Archaeologists investigating a 17th-century graveyard in the High Arctic are uncovering evidence of the perils that plagued early modern whalers, including extensive physical labor in their jobs and diseases such as scurvy. But the burial site is disappearing rapidly due to climate change, making archaeological excavations a race against time.

Likneset, which means "Corpse Point" in Norwegian, is the largest whaling burial site on Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between the North Pole and the northern coast of Norway. Hundreds of shallow graves marked with stone cairns have been found there in a cemetery that dates to the 17th-to-18th-century boom in Arctic whaling.