To the King's Road with the Norwegians!

Hello again! I'm back in the field, In Norway this time. Svalbard, Norway, to be exact. Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, Norway, to be even more exact.

I'm here with the Norwegian Polar Institute, to work on the Kongsvagen glacier (literally translated as the King's Road). I'll be making density profiles along the glacier, using a borehole instrument called the Wallingford Neutron Probe. More about that later. For now, lets just get me to Norway!

The first leg of the journey is to get to Olso, because you need to spend the night somewhere along the way. In Oslo I met up with an old friend and former office mate Lars Karlof. After a nice evening with Lars, his wife, and 2 very cute daughters, it was back to flying. From Oslo, I flew to Tromso, in Northern Norway, then to Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard.


In longyearbyen a signpost tells the distance to various points.

Then from Longyearbyen, to Ny-Alesund, the research station. From here we will drive snowmobiles (the Norwegians call them 'scooters') about 25 km to the glacier.


This is the current webcam view from just above Ny-Alesund. As you can see it's a small place, but big for a field site!

On arrival, I learned that the weather is not terribly favorable. In this case, that means it's warm, which will make it difficult to travel, because the snow will be soft. If it warms up too much, we won't be able to get out to the glacier at all! To see the current temperature in our area, Click here.

Well, that's all for now, I'll let you know how it goes a little later!