There's lots to see and do here, but getting out of town isn't simple, as you need a rifle and someone who's been cleared to use it. You also need to have had to foresight to request to borrow any equipment (such as a helmet or an avalanche beacon) in the week that you might need on the weekend.
That being said, there's plenty to see and do in the town too. A couple of weekends ago, when it was starting to get light again, me, Jen, Brad and Elliot went into town to explore a bit and to go see one of the famous polar bear signs.
Those who say Santa lives in Lapland are lying to you!
Not the warmest of beaches, but a beach none the less
The mining history of the town is very prominent
You're not aloud beyond these signs without a gun. Photo credit goes to Jen.
Soon after this I went for a "swim" (a very brief run into and out of) in the fjord. It was cold, as you can imagine! We couldn't do it properly because the tide was so low, so I might go again some time. It was fun and I warmed up again pretty quickly. Every Friday a group go do this, and anyone can join.
Then, just over a week ago a few of us walked up to mine 2b. This is a mine that's very close to Nybyen that I walk past every day to get to UNIS. It was quite slippery and hard to get up, but worth it as the views were very nice. Unfortunately you're not allowed to go inside the building anymore as it isn't safe, and the foot traffic is making it worse. I heard that they want to restore it soon though so that people can go in again.
Mine 2b
Made it!
The next day a group of us went for a walk as it was lovely weather, and we wanted to see the sun early by getting on top of the mountain. We underestimated how long it would take and didn't make it to our destination (Trollsteinen), but again, we had lovely views. We got to an entrance to an ice cave and had a peek inside.
The sun was so near, yet so far
And finally, here are some bonus pictures of some reindeer. They're everywhere at the moment! One very obligingly posed for photos outside my bedroom window.
Hello!
Spot the reindeer
Made a little video of some of the walk to the mine and up the mountain. As always, appreciate if you've read this, and hope to have another update next week
This past week I've been doing fieldwork at EISCAT. This is the last of our fieldwork, sadly.
There are four EISCAT facilities, in Finland, mainland Norway, Sweden and Svalbard. They are a system of incoherent scatter radars that measure the ionosphere and magnetosphere for changes in, for example, electron density. Using this data things like the aurora can be measured.
The station in Svalbard is made up of two radars, a 42m dish that is fixed to be aligned with the Earths magnetic field, and a 32m dish that can be pointed where you want.
Our week was split into three parts. One part was running our own experiment. I was in a team with Elliot, and we were trying to measure a substorm. We put the dish facing South, as we are north of the auroral oval here, and at 30 degrees elevation, hoping to see some activity. We didn't the first time, as the sky didn't want to play nice, but it was still fun to operate the system and move the big radar dish around. On Friday we got the chance to redo the experiment, and this time we had some success! We were teased for a long time as the aurora was just off where we could measure it, but happily it moved in the final 10 minutes.
The control room
42m dish
32m dish
The second part to the week was making a "cantenna", ie our own radar out of fruit tins. This was a lot of fun, as we got to use hammers, soldering irons and big drills. They're always fun! As you can see, it was all totally safe and we didn't almost crush Elliot's fingers on the kitchen table.
The cantenna was a success, and we used it to measure our speeds as we ran up and down the hallway. Then we went outside and drove a car at it (and us) in the slippery car park. Again, totally safe. Then we all ran around pretending to be a plasma cloud, to see how that looked. Science!
Beautiful
The third thing we did was design and run an experiment that the lecturer (Lisa) came up with that hasn't been done before, which was to point the EISCAT 32m dish and the superDARN network (another set of radars in Svalbard) in the same place, and essentially see if they see the same thing. This was tricky for various technical reasons, such as how they see different altitudes, and scan the sky at different rates, but in the end we got a good experiment out of it. Lisa says that if all goes well, it might be turned into a paper that we'd be co-authors of! That's nice because I'm not sure if I'll ever do a PhD, so this may be my only chance.
It was a fun week, and I did lots of exploring at the weekend. I'll put that in another post though as this one's getting quite long.
I'm behind on posting again! Will try to get better at writing these things.
