Growing up, I didn’t know what it meant to “do research”. I did some research projects in high school, but research as a field path was totally foreign to me until I started university. Unlike me, the young students who participated in this year’s Arctic Frontiers Science for Schools program were given a first-hand glimpse into what it means to conduct professional research. The Science for School ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The Tempest
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Measuring the aurora. This picture was taken while doing an optical/radar coordinated campaign in Svalbard, Norway, near the settlement of Longyearbyen. In this campaign, we were measuring for the first time the polarisation of the auroral ‘red line’ of atomic oxygen with a photopolarimeter and were running the radars in order to have a better understanding of the state of the ionosphe ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Northern lights in northern Norway
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Northern lights in Tromsø, displaying the collisions between electrically charged particles from the sun which penetrate the earth’s magnetic shield and strike atoms and molecules in our atmosphere. Collisions excite the atoms causing electrons to move to higher-energy orbits, further away from the nucleus. When electrons move back to lower-energy orbits, they release particles of light call ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Arctic cottongrass in Svalbard
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In the High Arctic, where vegetation is limited in height, cottongrass stands out as some of the tallest plant species around. This photo shows a wispy white patch of Arctic cottongrass growing amongst other tundra vegetation in the Advent river floodplain of Adventdalen, a valley on the Norwegian archipelago island Svalbard. Svalbard is of particular scientific interest as it is a relatively warm ...[Read More]