Northern Iceland is wilder. It has wider valleys and meandering rivers. There are fewer people, fewer tourists. And the colour has changed from brown to white, winter is coming.
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Western Iceland
Our first days in Iceland, we have been traveling along the west coast: Stykkisholmur, Snæfellsnes peninsula and jumping from one hot spring to the next. It is autumn and the dominating colour is brown. But when the sunlight hits, the whole landscape glows golden. Iceland is a little bit like being in the mountains of Norway. It is wet, cold and windy, but has less people, more sheep and horses, wider valleys, volcanos and hot springs. I love it!
Platåfjellet
Today is our last day in Longyearbyen, well actually the last three weeks have been one long day. The sun does not set here at this time of the year.
We’ve had blue sky and sun the whole day. We hiked to Platåfjellet and back to Longyearbyen via Tverrdalen.
Thank you Svalbard for a wonderful time. I want to come back!
Fossil hunting
Boat trip, glacier and Pyramiden
Last Sunday we went on a boat trip to see wild life, a glacier and the ghost town Pyramiden. We saw birds, reindeer, polar foxes, unfortunately now polar bear.
Pyramiden is a coal mining Russian settlement on Svalbard that was abandoned in 1998. 10 years later they came back and tourists can visit the town. Pyramiden is now inhabited by 12 people in summer and 2 in winter.
Bird cliffs
Yesterday, we went to a bird cliff, where we will put up a few sites to collect leaves for measuring traits, carbon flux and hopefully fly with drones. The bird cliffs, or the area below the cliffs are nutrient rich because of the bird droppings. We want to compare the plants growing under the bird cliffs to control plots that are not under a bird cliff.
So, far we do not see a large change in species composition, but the plants by the bird cliff were taller.
Longyearbyen, Svalbard
We arrived at 3 am in Longyearbyen this morning. It was difficult to tell if it was day or night. It’s always light at this time of the year. We are here to teach a plant functional trait course, the same we did in China and Peru. It’s the first time for me to be in the arctic, and it is exciting, a bit grey, cold and windy.
Today, we first went to UNIS (the university in Longyearbyen) to organize a few practical detail for the course next week. And then we had a look at the ITEX site in Endalen. There is not much vegetation, but if you look closer there is a diverse plant community growing in these challenging conditions. I’m looking forward to see more places and look more closely at the plants, vegetation and traits.
Trolltunga
The weather in southern Norway has been great lately, a never ending summer it seems. So, I decided to visit Trolltunga last Friday. I took my tent, some food and started to walk… with a million other people. It’s a long, but very nice walk if you do not want to be alone in the mountains.
Changing office location
Working in the office has the advantage that you meet colleagues and can discuss things. Often small problems can be solved very quickly when you can talk to the responsible person instead of writing several emails forth and back. But there is also a lot of distraction when I am at the office. Friends want to talk (nothing wrong with that), students come by to ask questions (also nothing wrong with that). But all of these little distractions add up. It’s hard to focus on something if you are interrupted, at least for me.
Therefore, I sometimes like to change my office location. Some days I work a couple of hours at home before going to work, because it let’s me focus on a particular thing: I can read a paper, read an introduction or write a paragraph in a manuscript. And sometimes I move my office further away: Håvoll, Switzerland. Also, I work concentrated for a few hours and then get to do fun stuff as well.
At the moment I am in Switzerland for a month to see my family and focus on work „in peace“. And a few weeks ago I was a week in Håvoll with:
Inca ruins
