Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 09:33
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High Arctic Change 09

Hi Mike Rhinard!

Riverglen and the Math & Science Center are eager to hear about your summer adventures. Anything to share at this time?

Holly and the TVMSC team

Sun, 07/19/2009 - 10:47

Mike Rhinard

Hello TVMSC/Riverglen!We finally arrived at our final destination where we will be working, Ny Alesund.
Ny Alesund is a small village on the western side of Spitzbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipeligo.  Formerly a coal mining outpost, Ny Alesund is now THE international place for arctic research and education.
Most people would be surprised at the projects going on here.  And some are not typical of what you might think.
For example, NASA has a team here that is working with a UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or radio controlled airplane.  Each day they have it take off from the small airport just outside of town.  After several circles around the airport to calibrate some of its instruments, the plane takes off for the day and flies hundreds of kilometers north to measure sea ice, among other things.
On Friday, we were lucky to have Dr. Yngve Kristoffersen, a professor at Univ. of Bergen, Norway, visit with our group about his hovercraft.  That's right, hovercraft.
He is able to take the hovercraft out over the ocean and right over the sea ice where he also measures thickness, density, etc.  Not only that, but he was involved in a program where they took Norwegian high school students out in the hovercraft to help with the data collection and learn about the science of sea ice.
How amazing of an experience would that be for a high school student?
As for our project, we have yet to really get started.  We are being hampered by strong winds making the fjord too rough and choppy to take the small boats out as far as we need to go.  We have been getting instruments and gear together and getting set up in the lab in the mean time.
Because the sun never sets here, we have been talking about going out at night when the winds are more calm. (Keep watching the photo gallery.  I have a great photo of town looking out at our glacier we'll be studying.  It looks like mid-day, but was taken at midnight.) But we are just now getting used to a much different schedule than the different time zones we are all from.  We'll see how the weather is.
Thank you for checking in.  Keep the questions coming.  I'll do my best to answer them.
Here is a great website that we just discovered today.  We hope to have our team on it soon.
www.arcticstation.nl