Arctic coalmining is a dream job, for some

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (Reuters) - Working down a coal mine on an Arctic island does not sound like a dream job for anyone, let alone a 21-year-old woman.
But Norwegian Guro Oydgard says she enjoys the life despite long shifts, choking dust and bone-numbing cold on the archipelago of Svalbard where Norway and Russia have mines in a former Cold War outpost that has outlived the Soviet Union.
"It's exciting. It's a physical job, not just sitting in an office," Oydgard told Reuters in her apartment in Longyearbyen, the world's most northerly village with 1,800 inhabitants and founded by an American miner a century ago.
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"Of course the risks are greater than working in an office but it's not as dangerous as people think," she said. Oydgard is one of six women working in the modern Svea mine, operated by Store Norske, alongside about 300 men.
The Russian and Norwegian miners and their families live on the same island 40 km (25 miles) apart, separated by a snow-covered mountain range that marks one of the greatest wage divides in the world for doing the same job.
Norwegian miners can earn up to $100,000 a year, more than 10 times the pay of a Russian miner, according to Norwegian officials. Norway administers Svalbard but other nations can exploit natural resources under a 1920 treaty.
Russian miners in the village of Barentsburg, which boasts a big heated indoor swimming pool and a bust of Lenin in the main square, declined to say precisely how much they earned. Continued...
© Reuters 2007.