Ok, just getting around to finishing this off too. It's like we were busy or something before the summer started. . . :)
Coming home from Spain was not an easy task, but the light quickly returned after I did and from then on, everything has been go, go, go. For both Oskar and myself the light brings lots of work. It's not only the tourist season but also the field season. Darkness usually means you can relax and breathe again.
I joined three main field campaigns this season, and they were: Svea for 15 days, a cruise on the ship Lance into the Barents sea for 8 days, and a 5 day excursion to Ny Ålesund. There were of course, many one day field work sessions, but I'll focus on the three big ones I got to be a part of this winter/spring season.
Svea is the mining town just south of Longyearbyen. We were actually sent there for so long because UNIS had nowhere in Longyearbyen for the students to live so they were going to have to set up a tent camp outside of logistics. Many hotel rooms and apartments, as well as the student housing were fully booked with students for the spring semester. UNIS has been working on building a new student building but it isn't planned to be ready before the fall semester.
So, because we were going to be there for so long we couldn't take many snowmobiles with us as other courses needed them for while we were gone. Therefore, only four of us drove snowmobiles with very heavy sleds to Svea, while the students and professor took the snow cat. It is a very easy drive that is very wide and marked the entire way because many of the workers in Svea drive back to Longyearbyen by snowmobile after their shift week. While in Svea we did a little bit of field work everyday and some lectures were given to the students. There was some ice cutting, amphipod catching, snow collecting, air sampling and soil collecting. The barack we were staying in had a large kitchen, but we weren't cooking for ourselves so instead we used the kitchen as a sort of wet lab and did some preliminary sample processing there. It worked!
On the weekend we had a sort of 'day off' and went on a short little trip into the valley with the students.
Snowmobile tailgate party! I thought it was funny.
They built an igloo, it was awesome!
These were also the first few days of sunlight in the area.
My friend Tatiana, who is a Phd student in my department, was also working on her own field work while we were there. So there was some late night sampling going on as well!
The cruise that I joined in April was with an ice mechanics course from my department. We sailed from Longyearbyen out of Isfjorden and down the west coast. Then around the south kapp of Svalbard where there are lots of waves and clashing currents so some people weren't feeling their best. We then sailed up into Storfjorden and through freemansundet between Edgeøya and Barentsøya, out into the Barents sea.
We were trying to find some good ice to do some mechanical tests on, but the only ice floes we could find that were thick enough, weren't large enough. There had been some storms in the past weeks that broke up a lot of the ice. We then spent another day trying to go back through the ice pieces, getting stuck many times, and ended up right outside of Mohnbukta (which is where Oskar and I have been many times on land at that tiny little hobbit cabin). There we found a very large, and thick ice floe, that even had a small iceberg attached to it! It was just what we were looking for, well almost, but definitely good enough.
Here we stayed for a few days doing tests on the ice everyday and the first morning I had to call everyone off the ice three times because of a polar bear coming near. That's always pretty exciting and scary! :)
The students went 'swimming' this year, but I was the person who held the rope. Safety first! :) It was also very cool while we were on the ice and people were jumping in, a helicopter came and landed on Lance. There was no emergency it was just a research group that was out and they needed to discuss some plans so they landed here. It was really neat to get to see them land on the ship from the ice.
The short trip to Ny Ålesund was nothing too special. It was mostly for the students to get to see a research station town like that. There were some visits to several of the stations and getting to participate in some of the sampling that these stations do. One of the afternoons I took the students on a snowmobile trip just for fun because there afternoon was free. It was a beautifully perfect day and we got to see lots of reindeer, birds and some beautiful cliffs out that way. It was very exciting for me as well because I had never been in that area before.
There was so much more snow in Ny Ålesund than there was in Longyearbyen at that time of year. It was fun to see so much snow again.
The plane ride was a big highlight as well. The trip there wasn't anything too special because it was bad weather and completely white out the entire way. Many planes were canceled infact and the second group didn't arrive until the following day.
However, on the trip back the weather was phenomenal and we had an amazing view; I took a lot of photos :)
Those were the big highlights of my field season. Not nearly as many trips as Oskar had, but I still had a great time enjoying the sunlight coming back and the fantastic blue skies we get up here and all the snow and high winds in their glory. You have to enjoy it while you can!
