Last Wednesday I had dinner with the Governor of Svalbard, the group of Norwegian islands of which Spitzbergen is by far the biggest. The archipelago lies around 80 north latitude, and is only 700 miles from the North Pole.
I have to admit that we were not tetea-tete, the Governor and I. There were about 50 others there as well, delegates from various European coun tries and organisations, all with an interest in the use of satellites for weather forecasting.
In the course of his welcoming address to us, the Governor asserted that several hundred million years ago Spitzbergen was far removed from the Arctic regime of snow and ice which is today its hallmark.
Local fossils and shells, apparently, indicate that it once enjoyed a tropical regime, located many thousands of miles nearer the equator than it is at present. Indeed, according to the Governor, the Svalbard Islands are still moving slowly on a collision course with Russia, but since the rate of progress is about a centimetre a year, he does not see it as an issue in his term of office.
Spitzbergen's move would have been a consequence of "continental drift".
As long ago as 1620, the English philosopher Francis Bacon had looked at a map of the world and noticed that Africa and South America appeared capable of fitting together like two adjacent pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
No one thought much more about it until a German geologist called Alfred Wegener developed the idea in the early decades of the last century.
Wegener came to the conclusion that Earth's land masses are not anchored in situ to the planet, but continually "drift".
It was a bizarre and courageous theory in its time, rejected for many years, and it was not until the 1950s that better geological mapping and new techniques for magnetic observations made it clear that Wegener was basically right: land masses are indeed in perpetual slow motion, and continually jostle each other for position.
Despite the doubts of his peers on this particular issue, Wegener was recognised in his time as a world expert on polar meteorology and glaciology.
He undertook several expeditions to Greenland, and indeed it was there that he prematurely met his end. In early 1931, shortly after his 50th birthday, he and a companion got lost on the ice-cap.
Several months later a search party came upon a pair of skis stuck upright in the snow, with a broken ski-pole lying between; 70 years ago today on May 12th, 1931, they found the body of Alfred Wegener buried underneath.