Today was the first day of our excursion to Isfjord Radio on Kapp Linne, which is on the west coast of Spitsbergen. We started off the day by picking up our Regatta suits and goggles before we were transported to the docks and our polarcircle boats. After a fun, bumpy two hour boat ride we arrived at our landing site. On the way there we saw lots of puffins and the spectacular, but foggy, southern coast of Isfjorden! In the next few hours we walked 10 km through 500 million years...

Preparation for field trip - History of Svalbard Today was a preparation day for our field trip on the weekend. We spent the morning with buying chocolates and candies, preparing our equipment and borrowing some equipment at the UNIS logistics. At 2 pm we had a security briefing for the fieldwork. This contains information about the area, like a geological overview and morphological specifics provided by some aerial pictures. This briefing includes some general information about polar bears in the area and remindes us to the general rules of meeting polar bears. The second part of the day was characterized by the history of Svalbard. Thor B. Arlov was lecturer for this and he presented a short and gripping overview. The island of Svalbard was discovered by Wil...

Dr Eric Wolff is the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Louis Agassiz Medal awarded by the European Geosciences Union (EGU). SciencePoles recently interviewed Dr Wolff on the subject of climate cycles and the quest for million year old ice. A veteran of 6 Antarctic seasons and 2 Greenland seasons, Dr Wolff has been working for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) for over twenty years, and played a central role in the extremely important European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA). A leading expert in the study of the chemical composition of snow cover and ice cores and their use...

Exactly one year ago today, The University of Alaska Fairbanks began a 5 month expedition to Arctic Alaska to study glacier response to climate change and their influence on the local ecosystems, as part of our contribution to IPY. The major accomplishments of that effort include: Extracting nearly 500 m of ice core from three holes in the glacier, Bringing 170 m of this back to civilization to study paleoclimate in this region, Installing thermistor strings to measure ice temperature throughout each of the three core holes, Conducted shallow coring to investigate the processes of internal accumulation on the glacier, Measured stage and discharge of the outlet stream throughout the summer,...

Picture: International Polar Foundation / R. Robert On February 15th, 2009, the Brussels-based International Polar Foundation (IPF) officially inaugurated the new Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station, the very first Antarctic research station ever designed and built to run entirely on renewable solar and wind energies. The new "zero emission" Belgian research station is the only research platform completed during the fourth International Pola...

With all our scientific equipment staged with ANZ in Christchurch, ready to fly down to the Ice, all that remains for me and Alex is to pack a few good books, set our lives in order for the next nine and half months and bid farewell to those around us - the latter possibly being the hardest part of all. Last night, to mark our imminent departure, we met with friends and colleagues from the University of Otago at the Carey’s Bay Hotel, just outside Port Chalmers – the last port of call for many early Antarctic expedition including those of Scott and Shackleton. The hotel is reputedly the location Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s last meal before setting sail from New Zealand on his fateful journey to Antarctica in November, 1910. Although were unable to confirm this story, it did make fo...

Photo Credit - AGAP team There were many times in the last two months where it seemed that the Antarctic Continent would win, keeping hidden the extensive landscape of subglacial lakes and mountains beneath the several kilometers of ice on Dome A. All the advance planning and negotiating with program leaders and logistics groups for enough days in the field to run the airborne geophysics were of little importance once we arrived on Antarctica. At this point we were negotiating with the continent herself, and we learned she can drive a hard bargain! The group at AGAP S camp had anticipated...

By Lutz Schirrmeister, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Text in German below 1 Two joint Russian-German land expeditions to the Dimitrii Laptev Strait (Bol’shoy Lyakhovsky Island, Oyogos Yar coast) and to the lower Kolyma River (Duvanny Yar site) were carried out as part of the IPY project "Past Permafrost records in Arctic Siberia" (ID 15) with 10 and 6 participants during the summers of 2007 and 2008, respectively. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI, Potsdam), the Russian Centre of Arctic and Antarctic Research (AARI,...

Neil Ross writes: Rather belated greetings from Subglacial Lake Ellsworth (SLE). I had hoped to post something a bit sooner in the season (we have already been here three weeks) but there has been far too much work to do and good weather to do it in. Sorry! Here is the first installment from late last month, more to come... 26-31 December: Last season at SLE we undertook a series of geophysical measurements (seismics and radar) to map the size and depth of the lake, which is located beneath three kilometers of West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This year, the primary goals were the resurvey of the location of 60 metal poles left in the ice surface last season, using a GPS to measure their elevation, how far they had travelled, and in whic...

Having been able to survive in the harsh Arctic climate for millennia, indigenous Northern communities have extensive intimate knowledge about the Arctic ecosystems in which they live. Increasingly, researchers are taking advantage of this wealth of knowledge to help them study the ecosystems of the Far North and how climate change is affecting them. One programme to monitor ice cover being run by the Nunavik Research Centre (NRC), the research arm of Québec's ...