Field excursion to Slakbreen

Mathilda, the fully packed bandwagon, and me

On Friday, half of the students taking the course "Snow and Ice Processes" were leaving for a 4 day trip to Slakbreen, a glacier which is a couple of hours driving away from Longyearbyen (by band wagon). We spent the afternoon packing everything up (loads of scientific equipment, safety equipment, food and all our personal stuff), and were allowed to "GO" by the head of Safety and Logistics, although the weather forecast was terrible and he is normally very strict with sending out students in bad weather conditions.

Carmen inside the band wagon, Juho on a scooter outside

The weather got worse by the minute, but we kept going as long as we could. We had 5 students and 1 teacher on scooters and 4 students and 1 teacher in the band wagon. The scooters were supposed to get to the cabin we were to live in the next 4 days about twice as fast as the band wagon, so that they could start heating it up and preparing it...

One of the scooters getting stuck

...but the band wagon soon caught up with the scooters as we started driving up Todalen. There was loads of soaking wet snow everwhere, and extremely difficult driving conditions, so the scooters got stuck all the time. In addition, the visibility was really bad...

Pia sceptical to the weather

After some time driving in these conditions, we figured that we would call a white out for a white out (although this was a quite rainy version of one), and turn back. The avalanche danger wasn't exactly small either...

The teacher, Carl, probably making a very wise decision

Later in the evening, it started to rain more and more and more... and the wind picked up, with gusts of up to 35 m/s (or so I was told). We took a taxi home from UNIS that night, and just walking from the taxi to our barrack (ca 30 meters) we managed to get completely, soaking wet due to the crazy weather. It is icy and very slippery to walk almost anywhere now, and the wind made it really hard to walk uphill on all this ice. The weather lasted for most of yesterday as well, and people stayed indoors for a large part of this weekend. Quite a lot of people went out to "test" what this extreme weather felt like, however :)

Taking a taxi home from UNIS in the evening... in pouring rain and wind gusts up to storm/gale strength

But now the problem is that the snowpack (or whatever is left of it) is soaking wet, and it is too difficult to drive scooters on it the way it is now... so our 4 day trip is cancelled, and we will only do a daytrip to Longyearbreen tomorrow instead, and if the conditions allow us to, we'll go on a daytrip to Slakbreen on Wednesday. Quite a sad outcome of what was supposed to be a really cool excursion... :(

Something else which is also sad, is that the wonderful igloo we made has collapsed completely... This rain and warm temperatures don't belong here on Svalbard now! I really hope for some more stable weather, some degrees below zero, as soon as possible...!