an aspiring climate modeler travels to Svalbard

Each of the days we’ve been out in the field has been nicer than the last.  The weather has been nicer, and I’ve also been less tired.  I guess I finally beat the jet-lag: just in time to turn around and go home.  Tomorrow is the last day.  One more day in the lab plus packing up.

Yesterday was gorgeous here.  Who knew I needed to come to the Arctic to get my vitamin D quota for the year?  It was 37 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday in Tempelfjorden.

we shed our outer layers in the warm sunshine

When we first drove onto the ice I was a little nervous.  It had rained since our last outing, which weighed down the snow, as well as causing some melting.  The snow thickness was a little less and it was also slushy in places.  It’s better not to think about how you’re driving on a skin <70cm thick over a vast deep fjord when you’re on the snow mobile.

Don’t worry.  It wasn’t going to break or anything.  The ice is pretty amazing.  I feel very lucky to be seeing all this in person.  The weight of the snow actually pushes the ice down below the natural water line – that is, below the level that it would float too by itself, as illustrated by a slab that we cut out and then replaced in our work area.

a cut slab of ice demonstrates the buoyancy of sea ice not weighed down by snow

It seemed we had gotten better at doing our slew of measurements.  At the end of the day we had a little time to drive closer to that glacier.  Apparently it’s not that safe near the interface, but we got just close enough for a better view.  Amazing.

glacier!

Finally we were back in town, had another late dinner, and walked back to the place where we’re staying.  On the way we stopped at a sun dial that Squid on the Ice wanted to see during the midnight sun.  Sadly it was too cloudy for the sun dial to cast a good shadow, but I did stop to appreciate these lovely high clouds.

Cirrus clouds lit by the midnight sun!

I’m glad that we got two days of rest after that last field day.  Tomorrow we go out again for the third (and last?) time, and I think I am well rested for it.  Today I spent the day in the lab filtering snow and ice samples.

operating the hand pump for sample filtering

Field work and lab work is rather different from working on computer simulations.  I’ve done both before in different flavors, but somehow I’d forgotten.  It’s definitely more of the kind of thing that most people picture when they picture science.  We are measuring things and doing experiments.  It’s nice not to sit in front of the computer all day long, and something about it feels more authentic too, since I am not immune from being influenced by our social constructions of what a scientist is.  At least we challenge the image of the scientist as old and male.  Our research party is majority women and the men are on the younger side too.

I don’t know why more people don’t cross over and engage in multiple approaches to doing science.  But every sub-field I’ve explored in the physical sciences has a rather arbitrary divide between the theory and experiment people.  When you’re out in the field you develop intuition about the complexity of the system you are studying, as well as a sense of the variability and its scales.  But you can only look at limited areas over limited times, and ultimately it’s nice to be able to generalize.  If you’re thinking about how you would model a complex system, perhaps you ask different questions in the field.  I’m not sure.

As I’ve engaged in this filtering process, I’m reminded of something my undergraduate advisor said about lab work: it doesn’t hurt to be a little bit obsessive-compulsive.  That’s very true for this work, for which we want to keep the whole process, from collecting samples to melting and filtering in the lab, obsessive-compulsively free of contamination.  Since what we are measuring is the content of light-absorbing material on the filter at the end, it wouldn’t do to introduce other materials at any stage of the process that aren’t found in the snow and ice when we got to the field site.

plume from the Longyearbyen power plant

It should also be noted that we get to the field site via snow machine.  There is exhaust and sometimes other snow machine tracks nearby, although we try to get away from the well-traveled paths.  Furthermore, we are about 40km from Longyearbyen, where a giant smoke stack in town spews pollutants and there are mining operations nearby.  Our samples are not representative of the Arctic or long-range transported pollutants.  They are, however, combined with the other measurements, part of a dataset that is useful for understanding optical processes in sea ice.  We don’t need representative ice to study how concentrations of particulate impacts how light is absorbed, reflected, and transmitted.

Here are some pictures from Friday to give you a sense of the town where we’re staying.

the main pedestrian street

The university is a big presence here.  The facilities are quite nice.

UNIS building, down the hill

hallway outside the office for visitors, which I'm using to upload blog posts

If you’re not a scientist here then you’re probably a tourist.  There is even a big fancy hotel to stay in.

the Longyearbyen Radisson

I got started doing some lab work.  Here’s the filtering set-up.  I will do more of that today on our new samples.

the lab space we are borrowing

(to be followed by the science part)

safety: This is for you mom.  We have a satelite phone and one of those buttons you can press in a real emergency to marshall emergency retrieval from the field.  There are flare pistols to scare away bears.  Apparently they are also startled by the snow mobiles.  We would leave the area, even abandoning expensive equipment before we would shoot a bear, but there is also a decent sized rifle.  Furthermore we are not nearly as isolated as I would have expected.

snow machines parked at the field site

Yesterday some other scientists made the trip out with us and set up right nearby to take some biology-related samples.  Groups on snow machines or dog sleds kept passing nearby throughout the day.  Who knew this was such a high-traffic area?  The child of civilization in me is kind of glad that there are other people around.  In fact, from where we set up we could see a boat that is frozen into the ice each year as a tourist attraction.  They have a restaurant and ten room hotel in there.  There are about 2000 people in the town of Longyearbyen, mostly scientists and tourists.

the other scientists just beyond our site

snow mobiles: This was my first time riding such a device.  We had only three for four people on the first day, so I was the passenger.  I’ll try out driving another day.  It’s pretty fun to ride.  You really need to hold on though.  After we’d been going for a bit I was able to relax the death grip, breath, and enjoy the scenery, confident in my grabbing on reflexes for when we went over bumps.

warm clothes: We were wearing driving suits on loan from the Norweigan Polar Institute.  They are one piece suits and very warm.  I spent ten hours outside working and commuting yesterday and I was not cold.  If you wear enough clothes it’s really not a problem.

a colleague models a snow suit while drilling an ice core

scenery: The pictures don’t capture it.  We drove up one valley, through a pass, and down another to get to the side-fiord where we worked yesterday.  Unfortunately there’s lots of snow everywhere, so you can’t see the rocks that well.  What can I say: my geologist training precedes this new polar science stuff, and I’d rather look at rocks.  They seem to be mostly sedimentary in this whole area where we are though.  There is even coal, which they mine and seem to use to power this town.  The mountains are still amazing to look at, and you get a sense of the geomorphology.  We drove through glacial carved valleys which now contain braided rivers when they are not frozen over, and dump out into fiords.  We may or may not go to another site next week which would involve traveling on an actual glacier.  But from the work site yesterday you could see the blue ice of a glacier edge further up the fiord.  Just wow.

the blue ice of the glacier that dumps into this fiord

Tomorrow we go out in the field.  We spent much of the day just getting organized for it.  Still jet-lagged.  Very excited.

a view out the window in the morning from where we're staying