It’s no mean feat to survive in the Arctic. There are some, however, who have brought the skill to perfection. In the course of evolution, northern species have developed a whole range of ingenious mechanisms and abilities, which help them thrive despite the cold and the dark. The adaptational virtuosity…
They’re everywhere. From carpets beneath our feet, through contact lenses in our eyes, to planes above our heads. Synthetic materials, although synthetic, have become perfectly natural, and the growing piles of plastic waste are just another element of our world. But discarded plastic accumulates not only in areas with thousands…
Much can be said about our project fieldwork but not that we ever travelled light. Why? Because, apart from some extra clothes, which were to protect us against the fickle Arctic weather, we also had to carry: flare guns and rifles in case of a not-that-pleasant encounter with a polar…
It sneaked up on us, cheeky rascal. We had only just come back from the field. Tired and hungry, we didn’t even have enough time to bring food tins to the table, which temporarily stood outside. We came out from behind the corner and there it was, the king of…
We could write volumes about this year’s expedition, but – honestly – who would have time to read such things? So, for a start, here come a few key numbers:1 Awfully Rotten Cabin4 awesome weeks (and a bit)6 intrepid volunteers11 days of back-breaking fieldwork23 kilometres of Svalbard’s coast2170 kilograms of…
So we’ve made it to Norway. Put up in pretty comfy rooms on the 12th floor of a quarantine hotel in the centre of Oslo, we’re just starting the third day of a mandatory 10-day quarantine.We arrived in Oslo on Saturday and – armed with negative COVID test results, vaccination…
Trapper cabins have been an integral part of Svalbard’s scenery for more than two hundred years. Over time, they’ve changed hands and character, undergone alterations and renovations, while those which were already beyond repair became a source of material for the construction of new cabins, thus going through partial reincarnation.…
The archipelago was probably known of already by the Vikings. Brief mentions of “cold shores” in the area, which is now instantly associated with Svalbard, appeared for the first time in 12th-century Nordic sagas. The thing is, though, that no evidence has ever been found to confirm that the Vikings…
In mid-February, a remarkable meeting – or, more specifically, two remarkable meetings! – took place among the peace and quiet of Kampinos National Park, providing us with an opportunity to meet the ten candidates whose applications appealed to us the most.It is hardly surprising that our base was an old…
Seas and oceans have served humanity as rubbish dumps for hundreds of years, but initially it wasn’t much of a problem. As recently as at the end of the 18th century, there were merely 1.5 billion of us and the majority of rubbish we generated was made of natural materials,…