Submitted by Glenn Morris and Stephen Doughty: The Arctic Voice Team has reached the end of the 2007 leg of their journey by kayak through Canada’s Northwest Passage. We are currently in Kugluktuk in the Coronation Gulf, and are spending the weeks before our return to the UK strengthening links between the schools in Kugluktuk and their twin schools in the UK. This part of the Arctic Voice project has proved extremely successful, and the work has attracted media attention from Canadian News North and the BBC. We arrived on August 14 and only one night was spent in a tent before comfortable accommodation w...

(Written on Sunday, submitted on Monday) Yesterday, which was Saturday, and today have been no fly days. Not due to the weather mind you, just the helicopter has been busy doing other things. Yesterday it had to take a party of New Zealand school girls up to Helheim Glacier, the weather wasn’t great so they didn’t go. Today it was a day off for everyone all round – no planned flights. So a couple of non weather-caused day offs. What to do, what to do, what to do? Hmm dissertation? Lets see, I could sit here at the hotel and stare out at the bay and the mountains and the icebergs while trying to finish another chapter… or Thomas could knock on my door and say “lets go for a hike up the flower valley walk." Oooh tough decisions. Oh listen, Thomas just knocked on my ...

Yesterday started out in the murk. Grey, with a visibility of about the end of your arm. Not much use getting out of bed I thought, thoroughly depressed. But as the minutes passed there were patches of blue that started to appear and by 10am the weather was worthy of a flight. We hustled down to the small heliport and met with Per who was pleased that we had shifted the coordinates a bit farther south and to a lower elevation. "Much more manageable” was his comment. We did a quick, relatively empty flight up to Tugtillip where we had stashed all the gear. On the way we passed the Bluie One East Airstrip that the US installed in WWII. It still looks very useable. Once at Tugtillip we again left Abbas to fend for himself for an hour as we headed inland. He told me later th...

It is August 20 in Siberia and we are in Yakutsk, Russia en route to Tiksi, Russia. "We" are a group of scientists, program managers and infrastucture development specialists from both the United States and Russia. Tiksi is a small outpost town at the mouth of the Lena River delta, and the location of a Russian Weather Service (Roshydromet) station that will now also become the location of a new meteorological and hydrological observatory. This trip is an exciting step in a program that has been developing over the last 3 years to establish Tiksi as a flagship observatory in the network being coordinated by the International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA). It is summer in Yakutsk and yesterday our local Roshydromet hosts took us on a boat trip on the ...