Knocking on (drift)wood, or a few facts about trapper cabins in Svalbard

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.…

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Nothing more than mountains and pointed peaks, or how Svalbard was discovered and what came out of it

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  • Reading time:15 mins read

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…

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The Magnificent Four, or project team version 2.0

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…

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Six years of letter writing

The letter-writing competition “Ludzie Listy Piszą” was held for the first time in 2014. The title could be translated as “People Write Letters”, but to a Polish person there’s a lot more to the pharse than its literal meaning. The words come from a song which has been around since…

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Better late than never, or slightly cooled news from the front

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  • Reading time:12 mins read

It’s been two months since – after four weeks of grappling with beach litter, bad weather and our own weaknesses – we reached the end of this year’s round of fieldwork, conducted as part of Sørkapp Marine Litter Cleanup project. Much against our better judgement, we did not immediately go…

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Too much of a good thing, or the reasons behind our problems with plastic

Plastic is such an obvious element of today’s world that hardly anyone wonders what it actually is and why the negative consequences of its overuse can now be felt even in the most remote corners of the globe. Let us therefore shed some much needed light on the issue. Plastic…

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Project for a centenary

This spring, Sørkapp Marine Litter Cleanup project received the patronage of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Poland. Despite the fact that the Embassy does not normally offer its patronage to initiatives carried out outside Polish borders, an exception was made in our case. The reason behind this exceptional treatment was…

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