Hello there, sorry for the delay in blogging this time, especially to Vicky, who apparently is my most avid reader! I’m on field work at the EISCAT Svalbard radar this week, a facility that measures Ionospheric parameters (but more about that later!) so its been hard to find time to write.

The weather here has been pretty much fantastic lately, except for a huge snow storm on Thursday night/Friday morning that prevented us from getting EISCAT for our introductory look round. Its still pretty cold though. The temperature is about minus 20 still. Today is the last day that we have ‘night’ and in about two weeks time, on April 19th the sun is still above the horizon at midnight; the midnight sun! The transition between 24 hour darkness and the midnight sun has come so quickly. So I was right, the Aurora from the previous blog is the last we will see.

To take advantage of the beautiful weather and rare time off, Me, Colin and Dayle went on a short scooter trip to the other side of the airport, but we couldn’t go any further because of the lack of a rifle and the potential presence of Polar Bears in Bjorndalen valley, not much further on.

We luckily (unluckily?) didn’t see any Polar Bears despite the optimism we exhibited by bringing telephoto lens and binoculars! We did however see a curious and friendly reindeer:

Other than EISCAT, that concludes my escapades beyond Longyearbyen since my last blog! We did however engage in the very British tradition of going on a pub crawl! This, of course required a warm up session by Me, James and Colin at Friday gathering!

On Saturday night a large group of us headed down to Barentz pub in the Radisson SAS hotel for food and the first drinks of our pub crawl (I had a cider that wasn’t Kopparberg, but it was £4 a bottle!) most ate giant Pizzas, the Italian one looked fantastic, covered in rocket, there was a beef pizza and the one I had, a taco pizza which had beef and tortilla chips on it! Its probably the best food I have eaten this year, which is not so much a compliment to the chef at Barentz pub, but an indication of the below par food available in the supermarkets here (especially on a student budget!)

Kjersti, Sarah, ‘Shirley’ and Ben

‘The Cave’ – James, Colin, Matt and Ben outside the Radisson

So it was off to the next pub on our crawl, Karlsberg pub, which must have the largest collection of whiskeys and cognacs I’ve ever seen. Using my immense knowledge of scotches (!) I selected (little better than closing my eyes and pointing really!) an Isle of Jura scotch, a double of which setting me back over £10! The rest of the party was similarly ripped off for drinks.

Savouring the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought!

And so it was on to the ohh so comically named Svalbar, I bet someone is still congratulating themselves for coming up with that. The last bar on the crawl. Okay, admittedly it wasn’t much of a pub crawl, but this is the Arctic, so we did the best we could!

And so on to my fieldwork at EISCAT. EISCAT (European Incoherent SCATter) is a European scientific organisation that operates incoherent scatter radar dishes up here in Longyearbyen (EISCAT Svalbard Radar), and UHF and VHF system in Tromso, northern Norway, as well as receivers in Sodankylä, Finland and Kiruna, Sweden.

A powerful beam of radar waves is transmitted into the Ionosphere (the part of the atmosphere between about 90 and 600 km up) where solar radiation dissociates ions and electrons and the Aurora occur. The interaction of the waves with these charged particles causes a weak backscattered which is detected by the receiver. Some complex maths is done (which we have been learning about in the ‘Radar diagnostics of space plasma’ course) and a spectrum is produced from which the electron density, Ion and electron temperatures and the bulk flow of the ionosphere can be obtained. Typical results look like:

Which are the real time analysed data plots for the experiment we are running at time of writing.
The facility here on Svalbard has two huge dishes, a steerable 32m antenna and a fixed, magnetic field aligned 42m antenna.

The fixed 42m antenna looks directly up the magnetic field line.

While the steerable 32m antenna (seen from below the 42m antenna) can be pointed anywhere or can be used to scan different portions of the sky.

Its all operated from a modern bank of computers

Which have the best office view in town!

But all this luxury couldn’t last. In return for antenna time we had to go into the 42m antenna to dig out snow!

But being inside the big dish did make for some good group pictures!

Kjellmar (lecturer), Nils, Dayle, Brendan and Halvard (EISCAT engineer), seated Colin

And we had a bit of fun after too, Colin taking his turn at supporting the big dish!

So what else is there to say? Well, there a big Avalanche risk at the moment. On the way home from EISCAT on Monday, Dayle was in the front car with some EISCAT engineers and our lecturer Kjellmar, whilst me, Brendan, Colin and Nils were in the second car. Dayle says as they approached the road below Mine 2b, 5 minutes walk from Nybyen, the engineers started swearing and saying ‘Avalanche’. The snow had fallen all the way down the mountainside on to the road, making it impassable. My barrack mate Jennifer had been walking along the road at the time and ran out of the way. Its a good thing we hadn’t been on the road a minute or so earlier.

Big blocks of snow on the road below mine 2b

Passersby survey the avalanche.

The avalanche just makes it to the road, preventing traffic getting through.

In an attempt to avert further avalanches, the Sysselman (governor) carried out a controlled explosion of the cornices (snow overhangs) near mine 2b, another avalanche in the same are occurring just before the explosives were detonated! We have now been told to avoid walking along the bottom of the mountainside at Nybyen, and to move the snow scooters from behind barrack 9 into the valley and not to use the scooter track along the valley side. Evidently the Sysselman thinks there is a danger of further avalanches in the area, but isn’t taking very direct action. There were reports that the Larsbreen glacier was closed but these turned out to be false.

I guess we all just have to be extra careful from now on, makes me glad my room is on the valley side!

Bye for now

Ash