SAMS students in the Arctic 2018

In the end of April the AT-211 class headed towards Björnöya  for some field (or floe) work. A couple days before heading off, we'd been on an evening trip to Barentsburg with some great weather to see the local architecture and structure styles. Barentsburg is a very colorful Russian mining town, quite different from Longyearbyen at least judging by the building style.   For our AT-211 trip, we set sail on the 24th of April on the ship Polarsyssel, not an ice breaker, and all prepared for a couple of days of hanging out indoors without internet. Views were great! A lot of water, a lot of birds, and eventually a lot of ice. We encountered fields of pancake ice floes in no time, and started looking for the ideal piece of salty frozen water - it had to be thick and big enough for security and enough working space. After we had found one and at a leisurly pace moored to the floe, we started working and did all the exciting stuff like measure the temperature profile alo...

Hey y'all This is kind of a summary of the last two months ... Every time I want to tell a little bit more about something, another thing happens... By now, we finished the Arctic Environmental Management course. The exams were last Thursday/Friday. Only one month to go, with a 7-day long cruise around the Archipelago coming up this Saturday! Hohooo, we're all looking forward to this!! So, beginning with mid of March... W e were having field work out in Adventdalen where we sampled transects for Svalbard reindeer Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus to estimate their spatial distribution. We counted snowmobile tracks, reindeer tracks, reindeer faeces, recorded snow hardness and dug holes to count ice layers in the snowpack. Where are those faecal piles?? Snow hardness examination by the use of a dynamic cone penetrometer. The sampling went so quick, that we finished on the second day at lunchtime. We drove over to the other side of the valley ...