Sunday and Monday were pretty foggy and cloudy again. We spent the whole day on discharge measurements in Arie and Fuglebekken catchments. We took water samples for estimation of suspended sediment concentration. Turbidity meter was installed at Arie river, which took us a while, but it seems working well. Hopefully no polar fox will bite our connection and power supply cables. We protected them by covering with stones, so if we are lucky enough, it will survive. We tried to measure discharge also on Revelva, but this one is pretty turbulent, so the precision is quite low. The only tricky thing for the moment is the stability of the runoff. With the cloudy weather the daily runoff fluctuations are negligible and calibration of the rating curve is not really perfect. So, we are waiting for rain or anything that will change the runoff.
In the meantime, we try to take samples for our colleagues. We collected snow algae for our friend from Charles university, Prague. We also started taking snow samples from different locations to evaluate the presence of black carbon depositions. For the moment we collected samples from Hansbreen and Ariebreen. These will be processed later in Helsinki. Finally, Veronika takes care about samples of few selected species of plants for our friend, botanist, who works on her thesis at UNIS. In the spare time, we are enjoying the local cuisine with its master chef Oleg.
We heard on VHF radio, that some polar bears are approaching from different sides. Some of our colleagues met them in the field. For the moment we are lucky and avoid all such encounters. We also manage to avoid the numerous groups of tourists coming on the large cruising ships almost every day. Honestly, I would better meet a bear than a group of 50 tourists in fancy red outdoor clothes – yes, they all have the same dress code, that´s probably the most weird thing about them…
all the best from the North,
Jan and Veronika
Arctic Research 