Cabin Trip

Hi everyone it’s Kendal here.

Since my last post,‎ we have been busy exploring the surrounding area with a five day field trip to Pyramiden and a day trip to the Russian settlement of Barentsburg. I have also squeezed in time to kayak across the fjord. 

The most exciting adventure on Svalbard has been our cabin trip to Foxdalen, a valley and glacier approximately 15km outside of Longyearbyen. Jamie, Susanne and I set off  on Friday afternoon when we finished lectures. As you can see from the photo below our bags probably weighed the same as us so we decided to taxi our way to the end of the road. This meant we only had a 6km hike to the cabin.

After our short but exhausting hike, we were extremely glad to catch the first glimpse of our accommodation that came in the form of a little red hut with a typically beautiful wooden décor inside and of course a log-burning stove.

Photo taken by Susanne

The first job as soon as we arrived was to light the fire and then wrap up warm in our sleeping bags to watch the sunset before having an early night. The next day we went on a hike where we encountered lots of reindeer and each collected reindeer antlers, we saw a solar halo and experimented with our photography skills below some ice.

Photo taken by Susanne

We also had spare time to practice our yoga poses at the top of the mountain!

Photo taken by Jamie

On Saturady afternoon Olesia and Ilya arrived at the cabin. We had a quick dinner and decided to go for a short evening hike to see the sunset.  After an energetic light saber fight ‎we settled in for the night and treated ourselves to mulled wine and smores.‎

Photo taken by Susanne

After a good nights sleep we awoke to a light layer of snow on the ground.  We set off on our journey back to Longyearbyen at midday, thankfully with much lighter bags having used all the water, food and firewood.

Definitely looking forward to our next adventure!

Photo taken by Susanne

Hi everyone, it's Daniel again!

In the last post Jamie told you about our Field work in Pyramiden so I'm going to take the opportunity while Jamie and Kendal are away at a cabin to tell you about the last couple of weeks.

We were all so tired after Pyramiden that we didn't go on any hikes that weekend. The next week we began Sediment Transport (a refreshing reminder of H2 Marine Geology for those at SAMS) with guest lecturer Jim Bogen and our first lectures for AT-210 Arctic Environmental Pollution. The first lectures were mostly introducing us to the topic and outlining the variety of toxic chemicals that are found around the world and defining contaminants and pollutants. With the sediment transport though we got another field excursion and our first lab work! This meant going on a tour of Longyearbyen and  taking water samples from the main rivers and the dam that supplies the town with water. In the lab we followed a procedure allowing us to find the mass of dissolved particles and the percentage of that which was organic (using some pretty impressive mass balances which were mounted on steel pillars).  It meant an early morning (0815) on Friday morning to combust our samples but then that gave us the afternoon free. 

The next week we had a reading week for hydrology but in pollution however we were learning about fuel transport, storage and spills which involved three (yes, three!) field excursions. This meant a tour of the fuel storage facilities at the airport the next day and of Longyearbyen's fuel storage the day after. On the Friday our excursion was a boat trip to and a tour around the Russian town of Barentsburg! I think (and I suspect that Jamie and Kendal will agree) that the highlight of the day was on the way to the town when we saw a fin whale! 

(Courtesy of Jamie - his camera skills were much better than mine!) We then stopped to have lunch in front of a glacier while the crew grilled a range of meets on the main deck. Moral questions were raised when we were offered whale meat for lunch (morals aside, don't try it, Kendal and I agreed it was tasteless). This continued to be one of the most relaxed field excursions we've been on to date as after touring the massive (and rather unsafe) storage facilities (for fuel that they didn't use in the town - conspiracy theorists love that one) we ended up in a hotel trying the local brew of beer. (Jamie - the suspicious Russian Fuel Storage in Barentsburg) (Jamie Rodgers - some students enjoying crisps and a beer)

That weekend Jamie and Kendal and our friend Susanne went for a hike up to Trollstein with our guest lecturer for pollution Anna Waitkus on the Saturday which was much more interesting that my detour to the shop across the plateau beneath Nordenskiöldtoppen with some friendly Arctic Biology Students. (Jamie doing some delayed photography for selfies again - from left to right; Kendal Hunter, Jamie Rodgers, Anna Waitkus and Susanne Lindholm)

This week past though we were given our Hydrology report assignments (my group has a short literature review, think I got the best assignment!) and lectures on Permafrost with Hydrology and Mercury in Polar Regions by guest lecturer Michelle Nerentorp for Pollution. This meant studying the lectures each day as we competed in a quiz each morning with the overall winner getting a bag of sweets but everyone else in the class got a Kvikk Lunsj (very much like a Kit Kat back home). While the rest of us left class on Friday for the UNIS Oktoberfest celebrations Jamie, Kendal and Susanne had been very organised and arranged with the Longyearbyen Hunting Society to use a cabin in Foxdallen for the weekend and I’m sure Kendal with have some fantastic pictures and stories to tell about that.

