I’m a geography graduate. Part of the attraction was the promise of exotic field trips, though in choosing “arts” geography I ended up monitoring bus-stop activity in Portsmouth city centre rather than measuring sand particles in the Atacama desert or analysing soil samples in the jungles of Indonesia. Ironically, though, poetry has taken me to all points of the compass, from South Korea, to Tasmania, to the interior of the Amazon rainforest, and this year to the Arctic Circle.

As someone whose inner lodestone is innately tuned to the gravitational pull of the north, this felt like a date with destiny, the trip coming about through conversations with the British Antarctic Survey (which has operations at both poles) and by way of a BBC commission to make four half-hour Radio 4 documentaries. So in the middle of the summer I packed a kitbag, including a multitool penknife that had been sitting in a drawer for 20 years apparently waiting for this invitation, and headed out.

Svalbard is a group of islands lying roughly halfway between the north coast of Norway and the north pole, with a landmass twice the size of Belgium. Spitsbergen is the main island, and Ny-Ålesund, at almost 79˚ latitude, is sometimes referred to as the world’s most northerly community. An old coal-mining outpost, the remnants of a frontier settlement still scar the landscape and, even though the place is almost entirely devoted to scientific research these days, many of the 40 or so wooden huts and houses date back to that era. A heavyweight bust of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the south pole, sits in the middle of the “town”, this being a staging post for various attempts to reach the very top of the planet, with only limited success. Being so close, it was interesting to consider that in the entire history of our existence, human beings only set foot on the north pole a few decades before they walked on the moon.

Not counting the cruise ships that occasionally discharge parka-clad tourists on to the jetty, the population of Ny-Ålesund rarely exceeds a couple of hundred, and most residents are visiting research scientists. The UK Arctic Research Station is a long, low, rust-red hut that houses laboratories and living quarters, and I set out from there every day with different teams, heading on to the water or inland.

This part of the Arctic is devastatingly beautiful. Sky-scraping mountains sweep down to the coast, and without buildings to act as reference points the scale is dizzying and disarming – you don’t know if you’re a David or a Goliath among the stony valleys, sharp aretes and pointed peaks. The sense of alienation and disorientation was intensified by the 24-hour July sunlight, but the most bewildering aspect of the whole expedition, for me, was the heat. The temperature hovered around 11C for five days, and for much of the time I wandered about in shirtsleeves, jeans and a pair of trainers. The thermal long johns never came out of the suitcase. Only the mountaintops were snow-covered.

Several glaciers calve into the water at the head of the adjacent fjord, and at frequent intervals the noiseless tranquillity was broken by the sound of collapsing or rupturing ice. One evening we cruised among the floating debris, ice that fizzed and crackled as it melted, the floating ruins of what felt like some catastrophic event. The team on board were examining sediment carried by melt water, and even to the untrained eye the glacial retreat is glaringly obvious, the “tide marks” of former ice levels striping the mountainsides, rivers of slurry cascading seaward. A second team were measuring microbial activity on the glacial plateaux. I went with them one day, expecting a trek across a hard, brilliant-white surface, but found myself tramping through miles of dirt-tinged slush.

The drip drip drip of climate change is the tick tick tick of a countdown to calamity. Across the entire polar territory the permafrost ain’t so permanent or frosty any more, and structures – both natural and human-made – are starting to tilt and sink as the once frozen ground exhales its captive carbon into the air. Another day I watched a polar bear trudging along the coast. Vigilance is everything here; those creatures can kill and do kill, and it’s odd to be flanked by field scientists armed with high-velocity rifles, being protected from the very things they are trying to protect. Polar bears are essentially marine animals reliant on sea ice to hunt their prey, but this large male seemed to be wandering in ever decreasing circles. I imagined him finally swinging from the north star by a single claw, everything under his paws having melted away. From Tromsø, on the Norwegian mainland but still within the Arctic Circle, I made another pilgrimage up a forested valley to encounter another glacier, and found it to be a carcass of darkening snow surrounded by a moat of its own weeping.

“Atlantification” seems to be the scientific buzzword for the way our temperate climate is extending into the polar region, drawing non-native flora and fauna towards higher latitudes, unbalancing complex and delicate ecosystems. It also feels like the right word to describe the relentless flow of plastics and other pollutants from south to north, and to explain why the stomachs of skuas and fulmars are full of cigarette lighters, condoms, fishing lines, bottle tops and the like. In 1880 the 20-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sailed to the Arctic on the SS Hope. Ostensibly employed as the ship’s surgeon, his diary from that journey is an unapologetic record of butchery, documenting the greedy slaughter of whales and seals and the shooting of polar bears as target practice. Words were my only trophies; I returned with a handful of poems. But as a member of a species inflicting such degradation and humiliation on the natural world, my shame and embarrassment were far greater.

***

The Summit by Simon Armitage

When I met the glacier face to face
there was no coming together
of skin and ice,
just washy clouds and a weepy sky
floating upside down
in a silver lake, and the eyes
looking up from the water were mine.

It was hard slog
in a valley more like a Scottish Glen,
along hillsides more at home
in the English Lakes.
A day’s trek up a narrow track
between harebell and birch
and to do what:

to say the arctic looks like this
or looks like that, to breathe
its cool breath then scratch a name
in the visitors’ book
and give the glacier a human form:
tongue, body, mouth and heart …
In any event

I was too late.
Looking up from the milky pool
I saw the whiteness in retreat,
the bedraggled hem of the bridal train
heading into the heights
towards deeper winter and truer north,
trailing a stony path.

When I met the glacier face to face
there was no close encounter
of ancient snow and body heat,
just weepy clouds and a washy sky
hanging upside down
in a zinc-coloured lake, and the eyes
staring out of the water were mine.

• Poet Laureate in the Arctic starts on BBC Radio 4 on 10 October. The Cryosphere by Simon Armitage (£8), a signed and limited edition pamphlet of poems, is available via faber.co.uk.