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Climate Change Svalbard

Hi Matt.

I just love the photos from Svalbard and your journals are great!

I know that this year's expedition to Lake Linne is shorter than in previous years. Can Mike, Al, or Steve comment on what they hope to accomplish or wrap-up during these two weeks? Also, what are they going to do with all the data they have collected over the past 3 years? What do they plan on doing in the future (if anything) with regards to the REU program?

Have a great time! You have a great group of people to work with.

Cheers, Janet

Cool

Fri, 07/27/2007 - 00:51

Matt Moore

Hi Janet, Busy morning here at Kap Linne. We've got three polar bears (not those from the storybook) on the beach close to camp. So, we're hanging close to camp until things mellow out a bit. I'm sure Matt will post on this later with some cool pics! As Matt probably explained this is a field season with a small team dedicated to downloading and maintaining all the equipment and instrumentation in the field. We've been busy here downloading weather stations and collecting data from loggers, time lapse photos from our lake-cam and our glacier cam and retrieving the sediment traps from out two lakes. Last night we got back in pretty late after a long search for a mooring in Kongressvatnet that had a string of instrumentation on it. Megan spotted it around 8 PM after taversing back and forth over the deep central basin for a few hours leaning over the bow of the zodiac. We're happy to find it and we spent hours into the evening downloading and thinking about the data.
Matt and our two students, Megan and Patty have done everything from recover sediment cores to program the loggers that we're re-deploying in the lakes. Patty will do a senior thesis at Mt. Holyoke on the sediment accumulation in Lake Linne and how it relates to this years weather and hydrology. Her interpretation will be aided by the weather data and the information from the various time lapse cameras which tell us about the hydrology in the watershed. Megan will be entering her third year at Bates College and will spend fall term in Iceland (as a native Vermonter she must like cold places!). In the spring she'll return to work on a core from Kongressvatnet, the lake adjacent to Lake Linne. She'll be working closely with Al, Steve and I on the composition of the core and how it relates to changes from the Little Ice Age to the present.
Looking at the big picture, we're trying to determine the long term history of climate change in the region, and more specifically glacier activity, by looking at variations in accumulation of the lake sediments. To do this we need to study the modern processes in this complex environment. The glacier shows slow steady retreat and loss in mass and we're looking to see how this is reflected in the laminations in the lake. Right now we have 4 years of continuous weather, lake, glacier, and sediment data and it is quite variable with some cold rainy years and some warmer drier years. Runoff into the lake and sediment transport has varied accordingly. We're all investigating the links in this complex environmental system. Students have begun to write articles for journals on several aspects of the study. Our team will probably get together at the Arctic Workshop in March to present results and strategize for next field season.We've also established some excellent collaborations with Norwegian colleagues and students who are doing complimentary work in studying changes in permafrost, lake processes, and glacier mass balance.
This was supposed to be a short answer but has turned into quite a long ramble. Once you get any of us started talking about our work you know what happens.
Thanks for the email. We all hope your summer is going well.
Mike