Fig. 1: Digging snow pits, taking ice cores, and watching out for polar bears – a cold day in February on a glacier in Svalbard. [Credit: Wenceslas Marie-Sainte]
Only one month after starting my PhD, I found myself in a tiny plane flying over one of the most beautiful and breathtaking landscapes I’ve ever seen. I was on the way to the northernmost settlement in the world – the research village Ny-Ålesund. What I expected from the trip: cold temperatures, darkness, and lots of snow. What I found instead: stunning views, magical colors, friendly people, and my love for the polar winter. An adventure diary…
28.01.2025 – A little less than 2 weeks to go, and we finished packing all the laboratory equipment we need to take to Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (Fig. 4). The excitement rises the closer we get to our departure to this distant island covered in ice and snow. This will be my first ever polar field work!
Most of the heavy equipment was sent to Ny-Ålesund before Christmas, so we can travel light with only our backpacks full of warm clothes and a few last crucial consumable items. “We” is a small team of four people: Christoph, post-doc at GFZ and the leader of the expedition; Liane, our professor; Anirban, a PhD student in his second year; and myself, the newest member of the GFZ Interface Geochemistry team. I started my PhD not even a month ago, in the middle of the preparations for this field trip. My PhD is part of the European Research Council ERC-funded DEEP PURPLE Synergy Grant. Our goal is to find glacier ice algae, tiny single-celled algae, in the ice under the snow on glaciers surrounding Ny-Ålesund. In the summer, these algae color glacier surfaces dark brown to purple – thus the name of the project: DEEP PURPLE. However, what these algae ‘do’ in the winter and how they survive the cold and darkness is currently unknown. Between testing methods and reading papers, I’m now counting the days until our flight to the far far North, already dreaming of freezing winds, deep snow, and polar lights.
09.02.2025 – We reached Longyearbyen! Flying in between steep mountains with weirdly flat tops, the city stretches out as an accumulation of houses in a valley shortly before we land. At the baggage belt, the first stuffed polar bear greets us (Fig. 9). The shuttle bus to town is packed full of people, unexpected in this place so far from everything. A sign shows that we are now closer to the North Pole than to Hamburg, which is an incredible feeling. The landscape only exists in white and shades of grey (Fig. 2), like natural color ceased to exist, the only yellow and red coming from the lights of the ‘city’. It’s 12 pm, yet it feels like late afternoon with the dim light and thick clouds; the sun will not rise above the horizon for eight more days. Our hotel is cozy and full of old pictures of mine workers, but the most impressive thing about the low buildings are the windows half covered in snow (Fig. 2); drifts carried by the wind building up in front of unused doors. We are lucky as the weather is calm now, and the air temperature is not too low, though a little wind is enough to make the cold bite into hands and nose. We walk the short distance to the town center and have lunch before walking down to the seaside, where all you can hear is the wind and the small waves gently splashing while rolling to shore. The roughness of the landscape makes me feel tiny and makes me remember that outside of Longyearbyen, the forces of nature take over, unimaginably stronger than me. There is not much more beautiful for me than the simplified, harsh landscape of the Arctic, and here I am, standing on this island 1000 km from the North Pole, a dream come true.
Fig. 2: Looking down to the fjord of Longyearbyen and the mountains on the other side (left) and our hotel, covered in snow drifts but very cozy inside (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch]
– The ‘expeditional’ character of our travel becomes obvious. While the weather was stable in the morning, colder than yesterday but with only very little wind, this turned very fast into a proper snowstorm in the early afternoon. After waiting for an hour at the airport, our flight to Ny-Ålesund was canceled, not surprising when looking at the menacing dark grey wall coming towards the city. With the suddenly free afternoon, we spend some time in the museum and then on a windy walk through the town. In the darkness illuminated by streetlights and a few cars, the wind gusts whirl around snow, no way to tell if it came from the sky or from the ground. The small path to the hotel is swallowed by centimeter-thick snow drifts, and the mountains around that we still saw in the morning disappear in the clouds and haze of snowflakes coming from all directions at once. Hoping for good weather tomorrow so we can finally arrive at our destination!
