As this week starts I am already feeling like a potato. Extremely busy weeks have gone by, filled with all the wonderful exiting stuff you can do in Svalbard, both science and non-science.

I am working on my master's thesis at the moment. It is about the Mediumfjellet thrust stack, located at the western side of Isforden on Svalbard, and I am making fracture models for predicting reservoir quality. At the moment I am trying to get into stratigraphy and other work that has been done in the area, to be ready for my five-week long fieldwork trip in august.

Being a student at UNIS and at Svalbard does not only mean hard work. Nevertheless, I think this is the place where I have developed my skills the most. Lots of extremely great and exclusive things are going on, and opportunities pop up from everywhere. Here are some of the things I have done during the last week only:


The technology and geology student exploring the ice-world

Longyearglacier has some great ice caves, which are good fun to explore. We did abseiling and climbing and of course lots of crawling. When the technology student accompanying me is more crazy about ice caves than a general glaciologist, then you can end up exploring the ice caves forever, basically. Check the cool ice-crystals on the roof!!


Dog sledding in Adventdalen

Dog sledding in twilight, with the blue colour, is just the greatest, as the sun just came back from the long polar night. The dogs jumps up and down, all exited and ready to take you anywhere or maybe only the shortest way to some sort of track. Funnily enough they don’t like making the track themselves. Or maybe they just don’t listen to a geology student.

Adventdalen is also great for kite skiing. UNIS has placed a weather station by the best kite spot, how convenient is that!! I have all the gear ready in my office, then I can quickly jump into it and get out in the valley, whenever I see that the wind is perfect. There was only one day of kiting this week.

I just got a great opportunity to work on something in parallel with my studies, for Store Norske Coal Company, a big mining company here in Svalbard. This job is related to what I will do for my field work at Mediumfjellet this August — logging sedimentary rocks. The logging for Store Norske is of bore cores taken from different places around Svalbard. I am learning so much from this job.


WOW! Check out these bore cores!

Text: Tine Larsen