From the 30th January to the 2nd February our class did some field work at the Kjell Henkrikson Observatory (KHO). We went from 5pm to varying degrees of lateness (the latest being around 3.30am), but thankfully we had no lectures during the day. It was quite tiring and very long hours to be working, but it was a cool experience to have.
To get there we had to take the car part way (about 15 minutes driving) and then the belt wagon for about 10 minutes. The belt wagon is a weird machine a bit like a tank, that feels like a rollercoaster but without the fun.
Belt wagon banter. Bottom image credit to KHO/UNIS
At KHO it was quite cold (especially on the first day as the heating was broken) and we had to wear fashionable indoor sandals to help with static shocks and keep our feet off the cold floor. KHO houses 30 instrument rooms that are owned by different scientific companies throughout the world. The instruments are light sensitive and so we had to be very careful with torches, and even had to drive the final stretch of the journey in the belt wagon with no head lights on. A lot of doors we weren't allowed to open either in case the light from the hallway damaged the equipment. This would cost hundreds of thousand of pounds to fix in some cases, so we were very careful! The power in Svalbard can be a bit unreliable, and this can cause problems with the instruments too, so in one room there were hundreds of large batteries as back up power, which would keep the building running for two days, if necessary.
During our week we learned lots about the various instruments there, including all-sky cameras, photometers and spectrometers. Below is a picture of Dag (our lecturer) with the Meridian Scanning Photometer (MSP), which scans the sky over the magnetic meridian and measures the intensity of typical wavelengths of light that the aurora gives off. We had to calibrate this several times, and did an absolute calibration on the final night. The absolute calibrations (which we also did for three spectrometers) were scary because they won't do it again until next year, so if we messed up we messed up a years worth of data! We were heavily supervised, however, and all seemed to go well.
The MSP. Behind all those wires is a rotating mirror that scans along the magnetic meridian.
We also had the task of predicting the aurora, which can only really be done 2-3 hours ahead of time. And while we got the time right, we were't expecting the light shows that we got, two days in a row!
Here is a time lapse I made of one of the substorms that occurred during the week, that I will be doing my project on. Image credit goes to KHO/UNIS (images used with permission).
Finally, we signed the guest book, and got to have Friday off as we'd gathered so much data in the other four days! This was very much needed to get our sleeping patterns back ready for lectures on Monday.
Making our mark! I drew in the bear during a break
Finally getting around to upload this after being busy with exams and having trouble with video editing software. But better late than never!
In order to study here at UNIS, you have to take part in a safety week course pretty much as soon as you get here. This is because all courses have a fieldwork element to them that means leaving the safe confines of the town (relatively safe anyway- we've already had a small avalanche and three polar bears wandering around!). My course's field work is actually very tame, we just get driven to the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) every night one week and then to EISCAT every night another week. Some have fieldwork where you have to go out on ski mobiles on the sea ice, where there are bears and the chances of falling in to the freezing water or hidden crevasses. So safety is important! The week also means you're more prepared if you go out on a private trip. So here's a list of the things I learned and got up to.
Day one: introductory lectures
This day was thankfully just an indoor day with lots of talks. 7 hours of talks in fact. I was still really ill at this point, so I was glad to be indoors, and I admit I fell asleep at some point...
Mainly we learned that there are a lot of ways to die here. They kept telling us that they weren't trying to scare us, but I'm not sure about that! Even stuff like eating a bit of snow can kill you because it could contain a liver destroying parasite that mice spread around. It was also stressed to us that polar bears aren't just bit of a joke, there are lots of them and people encounter them all the time. So. Yeah. We were also told what clothes to wear (cotton= bad, wool= good), and how to check for hypothermia and frost bite, or "frost nips". We were also told that they are very protective of cultural heritage and the wildlife, so to basically leave any nests or fossils or old buildings like the mines alone.
Day two: navigation and rifle handling
Our group had navigation first. We were taught how to understand various coordinate systems, how to use a satellite phone and how to make a planned route using a GPS device. Our task at the end was to plan a route outside, follow it, and midway call the instructor with the satellite phone. We could then look at how closely we followed the route at the end.
