Nymark was the name that artist Alex Hartley

Alex Hartley

Alex Hartley is a British artist whose work addresses complicated and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the built environments.nowhereisland is Hartley's winning 2012 Cultural Olympiad project for the South West of England...

 gave to a small island he discovered in the arctic

Arctic

The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...

 archipelago

Archipelago

An archipelago , sometimes called an island group, is a chain or cluster of islands. The word archipelago is derived from the Greek ἄρχι- – arkhi- and πέλαγος – pélagos through the Italian arcipelago...

 of Svalbard

Svalbard

Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. It is located north of mainland Europe, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The group of islands range from 74° to 81° north latitude , and from 10° to 35° east longitude. Spitsbergen is the...

, a Norwegian territory, in 2004. It is officially named Nyskjæret by the Name Committee for Norwegian Polar Regions (skjer = skerry). It is a small island in the Barents Sea

Barents Sea

The Barents Sea is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located north of Norway and Russia. Known in the Middle Ages as the Murman Sea, the sea takes its current name from the Dutch navigator Willem Barents...

, 500 miles off the coast of Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

. It emerged from the now melted portion of a retreating glacier and is around the size of a football field.

As part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympaid, Hartley will tour a scaled version of Nyskjæret round the South West coast of England as nowhereisland. It will provide a platform to engage with issues raised by the project, exploring a sense of place through an epic, nomadic sculpture and how we can respond to the issue of global warming

Global warming

Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...

. The island was discovered during a Cape Farewell expedition of scientists and artists, collaborating on a cultural response to global warming and the retreating Arctic ice pack. A large wall exhibit made from framed rock samples, letters, maps, photographs, and other documentation materials forms part of Cape Farewell - Art and Climate Change, and appeared in the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool as part of the 2006 biennialhttp://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/conservation/exhibitions/capefarewell/alex_hartley.asp.