Arctic Adventures

- Who shot my polar bear ? -

After looking for a good background course on climate change and dynamics for a long time, Tom and Lenny heard of one, which happened to take place at the UNIS institute on Spitsbergen. What a splendid idea, going to the North Pole (almost, at 78° latitude) to listen to a bunch of lectures ! We collected all our warmest clothes and fur hats and departed to the land of Santa Claus. One tip, if you ever fly Braathens and they put you in the back of the plane, bring a lot of food, because they’re not going to give you anything. All these deliciously smelling trolleys drive past you to the front ...

    The UNIS building

We arrived in Longyearbyen at midnight, and a UNIS student picked us up and brought us to the barracks, which were to be our home for the next two and a half weeks. All the students for the course lived together in one barrack, which was really nice and convenient for scientific discussions on course issues at the kitchen table. The one big drawback was the location of the barracks, three kilometres from the town centre. So we walked at least six kilometres each day, more if you wanted to go to town in the evenings, along the same slippery road, which got very, very boring after a couple of days.

A bit on Spitsbergen (or Svalbard, as the main island is called): Although Longyearbyen is the northernmost town in the world, the weather’s not too bad, thanks to the Gulfstream. During our stay temperatures didn’t drop below -10° C, with a nice amount of snow. Longyearbyen is the biggest town on Svalbard with 1200 inhabitants, which is not too difficult considering that the only other town is Barendsburg, a Russian mining/mafia settlement. Although mining on Svalbard has never made any profits until very recently, Norway used to mine around Longyearbyen to make a claim on the land. We visited one of the abandoned mines where we even found some 50's pin-up pictures in the bosses’ office. But now Norway has switches from mining to research and tourism. In 1993 the Norwegian government established UNIS (University Courses on Svalbard) in Longyearbyen, a private foundation owned by Norway's four universities. The objective of the foundation is to offer university level courses and to perform research relevant to Svalbard's geographical location in the high arctic.

Because of all these students at UNIS there is more entertainment than you might expect, about four pubs and restaurants. The best one, Huset (which was conveniently closer to the barracks than the town) even had disco’s in the weekends and movies on Sundays. Also, every Friday at the UNIS the fireplace was lit and beer sold for a nice evening (and you could actually smoke inside, -10° C and smoking outside makes you cut down seriously because of frozen fingers). And of course the students organized lots of parties among themselves. Unfortunately these were all Norwegian parties which means that you have to bring your own drinks and nobody will give you anything when you’ve finished yours.....

Which brings me to a main advantage of Spitsbergen over the Norwegian mainland: booze and cigarettes are tax free  (although still more expensive than at home)!  

    The town of Longyearbyen

The course (Climate Change and Climate Dynamics) was very interesting with lectures on ice cores (by Bruno Malaize), climate models (Olivier Marchal), marine sediment cores (Trond Dokken) and Holocene climate change (Eystein Jansen). The lectures were quite basic with emphasis on being able to read literature on these subjects critically. They were densely packed with information, a good thing we could discuss things later with the other students at home or during the long walks home. Understanding was sometimes hampered by the beautiful French accents of some lecturers (removing h’s where they belong to where they don’t). It was very funny as well to have an exam again after years of research.

So what else did we do except studying ? Drinking tea and chatting in the kitchen, watching television, reading loads of books, working out and playing squash at the sports centre and if the weather permitted we went out for a walk. We wanted to do a lot of hiking, but this was made more difficult as it went dark at four, was often snowing in the weekends and you needed a rifle to get out of town. We managed to get out of Longyearbyen valley once during our stay and it certainly was a revelation to see some other snowy hills for a change. The rifle is very necessary as a defence against polar bears. Six years ago two girls climbed a hill next to town and met a polar bear. One was eaten and the other girl managed to save her life by jumping of the cliff and breaking every bone in her body. So the first class at Unis was a safety course consisting of shooting lessons with a big rifle. Very exciting of course, and painful because of the recoil. Tom turned out to be a real shooting star, but I’ll just have to let the polar bear get a little closer to hit it. Luckily they are very big, which makes them easier to hit.... We didn’t see a single bear, except the stuffed one at the local museum. What we did see were northern lights, but they were very faint, whitish and unimpressive.

To conclude, we had a great time at UNIS, they provide very good courses in a very special place. And although you’ve seen most of it after a couple of weeks, we can recommend this institute to everyone. Check out the website to see if there’s anything interesting for you: www.unis.no.

Reindeer looking for food in town

The only polar bear we encountered (in the local museum)