Reindeer faeces, satellites, presenting, sampling at sea and midnight sun

May 02, 2018

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... We 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 to enjoy some sun next to a hydrolaccolith, a so-called pingo.

The pingo - it is huge! And apparently, this is just a small hydrolaccolith...

Our group ontop the pingo enjoying the last minutes of a well-deserved lunch in the sun © Jakob Emil Larsen.

The conditions those days were quite rough, -18° C with wind chill it felt like -30° C. I was cold… Not only did I got some frostbites on my nose, no, the ones from the week before were bothering me. I got some on the fingers and cheeks from walking over Platåfjellet to school on a Friday morning. And the reason why those frostbites happened was that I didn’t have my proper boots on as they got taken/stolen by somebody while I was on my first shift at the restaurant. So, my feet in my hiking boots were ice-cold, the wind was just blowing through. To change and put more layers on my feet I exposed my fingers and it is incredible how fast that goes. First, that feeling of a thousand needles like you know it from our winter, then the feeling disappears, and they get numb, which is fooling you into some safety that there isn’t. At least I caught some proper first sunrays that day.

As you can tell from our red cheeks and Rowan's frozen beard it wasn't the warmest of days...

The other excursion we participated in was up to the KSAT satellite facilities on Platåfjellet, where we got a little tour through the station, got some information about how it works and what they do in general.

Meanwhile, Nick and I had our presentation about energy consumption in Longyearbyen and it was quite a success. We made a good start with some dancing. I enjoyed it. It was good fun.

That wasn't the dancing part though, just loosening up some nervosity before.

And yeah, finally we were back on a boat again! I missed it dearly! Sampling for zooplankton, nutrients, chlorophyll-a, POC/PON, DNA/RNA and undertaking CTD & light measurements. It was good fun with beautiful weather and icy winds. Filtering at the end of a long day, however, wasn't that much fun anymore ...

Some happy students that morning.

Deploying the CTD's.

Adam is ready to sample for DNA & RNA.

Sun light measurements.

Deploying the multi plankton sampler.

View towards Adventdalen.

Julien handling the sampling of chlorophyll-a.

Oh, don't we know these devices well by now?

What I think was most fascinating were the changes in daylight the last couple of weeks. I realised it especially each time I got off from work. It was incredible to witness how fast the changes went.

🎵What a difference a day made / Twenty-four little hours 🎵

There is no more night and hikes to see the midnight sun are something special! Luckily it doesn't mess with my sleep, albeit I feel a lot more awake.