or mixed heritage site. Laponia’s environmental attributes include a visible documentation of Earth’s evolutionary history, ongoing and past biological and geological processes, a variety of natural beauty, and biological diversity. It is also a site of cultural heritage, as evidenced in the extraordinary remains pertaining to Sami culture.

Within the national park, we visited the Naturum; it’s name (“nature” and “room”) emphasized Laponia’s emphasis on both environment and society. We watched a short movie regarding the park, and were then given a guided tour of the exhibition. The exhibition detailed many aspects about Sami culture, especially their reindeer husbandry practices. Around Laponia, there are many unspoiled human remains from Sami in the past, including bark stripping and circular arrays of stones that were utilized for fire pits. The group was lucky enough to have Sami tour guides that engaged in reindeer husbandry themselves, and we were able to ask many specific questions regarding their culture.

After that, we made a quick detour to a waterfall that was visible from the Naturum. It was a wonderful example of the majestic beauty that Laponia has to offer. This sublime ending tied into our understanding of the national park as an area with extraordinary environmental and cultural values. We witnessed the cultural importance and transhumance of the site through our time at the Naturum exhibition, and caught a glimpse of Laponia’s natural beauty by the waterfall. Unfortunately, Laponia is facing threats of exploitation from mining and processing companies that want to use the land for national economic interests, and it is important to consider how this would affect the values of and attributes of the land.

Malmberget, 2nd of July

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Malmberget, 1st of July

This series of posts shares field notes from the study abroad course "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic." The course begins at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then students from the University of Illinois and KTH travel north to conduct research in the Arctic. This blog was originally posted on KTH's Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic webpage.

by Victoria Wallace and Pontus Wallin

This was the first day of fieldwork in Gällivare, and we’ve started to see why this municipality calls itself the mining capital of Europe. The focus of today’s study was Malmberget, a small mining town situated just ten minutes away from central Gällivare.

In 2010, LKAB mapped out the extent of the iron ore bodies that lie beneath Malmberget and announced that they would continue mining, which meant that the entire community would eventually need to be relocated. As we walked by the fence that separates the community from the gaping mouth of the open-pit mine, we were struck by the reality that every home we passed would soon be claimed by the ever-expanding mine. But, paradoxically, if the mine were to close, many of these homes would be probably be abandoned as well. Scattered across the town are mätplintar: instruments installed by LKAB to measure the ground deformation caused by the mine.

With the shaky future of Malmberget on our minds, we next began to study in more detail the history of the small town. The day continued with a guided tour by a local resident in a reconstructed shantytown near the pit. The little wooden shacks were built as a tourist attraction to demonstrate how the mining community may have looked at the end of the 19th century, and the guide spoke about the everyday life of the miners and their families.

Beyond the shantytown was the tall green Kaptensspelet, rising above the pit. While looking over the 800 meter-deep pit, we listened to the guide speak about the current phase of the move to Gällivare. The municipality has ambitions of constructing “world class arctic town” for the dislocated citizens, despite concerns regarding the growing tailing pond from the Boliden Aitik mine. If an accident were to occur with the tailing pond, the area could potentially be flooded by waste from the mine. This raises some serious questions, not least of which is whether Malmberget’s history of short-term city planning is repeating itself. Like in Kiruna, LKAB is very involved in city planning, and is even contributing funds to a local project to create a comprehensive model of the city of Malmberget as it stood around the year 1960.

It was a good day to draw comparisons, between Kiruna and Malmberget, between the past and future, and between the perspectives that were represented (LKAB, some local residents) and those that were not (notably Sami, youth, and women).

Malmberget, 1st of July

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Kiruna, 30th of June

This series of posts shares field notes from the study abroad course "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic." The course begins at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then students from the University of Illinois and KTH travel north to conduct research in the Arctic. This blog was originally posted on KTH's Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic webpage.

by Daniel Klen and Jessica Sellin

Today was our first full day back from the Tarfala Research Station! It was sad to leave its majestic landscape and all the hiking it provided, but we’re excited to move onto a new landscape and the adventures it holds.

In the morning, we visited the Hjalmar Lundbohms museum. The museum was Hjalmar Lundbohm's house, the founder of LKAB, and shows the history of the mining industry in Kiruna. The pictures in the museum depicted the miners and their families that lived and worked in the Kiruna area during the early 1900s. We were able to get an idea of life in Kiruna for early miners and their families from the perspective of the miners and settlers of the area. The museum also focused on Lundbohm himself and the national value of Kiruna through pictures, where the royalty inaugurated railway stations, schools, and other significant buildings or institutions. Borg Mesch, who was a legendary photographer in the area of Lappland, took all of the photos. He settled down in Kiruna when the town was first starting, and hence he photographed everything from the time of Kiruna’s birth, i.e., the mining, buildings, railways, settlers, and Sami people. The museum also contained an exhibition that aimed to present the city move from different perspectives, independent from LKAB and the municipality. It covered reasons, background, difficulties, and opportunities through comprehensive time lines, illustrations, and maps.

In the afternoon, we visited the Sami cultural center in Kiruna, which showed the Sami history and culture from a Sami perspective. In comparison to the Sami exhibit at the Nordiska Museum, which portrayed the Sami culture from an outsider’s perspective, the Sami cultural center portrayed the Sami culture from a Sami-centered organization. In addition to traditional Sami tools and clothing, there were exhibits showing different facets of Sami life. There was also a story told in which you could sense the anger and frustration among the Sami people towards the settlers and the state of Sweden. The Sami cultural center gave us additional insight into what role the traditional tools and clothing showcased in the Nordisk Museum played in Sami culture.


After our museum visits, we drove to Gällivare and Dundret, where we will spend the rest of the course. Along the way, we stopped at Svappavaara to view a Swedish cultural site. In total, our day was spent engaging with many cultural heritage sites and the narratives they tell about Sweden and its people.

Kiruna, 30th of June

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