Into the light of the polar night...

Late solar eclipse special!

Hi guys, Vanessa here!

Even though the solar eclipse was 10 days ago, a small Arctic update is needed.

Last week was rather stressful for us biology people with two presentations and lectures every day (hence the late update).

Currently the weather is horrendous (wind+snow=white-out) and the Easter holidays have started, so I thought an update would be appropriate. Let’s get started…

As you all know the very exciting solar eclipse took place 10 days ago.

Prior to that spectacular event, Colin flew up to Svalbard to help the biology course with some fieldwork. A small part of the biology course deployed and retrieved a mooring with an AZFP (Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler) attached to it to measure zooplankton activity (DVM) among other things. We also went out on two boat trips to collect zooplankton samples during midday and midnight.

Connor and I were part of the night group (I snuck my way in just in case there were any bioluminescent organisms, there were none).

Whilst wearing sexy orange rescue suits, we hauled out a zooplankton net several times and towed it for about 5 to 10 mins, and we also made a CTD cast. After collecting all the samples we wanted we made our way back to the harbour and arrived there at about midnight, where we were greeted by Northern lights (what a hard life we have).

Once back at UNIS, we showered each other down and started preparing the samples for lab work.

Showering after a night at sea

Let’s just say there was a lot of krill. A lot. But there were also some sea angels, copepods, ctenophores, arrow worms and some amphipods. We separated the ctenophores from the rest and measured them. Then the samples were sieved and all the samples were transferred into bottles to be stored for later use. We got back home at around 01.30 (tired and very hungry). Have to say though that Longyearbyen actually looked like a big city when we were out.

Anyone fancy some krill?

Can you spot the arrow worms?

Waiting for the cars and the eclipse

Unfortunately, we were not able to go out during the actual eclipse as Mother Nature had decided to bring us calm and freezing weather, which led to the formation of 11cm thick sea ice. However, the 20^th of March was a beautiful day and thus our lovely module leader Janne took us to her cabin/house out in Adventdalen. There we sat on reindeer skins with hot drinks and biscuits eagerly awaiting the eclipse. The valley was overrun by tourists that had out all sort of high-tech equipment, but luckily we were further up and it was quiet where we were. Excitement among our class was building up rapidly and many of us did not have high expectations, but oh boy. It got darker and darker, the temperature dropped and just wow. We were all blown away. The total eclipse just looked

A-mazing!!! There were so many ‘wows’ and ‘ohhs’ and ‘ahhhs’ and some sweary words.

Truly amazing to see!

But would I pay £10,000 to 20,000 to see it? No, I think I would just watch on TV :).