Making progress

Good evening from the Isfjord Radio Basecamp, 78 degrees North, 13 degrees East. We are in the fog right now, and have been for most of the evening. As we came over the crest of the first hill leaving the lake this evening, the wind was whipping ice pellets at us as the clouds whisked by at record speed. It almost looked like you were flying through the clouds in an airplane they were going by so fast. And to make matters worse, our direction home was dead into the wind. To put the icing on the cake, we were a little apprehensive with reports of a polar bear still in the area (kind of tough to see when they blend in with fog that yields 150 foot visibility at best), and were carrying back our cores that I spoke of in a previous post. Since the very top of these cores is still settling out of the water, we had to be extra careful in walking back with them to disturb them as little as possible, otherwise those nice laminations (varves) will get disturbed.

The other group (4 of them) hiked all the way up to the glacier today. Hopefully I can get some of their pictures to share with you guys. Up there, we have several cameras monitoring the movement and depletion of the glacier, as well as ablation stakes (measure the melting/removal of ice from the glacier) and weather stations. All of the data needs to be downloaded, batteries checked, and there are a couple of other small projects they are going to work on up there. Besides all of that, the other reason it is a big deal when they hike to the glacier is because it is an additional 2 1/2 hour hike from the south end of the lake! (Just to refresh your memory, we have a 45 minute hike from basecamp to the lake, a 15 minute boat ride down to the south end of the lake). They called by satellite phone at 7 PM to let us know they were leaving the glacier, so they won't be in until almost 11 PM. Talk about a long day.

This week has flown by, people have been very successful coring Lake Linne (Linnevatnet), and theirs and my cores from Kongressvatnet have all been safely transported back to Isfjord Radio basecamp. The next challenge is making them safe for transport to Longyearbyen, which is an hour plus boat ride, then finally for commercial air transport to get them back to the US. We are still working out just exactly how we are going to do that, and so far it is looking to be quite a challenge.

The last big event that I almost forgot to mention was the return of the polar bear on Tuesday. Just as we were planning to head out for our day (and on time for once), one of the other students, Chris, goes, "Ummm, there is a bear over there guys." And sure enough, the bear was back, though at a safe distance of maybe a 1/4 mile. Now last time he did this, he kind of wandered around at least a few hundred yards out and then made his way to the ocean. Tuesday, not so much, he started heading straight for our building! And man was this thing big, one paw was probably about the size of my entire torso. He came within 10 or so yards of the building, and thankfully for some reason made the right decision not to attack any of the people watching him with shotgun in hand, and turned away and took off right back where he came from. I'll get a picture of that up a little later. Hope you all enjoyed the post, I'll save the science for my next post when I plan to give you guys a little more information about what exactly I'm going to do with all of my mud that is sitting out in the garage here.