The most northerly... in the world

We've been here nearly two weeks now, and already it feels like we've been here a lot longer. I can hardly remember what it feels like to be able to walk outside without layering up to protect against frostbite, or to wander down the street without wading through deep snow. Seeing more snow scooters than cars already seem very normal and the sight of publicly-carried firearms is no longer surprising.

The fact that there are any cars here at all is surprising; there are only a few kilometres of road in any direction! We have only seen the Aurora Borealis once so far – the weather is usually too bad to be able to clearly see the sky.

A day in Svalbard is a catalogue of unusual sights and events – here the extraordinary is ordinary.

There is avalanche debris less than 50 metres from our accommodation and nobody bats an eyelid. The weather is wildly unpredictable, although if it warms much above minus 20 degrees, high winds and spindrift (wind blown snow) are almost guaranteed.

For every familiar thing, there is an unfamiliar twist – for example you can go to the world's most normally supermarket and buy some beer, but you'll need to have it subtracted from this month's beer ration!

“World's Most Northerly” claims are everywhere here – so far I've used the world's most northerly pub, cash machine, bank, supermarket, taxi, and of course university campus.

Last Wednesday (20/02/08), we were awoken by a violent shaking; the whole barrack felt like it was being pulled backwards and forwards. A quick check the next morning revealed that we'd just experienced Norway's most powerful earthquake on record, with a magnitude of 6.2 and an epicentre off the south east coast of Svalbard – we were still receiving the occasional aftershock almost a day later.

Damien, Alessio, and Jenny can now all claim to be part of the elite group of people who have slept through a magnitude 6 earthquake! Somehow an earthquake here doesn't seem that weird, it's just another strange day in the Arctic.

The initial week here was great with the rifle and skidoo training, and the first confirmed bear sighting of the trip (spotted casually sauntering across where we'd ridden our snow scooters less than 24 hours previously). However, it has been really satisfying to start to get to grips with the glaciology we all came up here to study.

The theoretical elements have been really useful covering in depth topics relating directly to my research, but it's been the chance to go out onto a polar glacier and start making direct field measurements that has probably been the most exciting for me. (That I got to ride there in a tracked vehicle just added to it!)

So much glaciology work involves spending long hours in front of a computer, so going out and digging density testing pits on a glacier surface was a refreshing change.

Plenty has been written by my fellow bloggers about our trip to the glacier Scott Turnerbreen, but just to reiterate, the chance to make a trip inside the glacier though an ice cave was awesome!

The cave itself apparently formed originally on the surface of the glacier as a meltwater stream, but as it cut down through the ice it was covered over by snow, and it gradually moved down through the ice.

In winter conditions such as we have at the moment everything is frozen and so the channel was dry. If we'd tried the same trip in summer we'd have got very wet!

On a more serious note, the trip to Scott Turnerbreen gave a sobering insight into the condition of the some of the smaller glaciers even this far north. Most retreating glaciers are trying to reach an equilibrium with the local climate, so that the area where the glacier accumulates snow from one year to the next can balance the rest of the glacier where melting predominates.

On the glacier we saw last Wednesday, when digging down on the upper part of the ice, there was no evidence of snow fall from previous years, showing that all of the mass gained by the glacier in winter is lost again in the summer, and more.

Essentially this means that under current conditions this glacier cannot reach equilibrium with the climate – and it's just a matter of time until it disappears.