Finally, we all had plans to view the super lunar eclipse tomorrow morning  but at the moment it is snowing as so I am afraid that it is unlikely that we will see anything.

That’s all from me, hopefully Kendal will write another post soon all about our hikes this week and their trip to Foxdallen! 

P.s. She might even have some pictures of the night sky recently, hint hint!

Pyramiden Field Trip

(Jamie here)

We've been here a few weeks now so are getting pretty settled into Longyearbyen, which must be why it was time for our field trip to a town even further north and more remote! Pyramiden is an abandoned Russian coal mining town that was last properly occupied in 1998. Since then the coal mines have lain silent and the only building occupied is the hotel in which we stayed, feeling a little like we had stumbled back into the 1970s. Pyramiden is quite literally built on Russian soil, shipped in when much of the town was originally built.

We travelled to Pyramiden in a massive RIB type boat; due to a lack of appropriately sized survival suits both me and Daniel ended stuck up in the (heated) cabin whilst Kendal braved the outside, sadly both sides of the glass were slightly envious of the other!

We were delayed setting off due to the sea state out in the fjord so spent the morning relaxing in the UNIS library (they have a hammock and big bean bags - please Shona?). By 12 it had calmed down and the trip across to Pyramiden was quite smooth and quick. On arrival we were deposited on the ramshackle quay and cadged a lift on the bus, which surely must be in the running for most northerly? After depositing our belongings on the chequered lino floor of our rooms we headed out to take salt dilution measurements of the flow rate of the stream coming down from the glacier above the town.

Checking the mixing of the flow with luminous dye. No photoshop involved!

Science!

After fieldwork it was time to head back to the hotel for our dinner and to watch a video on the history of Pyramiden, including video of a ski race meeting a polar bear! We also went exploring around the town and docks.

On Tuesday we went up onto the glacier and split into groups to find some highly elusive stakes laid out by the Czech research station to record the movement and accumulation/melting of the glacier. We reconvened for lunch half way up, and again to be guided down another glacier by Jacob, a PHD student from the Czech station, and hike back out to Pyramiden in a beautiful light, arriving slightly late for dinner and starving! A highlight of the day (other than being on a glacier in amazing sunshine) was an arctic fox coming and investigating us on the way up to the glacier in the morning.

The next day we visited some of the derelict water supply reservoirs that supplied the town and after lunch in a cabin split into three groups, one group (including both me and Daniel) hiked up and around to visit a huge waterfall from the top; the second group (with Kendal in it) hiked up the gorge to see the same waterfall from below and a few also went back to the hotel at this point. We arrived there first and whilst Jacob went to take pictures for his project we relaxed and enjoyed the view; just as we were leaving we received a radio call from the gorge group to say they were arriving at the base of the falls, many metres below us.

Dried lunch with water from the flasks made some of our packs far lighter!

Heat exchangers to keep the permafrost in the dam frozen so it remains watertight.

Fossils are quite common finds on hikes

It is impossible to get a sense of scale in such a landscape

The other group (Kendal in the pink hat) looked like ants making their way up the gorge.

Daniel crosses a smaller stream on our return down the other side of the valley, far above the gorge.

On arrival back at the hotel we were excitedly informed by the other group that the guide based out of the hotel had encountered and scared off a polar bear from the shore in the town, just a few hundred metres from the hotel but they didn't see it.

The previous nights polar bear sighting had us on high alert as we started out final full day in Pyramiden, walking to visit the Czech research station a few kilometres along the coast. We had a break there sampling their extensive range of biscuits before spending the afternoon comparing different methods of measuring flow rate and sediment transport and visiting the weather station they maintain. We then had dinner in the station, which oozes character, originally built as a Russian mining hut years ago before being used by a poacher who was unceremoniously kicked out and the station let to the Czechs for a nominal rent. After dinner we took a trip in a RIB across to the edge of a huge glacier on the opposite side of the fjord and went ashore and through a tunnel in the ice created by flowing meltwater. We were hoping to see the polar bear but he was presumably still somewhere on the Pyramiden side of the fjord, this small fact didn't stop us reporting back to the others that we had seen it of course!

This piece of ice looks suspiciously like Nessie...

 The following morning we met up with two chartered tourist RIBs for the trip back to Longyearbyen after a very busy week! I'll leave you with a few pictures of the town of Pyramiden.