11.02.25 – We fly to Ny-Ålesund in a tiny propeller plane with two rows of seats (Fig. 3). My heart is beating fast when we take off. The sky is clear, almost no clouds, and we fly much lower than larger passenger planes. During the short ~ 25 min flight, I can’t take my eyes off the landscape: endless white plains that look like no living being ever walked over them, sharp peaks in between (now the German name of the main island, Spitzbergen (“pointy mountains”), makes sense), turquoise glacier ice with deep cracks at the edges of dark fjords, and, every here and there small icebergs drifting around on the water (Fig. 3). The science village Ny-Ålesund, with its colorful wooden houses, appears on a flat area next to the shore. When we land, a van picks us and our luggage up, and we drive to the main service building, where we are greeted by the AWIPEV research station leader, Alex. For the rest of the day, every minute is filled, from introduction to the station, getting to know the two AWIPEV station engineers, Celas and Thomas, and snow scooter training to dinner, followed by polar bear safety training. In between, the view from every window takes my breath away. There is only a little snow covering a thick ice layer from the last warm days with positive temperature and rain (in the beginning of February at 79° North!). Still, the white cover allows us to see the landscape illuminated by the moon. And in the evening at the shooting range, we are even treated to some northern lights!
Fig. 3: Inside the tiny plane (left) and the views from the plane on Ny-Ålesund (middle) and the glacier Kronebreen at the end of Kongsfjorden (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch (left image) and Christoph Keuschnig (middle and right image]
Fig. 4: Our location on Svalbard (yellow star, left), Ny-Alesund (blue star) and the two glaciers we visited for sampling (right): Austre Broggerbreen (green star) and Midtre Lovénbreen (orange star), [Credit: Google Earth (left) and Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI, right)]
– After finishing all administrative, introductory, and training courses on the first day, the next two days are for fieldwork. We are on our second tour to Austre Brøggerbreen (Fig. 4). We found our sampling spot yesterday by drilling some test ice cores and looking for darker layers in the ice indicating the presence of biological material – basically, last summer’s bare ice surface (Fig. 5). Today, the temperature is below -10°C, so we try to keep the time short during that our hands are out of the thick gloves to handle the ice cores. Humidity from my breath freezes on hairs that escaped from my balaclava, on the outside of the scarf, and even on my eyelashes. While Anirban and Christoph core the ice cores, Liane and I kneel in the snow, photographing and measuring the position of different layers in the ice, cutting the core into pieces, and packing the samples into sterile plastic bags and jars. Celas, who joined us today, walks around to look out for polar bears and, in between, takes pictures of us, probably looking like kids in our thick overalls digging holes in the snow (Fig. 1). For lunch, I eat my first frozen sandwich, but the view makes it all worth it. When the snowmobile sled and the trunks of the scooters are full of ice and snow samples, we drive back down to the village through the small moraine hills at the end of the glacier, with the disappearing light painting the sky pink.
Fig. 5: The Team on Austre Brøggerbreen after a successful second day of sampling (left). From left to right: Anirban Majumder, Liane G. Benning, Mirjam Paasch, Christoph Keuschnig. One of our ice cores with a visible dark biological layer (right). [Credit: Wenceslas Marie-Sainte (left image) and Mirjam Paasch (right image)]
– The days start to blend into each other. Two days of fieldwork are followed by two days of processing liters and liters of melted snow and ice for later analysis in the lab. The hours in the lab are only disrupted by the regular meals in the service building and a walk to the harbor and along the shore close to the village, where the water is incredibly clear, and a thick layer of ice covers the beach and first meters of the sea floor (Fig. 6). One of the last houses on the way down to the fjord is in the summer a bar where people are sitting outside in the never disappearing sun – not really imaginable with all the snow and ice around now. In the afternoon, I am lucky enough to join a ski tour along the shore towards the small hut Gåsebu. While pushing my cross-country skis forward, I try to convince myself that this is really happening. The light in the afternoon is especially beautiful, coloring the sky in orange, pink, and purple, and there are pancake-shaped pieces of ice floating on the small waves (Fig. 6). We start a fire in the small oven of the hut, filling the room with warmth while drinking tea and eating some snacks. While the guys stay in the hut overnight, Anna and I ski back to the village for dinner, enchanted by the deep purple color that the sky has tonight. In the darkness, we use our headlamps to find our tracks in the shallow snow. On the brightest setting, the cone of my lamp illuminates the meters in front of me, but beyond this, the landscape disappears almost completely. Now and then, we stop to look around us, both happy that we don’t have to walk alone and relieved when we make it back to the safety of the village, my heart filled with the wonderful experience.