The second activity was rifle training. We got driven up to the range, which was an interesting experience in itself, because it was halfway up a snowy mountain and this seemingly normal bus handled it with ease. I don't know how the tires are made here, but it's impressive! Anyway, we got in and were told once again about the dangers of bears, and when you should shoot them. Basically you should try to scare them off with a flare gun, and if you can't and they get closer than 30m, shoot to kill. If you kill a bear when that situation could have been avoided, you can get a fine. We were then told how to half load a rifle, and then went outside to shoot at the targets.
Lying down was fine, and I shot fairly well (though admittedly at the wrong target). Crouching... not so much.Basically I had a panic attack, so failed and can't handle a gun unless I take the test again. Probably for the best, to be honest. One happy note to end on though is that we got a lift back to our accommodation, so that was nice.
Gun bruise on my guns
Day three: emergency camp and first aid training
In the emergency camp training we got taught how to set up an emergency tent and how to light a little stove. First we did it inside, which was fine, and then outside, which was much more difficult! We luckily had very little wind, but I imagine if it was windy things would be extremely difficult, especially tying the little knots in the cold. Outside we also had to shovel snow all around the edge of the tent to stop wind from getting under it. Inside the tent it was impressively warm.
Jen happy to be playing with fire
In first aid training we learned CPR, how to apply pressure to bleeding wounds and how to spot and treat hypothermia. We redid this outside, which was much harder as everyone was wearing so many layers of clothing and the wind made it hard to hear if people were breathing or not. We also learned how to wrap someone up in an insulating sleeping bag and how to make a stretcher out of backpacks. Day four: Lab and logistics, avalanche training
Here we got taught how to react if there were a fire or terrorist attack in the building. Most of the escape exits are out of windows, and some involve hopping fences and crawling under the building to get out. We got a tour of the building and got told a bit about how the university is run.
Is this likely to happen?!
In avalanche training we got taught how to best avoid avalanches, and how to find someone who'd been buried. This is relatively easy if they had an avalanche beacon on them, and much harder if they don't. In that case you have to look for clues first such as clothes or skis, and then spread out in a line and probe the area with long rods. We then got taught the most efficient way to dig them out. This was perhaps the most scary training because there's such limited time to act- after only 15 minutes of being buried, chances of survival drop dramatically.
Day five: Forming and properties of sea ice, glacier rescue
The day of the ice dunk! Fist we got taught about what kind of ice is safe to travel on, and how to react if someone did fall in. Then we got dressed up in snowmobile suits, which weren't waterproof, but kept us slightly dryer than we would have been. This wasn't a totally realistic scenario for a number of reasons- the boots were just wellies so that they could dry between groups, the ice picks we used were for sea ice when we were at fresh water ice, we had only our thermal layers on underneath, etc. But it gave us an idea at least. Then we travelled in the beltwagon (a strange, tank-like machine that weighs 7 tonnes and can travel very effectively through snow) to the hole full of ice water they'd dug out. It had frozen over, so they had to break up the ice before we got in!
Inviting
As you can see in the video below, the whole thing was over pretty quickly, and I actually found it to be quite fun. I wouldn't have liked to be in there any longer though. The worst bit was the walk from the water to the beltwagon, which was freezing in the wind!
After warming up a bit, we had glacier rescue, where we got taught how to rescue someone if they fell down a crevasse. This was a lot easier for people who had experience with climbing as it involved a lot of the same gear. We put our training to the test outside where a couple of us got winched up a storage container, which was fun
Day six- practical test
This day was rough because it lasted 6 1/2 hours outside with no breaks. There were five stations set up, each with a different scenario related to things we'd learned in the week. It's a blur in my mind of shovelling snow and cpr and trying not to fall over. Throughout the week I'd been appointed as group leader (completely randomly), which meant nothing until this day where I had to count people and "lead the group", which was hard when ill and everyone is walking faster than you. Regardless, we all passed and survived and got to witness a helicopter rescue at the end, as well as some aurora. We then headed back to the uni, were very grateful to have lunch, and then did a fun multiple choice quiz. My top ranking was 13th out of ~120, though that slipped about half way.
So that was my week! After everyone from Aberystwyth went straight into revision mode, as we had two exams in the next 8 days, as well as lectures starting. The first exam could have gone better, the second went pretty well. And then, finally... we could relax. Will update you more soon. Enjoy the video!
