Jan Mayen
— — a volcano under ice, with no town beneath it.
Not only on a wall.
“A narrow black island in the Greenland Sea, 600 kilometres northeast of Iceland, held up at its north end by Beerenberg — the northernmost above-water volcano on Earth, capped in ice. No town, no harbour, no road. A handful of Norwegian meteorologists and military personnel rotate through the station at Olonkinbyen on six-month tours. Fulmars, the sound of wind on lava, a glacier sliding into cold water. from the studio
Jan Mayen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Jan Mayen is a 377-square-kilometre Norwegian volcanic island in the Greenland Sea, roughly 600 kilometres northeast of Iceland and 500 kilometres east of Greenland. It splits into two halves: the broad northern Nord-Jan, dominated by the 2,277-metre stratovolcano Beerenberg under the Kvitbjørnen ice cap, and the lower, narrower southern Sør-Jan. The island has no permanent population. Norway has administered it since 1930, and since 2010 most of it has been protected as the Jan Mayen Nature Reserve. Eighteen staff from the Norwegian Armed Forces and Meteorological Institute rotate through the Olonkinbyen station.
The island sits inside the Arctic Front where cold polar air meets the warmer North Atlantic Drift, which keeps fog over the coast for most of the year and the summit of Beerenberg hidden behind cloud roughly nine days in ten. Mean annual temperature at sea level is about -1°C. Auroras run from late August through April; in midsummer the sun does not set for ten weeks. Wind is the dominant fact, with gales recorded above 50 metres per second from the south and southwest.
There is no commercial way to visit. The only landings are by Norwegian Air Force C-130 transports onto the gravel strip at Jan Mayensfield, eight times a year, weather permitting, and by occasional summer expedition cruise. The crew of eighteen at Olonkinbyen runs the LORAN-C-successor station and the meteorological observations begun in 1921. There are no roads off the small network around the station; the rest of the island is reached on foot, with care, through fields of pumice, moss campion, and the breeding colonies of fulmars and little auks along the cliffs of Kapp Wien.