In 1732, the crew of a German whaling ship peered out at an extraordinary sight. Great plumes of ash were rising from the strange, uninhabited island of Jan Mayen—an isolated sliver of land between northern Norway and Greenland. What the whalers saw was the eruption of Beerenberg, a cataclysmic volcanic event that reshaped Jan Mayen and caused a small population of Arctic char, a salmon-like fish, to get cut off from the ocean.
The fish and their descendants have been stuck in Nordlaguna, a tiny lake on Jan Mayen, ever since. For 300 years, this population of thousands of Arctic char has had to cope with confinement—and go to extreme lengths just to survive.
LINK (via: Hakai Magazine)