Fig. 6: At the beach of Ny-Ålesund during a lunchbreak walk (left) and cross-country skiing in paradise (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch]
– After finding a path to our second glacier – Midtre Løvenbreen (Fig. 4) – with the snow scooters yesterday, we are back today to collect ice cores with as much biomass as we can get. On the way up we saw seals on the beach of one of the small islands in the fjord. The weather is wonderful again, blue skies and the first rays of sunshine color the peaks on the other side of the fjord orange. The sun will not return to the village of Ny-Ålesund for almost another month, still, it is very bright outside, due to the scattering from the snow, and by now we have an almost normal day length. After finishing our work for the day, we stay on the glacier for a while, just taking in the view: the steep drop of the glacier below us with snow scooter tracks cutting through the white, the rippled plain further down with spots of grey and black that ends in the steel-blue of the sea, the peaks rising from the water on the other side of the fjord with endless white glaciers in the valleys and green-blue ice where the glaciers meet the sea, above all the endless sky that is purple, then turns pink and orange before the light transparent blue of winter (Fig. 7).
Fig 7: First sunlight on the mountain tops (left). On the way back to the research station with the scooters full of samples (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch]
– The last days were quieter but busy, spending most of the time in the laboratory rooms melting and filtering all our samples, looking at them under the microscope, and performing the first measurements to get an impression on the state of the algal cells. More time-consuming experiments and measurements will be performed back in Potsdam, for example, to analyze the community of microorganisms in our samples and the available nutrients that they could use as energy source. In between, we have smaller activities, like a science talk to the public in the village and launching one of the weather balloons. Today, the sky is covered in low-hanging clouds, and in the afternoon, it starts to snow, huge flakes that cover the village in silence. In the evening, we visit the dog yard, where some huskies that belong to a few of Ny-Ålesund’s inhabitants live (Fig. 8). They are very cuddly, most of the time two or three try to climb on my lap at the same time while I’m kneeling in the snow, or lie next to me, exposing their belly as if they would not even feel the -15°C through their thick fur. With my heart full, I return to the last bits of packing. We have to fit all our collected samples into the big ice box, hoping that we make it home to Potsdam quickly enough to prevent them from melting.
(Fig. 8.) Purple sky on one of the evenings (left), a couple of snowmen built inside (middle) and cuddles with the cutest dogs (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch (left and middle image) and Christoph Keuschnig (right image)]
– After breakfast, we take one last walk to the harbor, and then suddenly our time in this magical place is over. The wind is bitterly cold, and snow swirls around on the street. Despite the cold biting at my cheeks, I don’t want to leave; this frozen place has stolen my heart. There’s something about the quiet and the expansiveness of the landscape – harsh but with soft colors, wild and beautiful. And the people who welcomed us warmly, spending either short or long periods here to facilitate our research or pursue their own. When the small propeller plane takes off, the landscape is visible only for a moment; the village shrinks away and the mountains rush past, and then we find ourselves above the clouds. Perhaps this makes saying goodbye to this special place a little easier, which hopefully is more like a “See you soon” (Fig. 9). We depart with a considerable number of samples waiting to be analyzed in the coming months, hopefully providing us with new insights into the microscopic life on glaciers after a long and dark winter. And with phones full of pictures and memories of moments I will never forget.
Fig. 9: The AWIPEV blue house, our home for 10 days (left), Hello and Goodbye in the lobby of the Kings Bay service building (middle) and a last view on Ny-Ålesund (right). [Credit: Mirjam Paasch]
Thank you to Liane, who brought us to Ny-Ålesund, Anirban, and Christoph for making such a good team, and the AWIPEV staff Alex, Thomas, and Celas, for all their help.
Further Reading
Edited by Florina Schalamon and Lina Madaj.
