Spring is here!

Spring is definitely returning to the high arctic, birds are singing, the snow is melting in town at least, and much of Scotland has actually had more snow fall a few weeks ago than Longyearbyen. We can walk though the town without jackets, gloves, hats, or even particularly warm clothes for the first time in months as the temperature has even stopped having that funny "-" line in front of the number, at least at times. On the negative side this means that the season of freedom given by skis and snow-scooters is drawing to a close. We had to cancel a cabin trip a couple of weeks ago due to a combination of scooter trouble and bad driving conditions.

I have managed to get up to a lot over the last few weeks however which explains, if not excuses, the lamentable lack of blog-writing, sorry! Since I last updated you I've had two field weeks and spent an inordinate amount of time in a workshop mending scooters. Oh, and a few lectures/report writing days too.

The first field week was with AGF-212 Snow and Ice Dynamics and consisted of a succession of day trips out to a couple of glaciers about an hours drive on scooters away from Longyearbyen. I was in a pair specialising in digging snowpits (the regularity with which we do this does tend to lead to a few jokes from friends in other departments) and doing snow stability tests to look at avalanche risk, then reporting back our observations to the forecasters each evening. We also got to have a go helping do some of the other tasks including attempting to operate the radar to measure snow/ice depth and drilling holes in the glacier to put in new mass balance stakes. The weather and temperature varied quite widely during the week with the Tuesday being so snowy that we didn't have good enough visibility to make it as far as the glacier but other days were sunny and clear enough to make up for that. We also had temperatures as low as -23.3˚C and as warm as a balmy -12˚C.

One of many snowpits!

The views were phenomenal on the clear days however!

A rare photo of me, in this case drilling a hole for a mass balance stake by hand because the petrol drill was on strike. I'm pretty sure my camera was with Chris Borstad at the time so credit to him.

A BBQ on the east coast, filmed by the BBC no less!

We also had an amazing cruise for AGF 211 Air-Ice-Sea Interactions onboard the Norwegian Polar Institute's research vessel Lance. Over 8 days we saw lots of Svalbard, spent several days in fast ice in Woodfjorden on the northern coast, swam through a hole in the ice and reached 80˚ North whilst in an outdoor hot tub on the aft deck of the ship! It wasn't quite on our route but the captain was really cool and said we couldn't have only made it to 79˚ 50-something north so he took a slightly more northern route and blew the horn 8 times at 80˚ to let us know. I'll let the photos do the talking:

Arriving in Woodfjorden

Our midnight visitor

Swimming at just below 80 degrees north

Reversing out of the ice to avoid breaking off a section

This will look very familiar to anyone who has used the CTD on Calanus. Note the "shed" to stand in while you use it though!

Entertaining ourselves between stations and on the deeper CTD casts where one cast could take over an hour!

In our own time, between the report writing, I've also managed a few trips, including a final cabin trip with Holger and a Norwegian friend of ours.

Photo credit Maiken Rian

Photo credit Maiken Rian

Finally for this post Tuesday was the 17th of May - Norwegian Constitution Day. Cue a champagne breakfast (well pressecco because we are cheap students after all...) and a big parade with lots of Norwegian flags.

I think that's all to report back for now, our time here is coming to an end and I think the reality is just dawning on me!

Jamie

Edit - Here's a picture of is in the hot tub courtesy of Yannik:

Cabin trips - Arctic bathing, Scandinavian saunas and snowmobile ice-skating

Hi everyone – Matt here!

The Biology courses have been a bit mundane since we met the Russians, so I’m going to tell you about two snowmobile trips I’ve done recently!

My brother stayed over Easter, so we planned a trip to Diabase cabin. My flatmate Renee is a glaciologist, so she turned the trip into a guided tour and showed us her favourite site for fossil hunting, led us over a couple of glaciers and stopped at a “pingo”. A what? Is that even a real word? Well, apparently it’s a rare occurrence wherein sediments start forming soil and land on top of glacial ice… Whatever – it made a really cool slide ;-)

As the weather was nice and we had plenty of time we drove to my favourite local viewpoints at the Fredheim promontory, the plateau above Fredheim and the frozen waterfall off Sassendalen.

The cabin was in a great location, surrounded by wildlife – lots of reindeer, a flock of ptarmigan - and an unseen Arctic fox left tracks in the snow. Diabase cabin has a wood burning stove, a gas burner and a big sofa so it was cozy and warm and we cooked a proper dinner and a fry-up in the morning. It also has a sauna - so we fired it up to 90 degrees C and tried rolling in the snow. That was easy, so we went for a dip in the fjord!

I’m not kidding – check out the video!

https://youtu.be/I-dXnwGAg44

Onwards and upwards in both latitude and altitude. The second trip enters the chart straight into my Top 10 adventures of all time. I had a 5 day weekend in April that I’d had my eye on for months as my chance to take on a serious expedition. I wanted to get to the summit of the highest mountain on Svalbard and to stay at the Overgangshytte cabin by Austfjorden. I got a GPS track from Sarah in the UNIS Logistics Team as she’d done the same route the week before and I asked my flatmate Renee to come along to navigate and teach me how to read glacier and sea-ice conditions. Since Renee’s scooter had a list of minor problems and two major problems, we spent the week before the trip fixing it with my friends Kristian and Mikkel and invited them to complete our crew.

The logistics were crazy – I had to borrow 20 jerry cans for petrol and 3 sleds to carry them plus all the safety gear for glacier and sea-ice rescue, co-ordinate emergency beacon and emergency response and plan for emergency camps and every eventuality we’d covered in the safety course back in January…

The journey to the cabin took us 12 hours, of which less than half was actually driving and we finally arrived at 5am!? It was nuts. We had to deal with whiteouts from clouds and a blizzard, torn straps and a broken sled, snowmobile breakdowns, digging scooters out of deep powder snow-drifts in moraine fields, crevasses everywhere, disappearing sea-ice and driving and hiking up a natural skating rink (a frozen river and lake). Kudos to UNIS for teaching us how to deal with all of the above and for providing the safety gear we needed for free!

The weather was stunning for our day trips and the return journey. We drove all the way up to 79°N on week-old sea ice crisscrossed with fresh polar bear tracks, made it to the frozen lake on the way up to Atomfjellet and got to the summit of Newtontoppen in pink light above a sea of cloud with the sun just at the horizon.

A. MA. ZING.

Video below. The jacket is a UNIS down jacket provided by SAMS and the clothes I took were all paid for by SAMS Arctic Bursary, so thanks and kudos to SAMS for keeping me warm!

https://youtu.be/cKVWES_w6Ho