Caves of Iceness

Tip of the day: Don't buy salopettes from Mountain Warehouse.

It's nearly a week since the last post and about the most interesting thing to have happened in the period up to last Friday was the news that we had Friday off: LIE IN!!!! And you can bet that we all made the most of it; waking up at 11:30 am has never felt so good.

However, a day off doesn't always mean a day to be lazy here in Longyearbyen, for a lot of us a day off means a chance to go and explore some more / do something interesting. I think that's perhaps the largest difference that I have noticed between living at home and living here; people crave going out and doing something interesting and I have to admit that the feeling has spread to me too. As a disclaimer I wouldn't say that I'm not someone that appreciates the outside but after the last semester in Aber it felt like I'd never see anything outside of 4 walls again.

So! We went to revisit an area that we've already been but did so in the complete darkness, the final part of the safety training; a spot between Nybyen and Longyearbreen glacier. There isn't a huge amount there but a few spots to scramble up and enjoy, including some fun spots to "bum-shovel" down. And of course take a picture:

After a bit of waddling around we headed back and watched the Rugby whilst pre-drinking for the infamous Friday Gathering. Unfortunately for Noel he had class till 4pm which meant that he wasn't able to partake in the frivolities but did however get a head start on Friday Gathering, he wasn't too chuffed at how late we were... On the plus side though there was a lovely bonfire afterwards followed by an awesome meal at a place called "Barentz" which served gorgeous burgers and fries. If you ever come here I would recommend! The night was closed when me and Noel fell asleep on each other and attracted some confused looks by the rest of the bar; home time indeed.

Saturday looked to be a great day. Noel, Heather, and myself took a small hike up to Longyearbreen glacier to re-familiarize myself with skiing. Unfortunately no one had informed any of us that the ski's supplied by student equipment hadn't been adjusted to the requested boots which means, obviously, no skiing for me. I did however play camera man for the afternoon and got some clips for the upcoming videos, so it wasn't all a loss and the other two got some skiing in anyway.

Sunday, however, now that was one heck of a day. We'd had our sights set on the ice-caves for a while now and with the ever growing amount of light around noon we figured today would be a good day to take a look. So in this short video you get to see some of the walk up and the exploration within the cave. On and there's pictures too of course!

Whilst the pictures really don't do it justice, I hope you get a feel for what it was like being in such an awesome place with such evident geology surrounding you. Noel had a bit of an issue keeping his excitement in but really, who could blame him.

Other than that, the only really big thing to happen this week was some awesome aurora right outside our windows. I promised some pictures so, here you go:

It is worth a footnote, however, that we're finally home and settled in Barrack 11, sadly leaving Barrack 3 behind and all the awesome people there too. But on the plus side, Barrack 11 was where we obtained the aurora pictures so, it's not all bad.

Time for a cuppah I think.

Photography Master. Sort of...

It's not been quite a week since the last post but there have been some pretty awesome pictures taken the last few days with the light conditions improving. I would seriously recommend that everyone reading this checks out my cohorts posts too, they've done awesomely!

SO, 

Moving on to the pictures that I've been taking the last couple of days, I've finally gotten my head around the processing that comes with the "RAW" file types that are an option on the dSLR that I was lent for this trip. So without much further ado, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

So a little explanation behind the pictures taken, starting from the top. We have the full UNIS complex, an interesting quite well designed building if you ask me. Then there are a couple of pictures of a group of reindeer that I managed to get very close to, they were just chilling outside UNIS one day and so I naturally took advantage of this and went to take a closer look. A few scenic shots of the area in and around Longyearbyen follow, giving a bit of a hint to the beauty that is quite literally on our doorsteps. The slightly yellowish tinge images are from a short walk that Noel, Heather, and I took to just get out of town for a while, cabin fever is a real thing here! The next few images are from the hike that we took yesterday, we walked up to the airport and off up a track that took us to the KSAT site past the famous seed vault (see picture with green funky lighting). In the images, they're (KSAT) denoted by the golf ball looking shelters that house the dishes used to download the data from any of the (near) polar orbiting satellites like the Solar Dynamics Observatory, an imaging craft that I have a lot of experience dealing with so it was a must that I got to see it at some point. Up here, you can just about see the sunset which, as Noel quite rightly said, is the only real light that we get here at the moment. Each day the light gets a little more and we can see a little further into the fjord each time. The cloud cover recent;y has significantly hindered this but we have time and we enjoyed ourselves which was the main thing.

Damn was it tiring though, the hike lasted about 8 hours in total and we covered about 22km. Ordinarily this wouldn't be such a great feat but the snow made it particularly difficult to travel. It was an annoying level of deep and kept collapsing under our weight so most of our energy went into staying up right. The use of the newly coined "butt shovels" at the end made everything that we had just experienced more than worth it. Dropping about 450m using nothing more than a plastic bin lid (may as well have been) was so fun, nearly killed myself mind you but thankfully I had a Kieran in the way to catch me.

And finally there's the picture of the Reindeer that took a particular interest in me, likely because I was getting a little too close for comfort but for a few minutes we just sat there and stared at each other, each acknowledging that neither of us meant any harm. It was really really nice, serene perhaps.

So that's it from me at the moment, I'm sure if there's anything else interesting to happen this week, I'll let you know but right now we're all prepping for the first set of field work that starts next week at the Kjell Henrickson Observatory (KHO), now that will be an adventure.

Time for a cuppah I think.