Fieldwork Slideshow

Longyearbyen

As I think we mentioned before, Longyearbyen is the main city on Svalbard. With a population of a bit over 2000, it supports research at the University Centre, coal mining in the region, and a lot of tourism. The town isn’t huge, but it’s a great place to look around and there are lots of places to walk. Svalbard protects its cultural history, so there are lots of relics from past eras everywhere you look! So, here are some photos for in/around/near Longyearbyen from our visit there as well as the time I spent there in March while taking a course at the university.

Flower Correction

Hey all, I’m settled back in Cambridge. And so I have a few more things to blog about. But first, a correction. On the trip to Ossian Sars with Inger, I mistakenly wrote that we were looking for a buttercup. In fact, we were searching for a cinquefoil.

Back at home, Inger was able to more closely analyse the samples we took under a dissecting microscope in the lab. The beautiful flowering sample we saw was in fact Potentilla x insularis, but a smaller plant was the Potentilla nivea ssp. Nivea that we were looking for.

Safely Home

Just a quick post to let you all know the team (and the FieldSpec) made it safely back to the UK. Fjord is currently resting (he didn't get back to Cambridge until almost 3am!), but he will post a couple stories about Longyearbyen and the trip home soon.

Arctic Stonehenge?

Whilst out searching the tundra for a tasty evening snack - to be honest I'm not a fan of the chocolate cookies that Allen likes so much - I came across a large area of these strange rock circles and wondered how they got here. Was it the holy site of an ancient tribe? The footprints left by extraterrestrial visitors?

In fact these landforms are completely natural and are produced by the annual cycles of freeze and thaw that take place in the arctic soil, which lift larger rocks to the surface then push them outwards until they gather in rings. I also found these distinct stripes which form by a similar process on shallow slopes.

Turning Botanist

It's a rainy Sunday, so instead of a photo of the cloud outside of my window, I'll tell you about the trip we took on Thursday. Inger Alsos is a terrestrial ecologist based at the University Centre in Svalbard and the University of Tromsø. She was supposed to be on a flight out on Thursday afternoon, BUT Inger had heard that a rare flower was growing on some of the cliffs on Ossian Sars island in Kongsfjorden, and she couldn't resist the chance to find it, take some photos, and take some samples. She needed a couple extra sets of eyes to help find and identify the little flower, so Fiona, Gareth, Allen, and I all got to go along, too!

Our mission was to find a particular kind of Potentilla - basically an Arctic buttercup. The trick (of course there was a trick!) was that there are four very similar varieties of this plant in the Kongsfjorden area. We were looking for the ones with plain yellow flowers (no spots), and short white hairs on the underside of their 3-lobed leaves.

Inger led us to the right spot, and we struck lucky finding three patches of plants showing a range of flowers in bloom and dying! Mission achieved!

Gareth, Fiona, and Inger relaxing for a second after finding the flowers. The flowers like to grow on steep slopes - steep enough to catch strong sun and deter grazers but shallow enough to hold on to soil.

Although Ossian Sars is an island, reindeer and foxes cross over (mostly in the winter, but some swim in the summer, too). We saw a very cute little Arctic fox, but he was too quick for my camera. A reindeer below us, on the other hand, very obligingly stood near an iceberg in the ocean below.

I tried to convince the others that I could identify plants by taste, but was told off because it destroyed the (tasty) samples. It was very hard for me to not eat the flowers, but I did my best...

Inger maintains a very comprehensive website about all of Svalbard's vascular plants - check it out at www.svalbardflora.net. The photos from our trip on Thursday should be up in a couple weeks once DNA tests confirm the flower identification.

Newswatch

If you were thinking that we're the only team doing cool research in Ny-Ålesund, then (although we might be flattered) you'd be wrong. Here's a cool article (Looking for the Coolest forms of Life on Earth) from ScienceDaily about a team of UK scientists using glaciers in the area to simulate what conditions life might have to deal with on Mars. They're even keeping a blog, so if you need your Ny-Alesund fix after we're gone, you can get it here.