Svalbard's wild survivors have figured out how to adapt to the high Arctic's darkness, its bitter cold, and its meager vegetation. But there's one force that has come at them too fast for evolutionary change: humans.

From the 17th to 19th centuries, whalers sailed to Svalbard to hunt the region's mighty cetaceans, whose thick blubber could be turned into whale oil and, ultimately, handsome profits. On a voyage to Svalbard in 1612, the captain of a Dutch ship reported that the Barents Sea was so full of whales that the ship's prow parted the beasts as though it were cutting through pack ice. By the end of the 18th century, the world's insatiable appetite for whale oil had almost wiped them out. Some 50,000 bowhead whales, the longest lived mammal on the planet, were taken by Dutch vessels alone. The commercial carnage drove the species to near extinction. (Today more than 10,000 bowheads survive, mostly in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas.) After mowing through the whales, the hunters turned their attention to the walrus—for its ivory—and nearly snuffed out that species too.

At the end of World War I the Svalbard Treaty gave Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, whose resources Sweden and Russia also eyed. The treaty proved to be a turning point. Over the course of the 20th century Norwegian officials put a halt to the free-for-all and turned one of the world's greatest wildlife killing grounds into one of its most protected sanctuaries. Today 65 percent of Svalbard's islands and 75 percent of its marine areas lie within national parks or nature reserves. A remarkable thing happens when you give animals habitat and peace. They thrive. Svalbard's walrus population, winnowed to a few hundred animals by the 1950s, rebounded to more than 2,600 in 2006. Only a thousand reindeer grazed in the valleys in the 1920s. Today some experts believe there may be as many as 10,000.

The days of outright slaughter are gone, but humans continue to pressure wildlife here in indirect ways. Toxins like PCBs and perfluorinated compounds swirl up to Svalbard on air and ocean currents and become trapped in the fatty tissue of glaucous gulls, great skuas, arctic foxes, and ringed seals, compromising their immune systems. Polar bears carry much higher levels of the pollutants than their Alaskan and Canadian counterparts. Climate change, meanwhile, forces a retreat of the summer ice pack, imperiling the region's polar bears. The wildlife that thrives up here has adapted to one of the toughest habitats on Earth. As temperatures rise, those birds, fish, and mammals will be forced to adapt even further.

Perhaps there is cause for hope in the curious ways Svalbard's wildlife has already adjusted to humans, the predator turned protector. In the coal-mining outpost of Ba­rentsburg, dozens of black-legged kittiwakes have turned abandoned buildings into makeshift bird cliffs, nesting on the window ledges. At midnight or noon—it makes no difference to the birds—the parents leap off the ledges to dive after fish schooling in the harbor below. In their own small way the kittiwakes are expanding the edge of the possible, windowsill by windowsill. It's ingenious but, for Svalbard, not atypical. Up here opportunity and abundance often appear in unlikely places.