Hey! It's Kirsty here, first of all I should apologise for taking so long to write a post for the blog so to make up for it I feel like this post might be a bit long. (I would recommend getting a cup of tea about now).
It's just over a month since I first arrived in Longyearbyen and all ready I am totally in love with the place. Every morning I wake up I am greeted with the amazing view of Longyearbreen - although the winds that blow off the glacier are not so welcome, especially when I am trying to walk home with groceries.
As Boo already talked about in the previous blog post, my first week here consisted of the mandatory safety training course, which ended up being really fun (despite constantly being told how you may die). I found floating around in the fjord to be the best part as it was so relaxing.
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| Feeling like an otter, Photo Credit: Nils Roar Sælthun |
My Course
I am taking two courses here at UNIS throughout the semester, these are AT-209 Arctic Hydrology and Climate change and AT-210 Arctic Environmental Pollution, so far both modules have been super interesting. AT-209 is a bit different from what I am used to due to the hydrology element of it, where as AT-210 has so far been more chemistry based which I am loving.
On the 22nd August I travelled to the "abandoned" russian mining town of Pyramiden which is located in the Billefjordan region of Svalbard. I was here for 6 days as part of the AT-209 course so we could take measurements of various glacial rivers around the area. It was also a great excuse to get to see the area.
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| The impressive Nordenskiöldbreen glacier |
During our time here we were staying ~5km from the town of Pyramiden in the Petuniabukta area, where there is a Czech owned cabin which is occupied during the summer months here for scientific research. There were two cabins, the warm one where all the cooking, eating, and socialising was done (along with some sleeping for those who didn't have as great sleeping bags) then the cold one, where those that had the best sleeping bags would sleep.
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| The cold cabin at Petuniabukta, feat. Nordenskiöldbreen in the distance |
Our first day at the Czech cabin was mainly spent organising all of our supplies and getting to know everybody over a meal which they had kindly prepared for our arrival.
The second day was a little bit more exciting as we hiked from the cabin back into Pyramiden, which isn't truly abandoned as there are about 7/8 people currently living there manning the hotel/tourist museum and giving tours of the town. Everytime we went past the hotel it was a welcome site as it is the only place in the area where there is a flushing toilet and heating. Still there is no wifi or mobile phone signal so it really did feel like going back in time. The town itself is much larger than I imagined and it's easy to see why it was the poster child of communism for the soviet union during the Cold War.
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| "Arctic Pole Svalbard" |
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| Lenin watching over the parade street in Pyramiden |
We continued to hike further past Pyramiden to a small glacial river coming from the melt waters of Bertillbreen, here we measured the
discharge of the river through salt injections. A litre of water with a known
quantity of salt would be injected into the river, by doing this it allowed for
the conductivity of the water to be measured. As the river was fresh water the
natural conductivity was low, so the time taken for the conductivity to return
to the natural level in the absence of salt was measured during
each injection.
Our third day was considered to be a "lighter" day, but at the end of the day I was still exhausted (most likely its just my horrible fitness level). We went along the coast from the cabin towards Elsabreen and then continued on further towards the river Ferdinand where we did a cross sectional measurement of the rivers velocity. In the afternoon once we were back, we were given the opportunity to look at some algae and fungi samples under a microscope which quite a few people were really excited about, but for me it was nothing new compared to what we do at SAMs.
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| Taking measurements (or eating lunch like I was doing). Photo Credit: Nils Roar Sælthun |
The fourth day was spent hiking from the cabin to the Blue Lake, which used to be one of the sources of fresh water for the locals of Pyramiden. Along the way there we were looking at the old pump houses and dams which had once been used to store the melt water during the summer months. Whilst at the Blue Lake cabin we saw 3 reindeer in the lower valley, sadly I wasn't able to get a photo of them.
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| Looking back towards the settlement from the road out to Blue Lake feat. Pyramiden on the left. |
Our last full day here was spend hiking to Bertilbreen where we used GPS data to track the thickness of the glacial ice in comparison to previous years. We had reasonably good weather for it which was really nice, even saw a bit of sun through all the clouds! Although the wind on the glacier was so strong even through all my layers I still felt cold.
So that's everything I got up to on my trip to Pyramiden! Once again I am sorry this took me so long to write, I promise the next post won't take me as long :)
- Kirsty
