An Avalanche of Contrasts

Photo: Dag Avango Today we visited two worlds: the Arctic we have become so familiar with and Pyramiden, the diorama of Soviet life we only just encountered yesterday. It has been an avalanche of contrasts: the coolness of the Arctic against the warmth of the Pyramiden hotel; Norwegian colors and Soviet monotone; the kindness of our Russian guides and the dominating frigidity of Svalbard's dappled peaks. In Pyramiden, we investigated a power plant, black and rust. We had lunch on the docks,...

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Pyramiden

 Pyramiden. Photo: Dag Avango After a nice sunny night, we woke up to another rain filled morning. Today our plan was to hike to Pyramiden, an old Russian mining settlement, named after the central mountains pyramid shape. The main goal in going to Pyramiden was to understand how the settlement functioned and how it impacted the Arctic environment. The five kilometer hike to the settlement was cold and uncomfortable due to the constant rain and poor visibility. On our way, we had to to...

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Exciting Encounters

Hello from Svalbard! Day three of the tent camp, the weather was perfect for a long hike – no wind, no burning sun, no rain. We headed north east from our camp towards a glacier called Svenbreen. Our scientific aim was to date the age of the moraine, which is debris deposited at the end of a glacier. When a glacier retreats, the moraines show us where previous glacier fronts were, giving us an idea of the rate of retreat. Along the way we had several exciting encounters... First we had...

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Rolling Mist

Today is officially the halfway point of our trip and we were greeted  by the rolling mist waking up. It blanketed the landscape and shrouded the mountains and glaciers that we had grown accustomed to admiring, it was accompanied by a fine drizzle. Not to be stopped we layered up and headed out to hunt for the Svalbard flora. We hiked northeastward following the coast up a few kilometers from our camp. Once at the site we started down at the beach, first hunting for tracks from our polar bear...

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Petunia Bay

This article originally appeared on the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat's website. by Fredrik Isaksson, Emma Giesen and Peiyuan Zhang We started the day at 7 am in the morning. The weather in Longyearbyen was cold, windy and foggy. We had our breakfast in the guest house and each of us prepared a lunch bag. Surprisingly we found a reindeer outside the reception having his breakfast as well. The buses picked us up at around 8:30 am for the trip to the harbor. Then we boarded the...

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