Emphasis Preaching Journal

Kirsty Duncan recently headed an expedition to Longyearbyen, a tiny mining town in Svalbard, a huge archipelago of islands some 600 miles north of Norway. Seven miners, who were stricken by influenza in October of 1918, are buried in a church yard there. Because they have lain in permafrost in that far-northern cemetery all these years, it is speculated that the flu virus which killed them might still be intact. The virus, known as the Spanish flu, is the deadliest the world has ever known, having killed between 20 and 40 million people.